Conducting an information audit

The importance of a healthy diet for physical health is well understood. Most people have a good sense about foods likely to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the body (excuse the extreme simplification in the interest of brevity), and if not, the information to form a view is easily accessible.

What if I asked you whether certain foods are good or bad for the mind? This might be a bit more challenging, though most would intuit that those which are good or bad for the body are likely to have the same impact on the mind.

What if instead I asked you about the impact on the mind of the information that you consume? This might be something you have spent less time considering. But we are missing a trick if we are optimising our physical diet for both physical and mental performance, but not our mental diet.

Eating junk for breakfast

I believe that most of you would agree with me that an energy drink, a packet of crisps and a cigarette is a bad breakfast, and far from an optimal way to begin the day.

What about waking up and immediately checking social media? Or work email? What about negative news stories, or news with a xenophobic bias? Some of the information we consume on a daily basis can have real negative impacts on us.

If we take negative news for example, a continuous stream of disheartening news can alter our perception of the world, affecting motivation and lead to viewing the world through the lens of cynicism and hopelessness. This has the potential to exacerbate our own personal anxieties and stresses in our lives. Consuming such news can have physiological impacts, activating our natural response to crisis, with the sympathetic nervous system causing our bodies to release stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline.

Implementation idea

Perform an audit of the information you consume on a daily basis, with the view to reducing or cutting out completely those sources which you believe could have a negative impact on you.

There are some inherent challenges associated with this exercise. We may not always realise the presence of noise at the time we are consuming it, or struggle to pin-point which source is the one we need to address. It is further complicated by the fact that other external factors can compound the negative impacts.

For these reasons it may be useful to treat this as trial and error process. Experiment for set periods of time, monitoring the impacts of reducing or cutting certain inputs, whilst trying to keep other factors constant.

In a world where we are consuming increasing amounts of information on a daily basis, the conscious consumption of this information may prove an effective consideration in keeping our minds healthy going forwards.

Best, Alex Joshi