I took a few days to disconnect this past week.
I spent my days outdoors, writing, reading… and simply doing nothing.
Every time I spend time doing nothing, I find that I “rediscover” older concepts or principles, but in a clearer way.
Differently said, the concepts and principles are the same, but I now have a better/deeper understanding of them… and when I understand something better, this means that I have better words to explain it.
So here are some thoughts:
If someone speaks to you, you can understand the information.
If 20 different people speak at the same time to you, it becomes noise and the messages are lost.
Our body functions the same way: It uses information to know what to do and when to do it.
By information, I mean light, food, magnetism and movement.
That said, too much of these information creates internal NOISE.
And for our biology, noise = inflammation.
That said, Inflammation is simply the by-product of too much of something.
The thing is that it can sometimes become hard to know you if we have too much of something because we can become so accustomed to a dysfunctional standard that our body starts considering it as “normal.”
But there’s a clear difference between normal and optimal.
And here’s the tricky part:
If we live in a suboptimal way, “optimal” WILL feel dysfunctional and foreign.
It won’t feel normal… because that’s not OUR normal.
But that doesn’t mean it’s “bad.”
It just means that our perception is off, and we lost track of what is good and what’s not.
This is one of the reasons why I rarely listen to people who tell me that “they feel good.”; I can’t trust their judgment on the matter because their perception is skewed.
So okay, that’s cool and all… but how do we build a functional perspective on what is good or bad?
It’s plain and simple. It’s not necessarily easy, but it’s simple:
Remove the excess of information that’s causing noise.
Or, differently said, remove things from your life.
Even things that you might consider “good.” (they might very well be bad but you can’t see it right now)
You don’t have to remove them permanently. It can only be for a little while, long enough for you to test out how your physiology reacts to the change.
The idea is that if your perception is biased towards what’s good and what’s not, you can only start seeing what’s true when you start removing things.
NOT by adding more of them.
Not sure what to remove first?
A good place to start would be to look at everything that is not vital.
Then, typically, I find that the thing that’s the hardest to remove because you’re craving it is the ONE thing you should focus on removing the most…. and the one that will get you the best changes.
Curious enough, I find that it’s this one thing that people can get pretty good at coming up with in all sorts of ways why they shouldn’t/can’t remove it.
If you can’t… then you must!
🤙🏼