Life in the Information Overload Age

“If more information was the answer, we’d all be millionaires with 6-pack abs.”

It’s a brisk Saturday morning and you decide to go to the bookstore in search of some new reading material for the weekend.

You want to find some kind of intellectual pick-me-up, a small boost for your mind and body, something to inspire newer, more positive habits. You’ve been feeling pretty good lately, maybe a little tired, but something feels off and you’re not sure what it is.

You walk over to the non-fiction section and scan through book titles related to Nutrition. At first, a new diet book catches your eye and you wonder if maybe you haven’t been eating enough vegetables.

On the end-cap display you notice a set of beautifully-bound hardcovers, each proclaiming that a carnivore’s diet is the only way to cure the mid-day energy slump that’s been hitting you during the workday.

An employee pushes a cart past you, so you look up and turn your head sideways to read the title, which tells you that it’s actually one specific bacterium in your gut that’s preventing you from absorbing any of the nutrition in either your plant-based or all-meat diet.

You walk over and pick it up, and while reading the back cover you see a quote from the author of a brand-new bestseller that’s discovered the real reason you’re not feeling your best - it’s all due to your genes.

Woosh. You feel the jitters, like you’ve had too much caffeine, then remember that you haven’t even had your first cuppa today.

The pressure of a thousand books staring you in the face becomes unbearable, so you grab your phone and take things into your own hands.

You sift through 100 million reviews and the voices of an equal number of Redditors start whispering anecdotes of how an obscure German book from the 1800’s was the only thing that helped their Aunt Mae cure her ills.

Next thing you know, you’re lying awake in your bed in a cold sweat on a crisp Saturday morning.

No, my friend, this isn’t a nightmare. This is the state of the wellness industry today. And we haven’t even left the Nutrition section, or scrolled through Instagram.

It’s a double-edge sword, seeking lifestyle improvements in the Information Age.

The information is all there, but the info is the source of the problem: a lot of the time, there’s too much for our own good and it becomes almost impossible to know what to do with it.

For every new lifestyle improvement you integrate, you’re bound to learn 5 more that you could be trying.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re not doing enough, missing out on a critical component, and potentially doing something that’s actually making you feel worse.

What to do instead?

Principles, then practices.

Before focusing on new practices, take time to establish foundational principles first.

They help you create a lens through which you can view any existing or new lifestyle change you’re looking to make, and help you test new practices with self-informed decisions.

Listening to your body is a skill worth learning

Listening to your body puts you in the driver seat and gives you the trust and confidence to really understand how certain lifestyle changes are impacting your life.

The opposite of this is a mind filled with too many opinions, each telling you what you should and should not be doing.

The key to this principle is that you are learning to do this. It’s an on-going effort that improves over time with repetition.

Whether it's diet, exercise, sleep, mindset, or something else, you’ll acquire new listening skills that get you more in-tune with your body, so when you choose to increase Y, or decrease Z, you’re prepared to accurately measure the effect.

I have nothing against listening to health and wellness experts. I think they’re great.

It’s about ensuring you are practicing listening to your body, so that those external factors are being received by the ultimate expert on your life: you.

At the end of the day, we must be the designers of our own lifestyle blueprint.

See within the 20% and 80% range

Learning to see within the 20% to 80% range, the middle area of the bell curve, helps set things in a more realistic light by reducing the pull of extreme claims and extreme expectations.

You can apply this principle to level of commitment (time and intensity) as well as expectations of results.

The reason why this is important is simply because books (and podcasts, blogs, social media accounts, and more) do not sell as well if the title is “Sometimes, some of this works for some people.”

For better or worse, the modern world prioritizes extreme claims because our brains are wired to respond to them.

So it’s up to you to create a filter where you neither accept or deny a claim outright, but simply imagine what might be true along various points of the possible distribution of outcomes, which ultimately helps clarify what exists in the outer ranges.

Most times, there will be some parcel of truth along some point of the spectrum, however grandiose the claim.

Coupled with principle 1, learning to listen to your body, these can be powerful tools to effectively determine and judge the various lifestyle habits you want to assimilate into your world.

Remember to Ask “Who is Asking?”

This is the ultimate “why” question in your lifestyle upgrade pursuits. It’s important to ask not only at the outset of a new endeavor, but is a powerful principle to implement as you check-in on your lifestyle throughout the year.

There is no right answer. The only wrong answer is no answer at all. Most of the time, it’s a question that should inspire self-reflection and discovery, rather than elicit a definitive answer.

You are the designer

Combining these three principles creates a healthy filter that puts you in control of making decisions related to your lifestyle habits and upgrades. It can reduce the anxiety that arises when learning about and deciding on new wellness practices to implement.

When you start learning to listen to your body, you can better contextualize the sometimes overwhelming levels of advice that are sent your way on any given day. You can start small, test for yourself, and optimize along the way without the need to dive head-first into any (or away from any) protocol in particular.

If you continue to listen to your body and absorb new information while considering the most likely outcomes, rather than the extremes, you’ll learn how your life is impacted by these changes at a much deeper level than if you merely ask “will this work, or not work?”

And blanketing these thought-patterns with an understanding of who is leading the effort, knowing who is asking you to pursue these habits, places the effort in a context that doesn’t distort, aggrandize or degenerate any decision, but instead allows you to build a realistic framework for the various decisions you make on a daily basis.

You are the designer. Wellness experts and writers are here to hold up signs. View these signs as interesting guideposts along your journey, but keep in mind that you needn’t follow any particular set of signs unless they match with the world that you want to create for yourself.