Find Your Balance | Weekbook #17

We live in a time where sensationalism is the norm. Clickbait headlines, rage-inducing social media posts, and inescapable echo chambers fiercely compete for your attention. In the age of information overload, how can you differentiate the useful from the unhelpful? More crucially, how can you find balance in a world of extremities?

It is indisputable that technology and social media have given us access to an unprecedented amount of information, and with prominent features such as infinitely scrolling feeds, it is possible to quite literally spend your entire life-consuming never-ending content. The challenge is, how do you know what is true or false? Put simply, you can’t ever be certain.

Arguably this isn’t unique to technology. Ever since humanity learned to communicate and create fiction, everything has been open to debate. However, there is one key difference, the rate of consumption. In the pre-technology era, it was guaranteed that you would need to do your research and truly contemplate the source of information when learning about a topic. In short, you had the opportunity to reflect as you consumed. Moreover, the volume of consumable content was considerably smaller.

However, in the modern world, technology has given life to something completely unprecedented - the opportunity for each of us to create and share consumable content. While there is an obvious upside, such as providing an opportunity to those who would otherwise be denied it, there are no guardrails to control what is being published and no limit to what is available for consumption.

This is something I’ve fallen victim to recently, and the loop I’ve found myself in is the health and fitness side of social media.

One of my major goals this year is to be consistent with my exercise routine, eat healthier and lose some weight. I’m by no means an unhealthy individual, but it’s something I want to achieve for myself.

As someone who has never taken their health too seriously before, the logical place for me to start was researching fitness routines and approaches to a healthy diet. What followed was pretty mind-blowing.

After a few hours of research across multiple media formats; blogs, YouTube videos, and books, my social media feeds were suddenly full to bursting with fitness and diet influencers. Video after video, post after post, I was told about hundreds of different approaches to working out and dieting. Some said that I needed to maintain a calorie deficit, and others said that this was misleading. Some said that cardio would lead to muscle loss, and others said it was essential in the pursuit of burning fat. Put bluntly, it was overwhelming. The only thing I was certain of was that I was more confused than before.

So instead, I decided to experiment. Rather than hop on the bandwagon of the latest trendy diet or workout routine, I did what I enjoyed. I started going to the gym, continued to play football with people from work, and went for the occasional run. I also tried to walk a bit more and be more mindful of what I was consuming. For my diet, I simply looked at the science. If I wanted to lose weight, logically I needed to put less into my body than it burned, so I began tracking my calories and maintaining a deficit. To find the right target, I simply increased or decreased my target calories each week until I found a rate of weight loss that I was happy with and was reasonable to maintain for the long run.

But the most important lesson I learned during this experiment wasn’t anything to do with exercise routines or diets. It was about balance. I knew that I didn’t want to sacrifice the parts of life I enjoyed most such as socializing with friends, going out for dinner with my partner, or enjoying a different form of exercise, so I found an approach that allowed me to have balance. That’s the lesson that most online content won’t teach you because it isn’t sexy and it doesn’t generate interactions.

The beauty is this same lesson can be applied to all areas of life. Whilst I believe wholeheartedly in maintaining discipline and being consistent, the approach you follow also has to be sustainable for the long term. So whilst there is undeniable value to be gained from the content you’re consuming, you have to learn to apply a degree of sensibility to it all, and in a world full of extremities, finding balance has never been more essential.

Book Notes

I am currently reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.

• “The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has been. The present is chaos and indeterminate.”

This passage discusses how our memory of the past can be distorted by other events in our lives, often leading us to recall previous events incorrectly. Consequently, this part of our memory that we often rely on so heavily is perhaps not the trusted advisor we believe it to be. The present moment on the other hands is always chaotic and unpredictable, due to the lack of control we have over everything but ourselves.

• “We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.”

I particularly like this analysis of how the brain interprets what the eyes see. For example, when we see a set of cutlery on the table, we don’t simply see an object. We see a set of tools that will make our lives easier and can relate that to a particular activity, in this case eating. For me, this beautifully demonstrates the immense power of our most powerful organ.

Try this Podcast

Ending Quote

“Balance is not something you find, it's something you create.” - Jana Kingsford

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