Content fasting

The antidote to information addiction

Perfectionism is exhausting.

As a previously passionate perfectionist (now in recovery), I used knowledge-gathering as an excuse not to get into action. I kept myself convinced I needed more information before I could do anything.

Continuous research was the name of the perfectionist game. I was always working hard to solve the infinite puzzle before I could make a choice, any choice. From what career to pursue to what toothpicks to buy.

I was an expert in researching and solving (but in actuality creating) my own problems.

From the outside it might have looked like I didn’t have much going on, but on the inside there was a perpetual storm raging. Estimations, calculations, analyses, assessments, evaluations, projections, deductions, extrapolations, interpretations.

But never conclusions or decisions.

As I said, exhausting.

Rock bottom

Due to my inaction and active avoidance, my health had been steadily deteriorating for years.

I had been suffering from auto-immune issues ever since I was a child and had been relying on prescription medication to keep the symptoms at bay. Partly because I didn’t know the impact of lifestyle choices on health yet, and partly because I was secretly hoping my issues would spontaneously solve themselves. As you might have guessed, they did not.

In addition to the already worsening physical symptoms, my condition had now spilled over into the mental domain. I was basically always anxious and I had dozens of dips into depression.

This actually saved me though. When I hit an especially low point of physical and mental ill-being (suddenly seeing myself sit there as a sad pile of despair), it kind of ‘broke the spell’. I realized I needed to change and I knew how. 

I didn’t need more information, I needed to start implementing what I already knew but was ignoring. Improving my habits wasn’t rocket science but I was acting like I needed to do deep research to figure out how to do simple things.

Simple, but not easy. It took a while for the train to leave the station but it worked. My health slowly improved. I got better.

Experimenting on myself proved way more clarifying than research ever could, and I quickly figured out that the biggest shift came from changing what I put in my mouth.

Subtraction

Although at first I fell for the trap of trying every ‘diet’ out there, I eventually started simplifying and that’s when things started to drastically improve.

I discovered that one of the biggest clarifiers was elimination. Both an elimination diet and fasting (the ultimate elimination diet) helped me get clear on what I could and couldn’t tolerate and eventually what I thrived on.

Not only did not eating help to discover what I could eat, it also helped in general. Skipping the evening meal works wonders for my mood and sleep for example.

It taught me the power of subtraction rather than adding.

It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to me to apply the same principle to an entirely different kind of consumption.

Information consumption.

My information diet

My quest for better health had conveniently kickstarted my taste for self-improvement, but it had also put my research habit into second gear. It was getting worse.

On the diet front, I had eliminated foods and started intermittent fasting, but content-wise, I was still mindlessly binging on a daily basis. Sure, some of that was for entertainment purposes (season one and two of ‘The Bear’ anyone?), but most of it was filed under ‘important self-improvement research’.

I was hoarding books, articles, and videos like I was gorging myself at an all-you-can-eat buffet and I kept myself acutely aware of every new book-release in the self-help category. Because: ‘there might be some tidbit of truth in there that I‘ve got to know’.

Notice that I’m saying ‘got to know’, not ‘got to do’. I had the same perfectionist, non-action problem all over again but this time with my content consumption.

I was stuffing my face with content and it had nothing to do with knowledge-acquisition. It became clearer and clearer to me that it was an addiction. Instead of nutrient absorption, this was just gluttony.

I had to stop, I had to subtract.

Writing to the rescue

Even though I knew I wanted to change my relationship to content consumption, I didn’t have a clear plan.

In an effort to create rather than consume, I enrolled in a writing course. This was a great change of perspective. For the first time, I was on the other side of the informational flow and I could feel the difference. It was calming.

The final push I needed to transform my consumption habit was the arrival of my newborn daughter.

I simply didn’t have time to read, watch, or listen to anything. Where I once had a reading list and at least 20 podcasts queued up, I now couldn’t even read a back cover or get past the commercials.

Caring for my daughter, running my coaching business and writing a newsletter took all of the time I had. Mindless consumption and research automatically fell to the bottom of my list of priorities.

It led to ditching my book-binging habit and officially starting content fasting. This meant purposefully choosing what, when, and how much to consume while keeping the focus on creating.

Content fasting cured my information addiction. As a recovering perfectionist, it’s an essential part of my personal support system.

And it’s not exhausting at all.