I’ve been doing a lot of personal growth work recently. Through my courses at The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, various books that I’m finally getting the chance to read, and time to just sit and be with myself, there has been lots of opportunity for learning.

But there has also been lots of opportunity for distraction, digital distraction. As I’m writing this I’m checking the screen time on my iPhone, and it says I have an 8h 30m daily average. Just this week (it’s Friday today), I have spent 17h 31m on social networking sites, 9h 29m on entertainment, and 6h 27m on creativity (which probably means some other unproductive app). Are you kidding me?

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think it is. We are hearing more and more about the addictions of technology and it’s becoming a well known fact that social media especially, is quite addicting. From a health and brain perspective, every time you get a like or a share or a comment that’s a hit of dopamine (the feel good chemical) straight to your brain. When the feeling fades, you’re left wanting more and more, like any addictive drug. It truly is not healthy!

But that’s not what today’s post is about. Today I want to talk about what technology is doing to our thoughts and more importantly, why this matters to you.

What is digital deduction

Most of us know that technology is slowly but surely taking up more and more of our lives. The key part here is that we recognize it, we are conscious of it. What many of us don’t realize is that technology is changing the way we think, believe, and act.

Jim Kwik, author of Limitless: Upgrade your brain, learn anything faster, and unlock your exceptional life, brings awareness to this unfortunate fact with a concept known as digital deduction, in which humans have shifted to a reliance on technology to make decisions, form thoughts, and shape our opinions. With all of the information out on the internet, we can get any answer to any question, or see any opinion, or any analysis and absorb it as our own.

As Jim Kwik puts it,

“We tend to identify with a handful of sources with which we align and then give those sources extreme influence over our thinking and decision-making. In the process, the “muscles” we use to think critically and reason effectively are atrophying.”

Notice anything jarring that he has said?

Technology takes away our ability to critically think

We are living in an era where technology can literally think for us. Not literally (just yet), but in the sense that we derive our thinking and beliefs and opinions based on what we come across on the internet, technology very much does think for us.

It’s a double edged sword. Technology provides us with millions of times more information than someone in the 1400’s could have access to in an entire lifetime yet, at the same time, improper use of causes us to become dumber and dumber. I used to never believe my parents when they said those video games would turn my brain to mush. Now, I know better. You become what you eat and that definitely includes what you feed your mind.

Have you come to realize this in your own life? You’re finding it impossible to remember someone’s name you just met 5 seconds ago, you can’t recall a single phone number except your own, you find yourself looking up information that you probably do know but just don’t yourself a chance to remember. I know that I do.

And that’s why I’m so excited to be reading Jim Kwik’s book, Limitless, because it is teaching me how to learn, how to remember, and to realize the power that’s sitting between my two ears, my brain.

Why it’s important to critically think in today’s world

This has honestly been a personal struggle of mine as I’ve largely taken a lot of what I believe from the environment around me – the podcasts I listen to, the books I read, the people I hang around, the seminars I attend – without too much thought. They each align with my values and I do take them to be true. As I’m going along my own health journey and training to become a health coach, I’m realizing this is a skill that I need to start bringing back right now. It’s time to get curious again. It’s time to take a holistic approach to the information I consume, and just sit with it until I can make my own decision. I don’t want to be spoon fed my information from my phone or computer, I want my thoughts and my beliefs to be authentically mine.

We’re living a world where digital distraction and digital deduction are everywhere. Subconscious messages about how we should live our lives, to how we should feel and act are sent to our brains thousands of times daily through billboards, movies, television shows, magazines, the media and news, social media, the government… everyone and everywhere is trying to get us to think and act in a certain way.

The only way to avoid the noise and clutter and information overload is to be conscious about what you allow into your mind AND learn to formulate your own thoughts based on information provided. Take it back to high school when you might have had to analyze a paper or research article for class – didn’t the teacher always have you look for the weak spots in the argument, examine it from a broader perspective and context, and find improvements. The idea is not to take any piece of information you come across as factual – the idea is to parse through the information, look for any areas of bias or misrepresentation, and finally make your own best decision based on what has been provided.

If we don’t start bringing back this attitude, what are we left with? We’re just some cog in the machine that obeys every command and gets manipulated in various ways – that’s not something we want!

How to think

Don’t turn your liberating skill of thinking and being authentic over to your device. You would never let someone else in person impose their thinking on you because for starters it’s annoying and secondly nobody likes to be controlled! We all want to be free and live our own lives. When we immediately reach for a device to give us information, we are essentially doing the exact same thing.

So here’s what you can do.

• Get the book Limitless, by Jim Kwik. The book can provide you with far more information and tactics than I can share here
• Be conscious with your screen time usage. Set a limit for social media and entertainment usage throughout the day. Even if you continue when the time is out, the notification will at least bring awareness to your over usage
• Recognize situations where you habitually grab your device. Choose one of these situations and write down an action plan for what you can do instead. For example, when I’m working and I see notifications popping up on my phone, I get distracted. Now, all of the notifications except for messages and calls will pop-up for me AND I put my phone far away from me when I have something important to work on
• Think about one area that you need to make a decision on and then spend some time working through that decision with no use of technology. Even if you actually need information online, see how much you can actually remember, you might surprise yourself
• Turn off the news. Most of it is negative anyway, why even listen? For the weather? Look outside.
• Do your own research on topics you are passionate about, don’t defer to other people’s articles. Those are their opinions and not raw data.
• Don’t believe everything you hear – strict vegans will claim veganism is the only way to save the world and human health, yet farmers and many health experts know that regenerative farming with cattle and bison would not only drastically reduce climate change, but also fuel the soil with more nutrients. Don’t believe me? Go look it up on your own.

There’s a fine line between thinking on your own and being told what to think. Most of the time, we don’t realize we are sucking up information like a vacuum from the internet and we think, “those are my just my thoughts.” Chances are, you didn’t come up with your thoughts.

What are your thoughts 🙂

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments.