Why “Eat” Less Digital Information?

The top reason to watch your Mental Diet

“We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

How we consume social media and internet info today is similar to how we eat in the 21st century. Before, in older times, food was scarce. It was also all-natural and regulated by the unfathomable and uncontrollable processes of nature. Therefore, nature itself took care of our diet. Unless you were Henry the Eighth or another chubby royalty, you didn’t need to watch your diet. On the contrary, you were constantly trying to survive and get enough in your belly.

Today, food is abundant in the Western world, in particular. You have to count calories and restrict yourself because it is so easy to overeat.

It is the same with digital information. It is so easy to ingest an overload. The human brain is not meant to consume an endless amount of information. I should know: as an incredibly curious person, I watch everything about everything. I feast on documentaries about North Korea, poverty in Malaysia, illegal maid trade in India, child abduction all over the world, environmental disasters in Siberia, and the list goes on and on.

With the present abundance of information, and loads of it being of quite poor quality, we must exercise restriction. I use the app “Self Control” to cut my access to certain sites and I am sure there are many others. We have come to an age in which we must realize that as the body gets fat, heavy, and sick from overeating, so does the brain. The brain gets heavy, sluggish, burnt out. (See the chapter “How to Make a Habit Irresistible” from the best-selling book Atomic Habits on the ever-evolving trend to provide hyper-stimuli and how the brain responds).

Obsessing over IG profiles of people screaming for attention or similar YT vids is like consuming junk food. Be aware of the damage you are doing to your brain: it is not as visible as your body’s shape. Be aware of kids and teenagers becoming mentally “overweight”; this will lead to mental sickness the way extra weight leads to physical sicknesses, such as diabetes. The mental version of diabetes is called depression and anxiety, and these are really serious things.

I am not saying that depression and anxiety are caused by consuming too much internet information, but, if someone is already prone to these or experiencing these, sitting all day in the room watching mindless YouTube videos will do nothing to improve the person’s state and, as a matter of fact, will make it worse.

Let’s exercise some caution and restraint about what we put in our minds just as we are careful about what we put in our bodies.