simplifying a few things

I was listening to a food podcast recently and the guest being interviewed said that “we are over fed but under nourished”. He was talking about food, but it got me thinking about how it’s also a good analogy for other areas in our lives right now. The idea that more, quicker, newer is always better has become the norm, so I thought of other simple ways in my life that I could figuratively “eat less, but get better nourishment”.

News – I can’t remember who said it, but they said that there are 7 billion people in the world, and we can’t and shouldn’t know what is going with all of them, all of the time, and what their opinions are on everything. The news cycle is non-stop and has morphed into the news/opinion cycle. What I’ve been trying lately is when I look at the headlines, I’m trying to read only news. Which is to say no pieces that are solely opinions & no articles just rehashing another articles. It’s not so easily parsed but trying to use some filter has cut down tremendously what I’m watching or reading and I’m getting a much better experience.

Websites – I have all of the sites that I follow, on an RSS feed and each day I scan through them and read the articles that interest me in more depth. I had a ridiculous 140 sites. The major themes were food, gardening, fashion, self improvement, reading, & lifestyle. But it got to the point where I was doing mostly scanning of headlines and less reading of things more in depth. Do I need to see 25 new recipes every day, or add 5 more books to my reading list? So, I went through the list and deleted many of them. I put the deleted sites in my bookmarks so I can still easily access them, but now it’s a quick scan and again I’m enjoying reading the actual articles. Scanning the headlines of news and sites are definitely were empty calories for me.

Social media – I read that the average person now spends 2 hours & 24 minutes per day on social media. This was an easy one for me. I’m not that into it to begin with, so making the change was simple. I did a Marie Kondo on the people that I followed by asking myself does this person or group that I follow bring me joy, and if not, why in the heck am I following them. Not that I need to agree with everything that they say but if it’s bringing me stress and grief, mute or delete them.

Online shopping – Otherwise known as death by a thousand cuts. I may not purchase expensive things online, but I’ll purchase little things here and there and over time they really add up. I have a few sites that I do most of my shopping on and one of them is Amazon. I went to my history and scrolled through all the things I’ve purchased in the last two years and I realized many of the things that I thought I needed at the time were really unnecessary. So I’m experimenting with ways to be more mindful about my purchases. The idea is to slow it down so I have several opportunities to rethink the purchase. I can only purchase things on Sunday. I put things on a list during the week and at the top of my list I have a few questions written down, that I need to ask myself about each item before I buy them. Is this something I really need or want to buy or is it an impulse buy? Can I just do without it for now? Is there something I already have that I could use instead? And so far it’s working. I’m going to keep tweaking it to see what else I can do.

Subscriptions – Like online shopping, these can creep up on you. Subscriptions can be anything from monthly software, music, food, toiletries, make up, gym memberships, audiobooks. Even clothes, razors, hair color, it seems anything can be a regular subscription. I went through my credit card statement and saw I had more than I thought did and there were several that I could eliminate.

Time Management – For many of us, the pandemic has given us too much time, but it also helped me reset my thinking on overbooking and how many of us ran at a break neck speed because it was sort of a badge of honor to be overly busy. Maybe that makes us feel wanted, important, needed. Maybe as things open up we can more judicious in what we let back into our lives and how we spend our time. Have a real conversation with someone, without thinking in the back of our mind what we have to do next. Being present. Valuing what we have in our lives. Have a good week and let me know if you have any tips that have been helpful to you. xo