Have you ever heard the saying, “You are what you eat”? If you fill your body with excess sugar, processed, and fried foods while skipping veggies, protein, and fruit, you will undoubtedly feel sluggish and gain excess weight. In the same way, what you fill your mind with is just as important to well-being as is nutrition to physical health.
With the changing reality of our world it is very easy to get sucked into constant media updates. While I am not underestimating the importance of staying abreast of this world crisis, it might be time to do a self-check on just how much time you are spending feeding or even binging on COVID-19 information.
Mind Nutrition Check-in
What are you feeding your mind?
A few years ago I visited a nutritionist with the hope of assessing my diet and discovering how my current food intake could be modified to decrease my negative bodily symptoms and increase positive, healthier results. I followed the steps she outlined and gained positive information about my individual nutritional needs that I am still benefiting from today.
Below are the steps we took to find the right nutrition for my individual body. I believe these exact same steps can be used to decide if your media diet is contributing to your well-being and what you can do to increase healthier results.
- Determine what I was currently eating and track each food item consumed in a journal.
Translation for mind nutrition: Determine what you are feeding your mind. What are you reading and watching? How much time are you investing in social media? It might be very eye-opening to see just how much time you are spending on your devices each day and what you are consuming. Consider journaling your time spent or using an app that tracks online usage.
- Eliminate a variety of foods that have a history of being problematic for others nutritionally. Introduce foods back into my diet to identify the culprit(s).
Translation for mind nutrition: For which social media, programing, videos or podcasts would it be good to press the pause button? Is it time to take a complete electronic break? Or, do you just need to restrict your intake to one or two times a day for minutes rather than hours?
- Identify your individual body’ tolerance to the negative reactive foods. Do they each need to be eliminated totally or can they be tolerated on a limited basis.
Translation for mind nutrition: What is the impact of your media habits on your well-being? Is it helping you stay connected, or is it feeding anxiety? Is there a chance your media habits are more of an addiction versus a diet of happy, wholesome nutrition? Are you happier as a result of your mind nutrition, or are you more depressed than usual? ? Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania states that those limiting social media “showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring. . . . Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being.”
- Focus on eating what is healthy versus what is not healthy for my individual body. Translation for mind nutrition: Is it time to read, watch or listen to something for fun or something related to your passion? The Open Education Database reports that reading impacts us positively from developing critical and creative thinking skills to enhancing our capacity for empathy. Finally, especially in this time of social distancing, is it time to just plain use our devices to connect with our friends and loved ones via phone and video platforms such as Facebook and Zoom?
I encourage you to shine your brilliance by taking responsibility for your mind’s nutrition. You don’t need to give up your favorite social media channels, just decide how much is best for you and fill the rest of your mind diet with good, brilliant reading, music, podcasts, videos and shows. In this challenging time you need uplifting music, inspirational stories, and ideas to feed your passion, expand your mind, your mind, and bring your brilliance to life.