Aerial View:

• Intro thoughts

• Mindful Minute: Creation vs Consumption

• Conscious Consumer: Primally Pure Deodorant

• Quote of the day

• 3 key questions to reflect on

What’s up men, welcome back. Sunday night, sitting with some soft music on the speaker, dog snuggled up against my side, heating pad on my back to get some healing bloodflow through my sore traps, and the fireplace netflix program on the tv. If you don’t know what that is, search fireplace on netflix. It’s quite literally a recording of wood burning in a fireplace. I love south FL, but I do miss a good old fashioned fire in a real fire place in the house. I look forward to this when I make my return back to the Northeast one day.

Anyway- I think I’ve made it my short term life goal to get rid of my iphone and return to a flip phone. Why? There’s much less going on in a flip phone. It’s just a phone. Not a super computer with crazy addictive apps and extensive capabilities. I think the computer is enough to really tap into all of the capabilities needed, but having them all both on desktop and 24/7 everywhere we go via mobile prohibits us from distancing ourselves from our digital worlds. Anyways, this will make more sense after tonight’s post on over-consumption, let’s get into it.

Mindful Minute - Creation vs Consumption.

Lately I’ve become considerably more aware of how much I am consuming. News, messages, music, food, you name it. We’ve become creatures of mass consumption. It is incredibly easy to let this go unchecked. I’ve been pretty guilty of it over the past month, and I’ve felt the brunt of it.

I believe this tendency to over-consume is directly contributing to the mental health crisis in our society. We’ve never been so easily connected to each other, yet so incredibly disconnected from each other. We are the closest and farthest apart we’ve ever been in history. Not to mention we have access to more information than our brains can handle. I don’t think our brains have evolved enough yet to process this constant onslaught of data, and we suffer as a result of consuming it anyway.

Personally, when I let my guard down, I find myself in a loop of stimulation/consumption.

I’ve dubbed this the dopamine loop, and here’s what it typically looks like for me:

I check my texts, I check my work email, I check my personal email, I pop over to Shopify and check in on daily sales, then I open slack and check for new messages there, followed by the worst of them all, Instagram. 

Instagram is brutal because it combines so many means of consumption into one location. Messages, stories, posts, reels, exploration pages, it’s literally designed to keep you hooked, and there is ALWAYS more. You can refresh 24/7 and always have new content in front of you. It’s catered to literally show you what it knows you like. From a business perspective, it’s great. From a human health perspective, this is alarming.

So how do you know if you are over-consuming? Well, here’s a few examples of what can happen when relentlessly hitting the dopamine button:

-General unease, anxiety, and a feeling of being on edge when NOT stimulating the brain
-Constant desire to check the sources of stimulation accompanied by FOMO when abstaining
-Trouble focusing or staying on track 
-Procrastination & justification for putting tasks off
-Depressive symptoms like hopelessness, despair, and/or dread

If you’ve experienced these, your dopamine receptors might need a break, and your central nervous system a reset. Dopamine hits make your body feel good, which then signals that you are safe. When we are in a loop of this, the time without the dopamine hit makes our bodies then feel unsafe. It is a false signal. Your mind perceives the stillness as dangerous and signals to your body the same.  That’s why these artificial dopamine hits are so dangerous.

What’s the solution? 

As always, change starts with conscious awareness. Once we are aware of the issue at hand, we can work on solving it.

Everything in this life has its counterbalance, and in this case, the opposite of consumption is creation.

We need less consumption and more creation.

When I catch myself feeling the effects of over stimulating and falling prey to the repetitive dopamine loop, I shut it all down. No work, no screens, no food, no music, no consuming. I’ll put on pretty dim lighting, usually soft yellow light accompanied by a lit candle, and I’ll grab my guitar, sit at my piano, or reach for a pen and journal. Nothing special from here, just creation. I’ll play for half hour, an hour, even 2-3 hours sometimes. Or I’ll write, just get out whatever is in my head.

These three methods of creation have brought me back to center time and time again. Yours will likely look different, but I encourage you to sit back and really think about what they might be, so next time you’re feeling over stimulated and in need of a break, you won’t have to search for them in the moment. Proactive beats reactive.

Creation alone, while a great step in the right direction, is not enough to fully push back. We need stillness. Robert Frost said “The only way out is through” and in this situation, “through” is sitting with your thoughts in utter stillness. Can you sit still for 1 minute in silence with your thoughts? 5 minutes? 20? 1 hour?

There has never been a better time in your life to practice this. It’s a skill and as simple as it seems, it is a lost art today. We must take an evolutionary step backwards and remember how to practice the art of stillness.

In cultivating a stillness practice, we will retrain our minds, and thus, our bodies into understanding that we are indeed safe in stillness. Rest, healing, and real recovery happens in stillness. Sleep alone is not enough anymore, we need to rest while awake too.

We need the tools we have access to, we can’t eliminate them, they serve utility and provide massive value to our lives. But as with everything, moderation prevails. 

That’s all I’ve got for today- I think this topic may be the most important one I’ve written about yet. Please create more, and practice stillness, we all need it.

Conscious Consumer

Quote of the week

Highlighted in tonights Mindful Minute, this quote lives rent free in my head in perpetuity. Anytime I face adversity, I remember this quote. There is only one certain way to overcome adversity: Stare it in the face, lower your gaze, and continue forwards. Right through it. Embrace the discomfort, sit with it, and put one foot in front of another despite the pain. Not only will you continue forward movement towards your goals, but you’ll show your mind and body that you’re capable of operating in discomfort. If you can do this, you will be unstoppable and your success (whatever it means to you) inevitable.

Rise and Reflect - 3 Questions to Inspire Impactful Action and Critical Reflection

1. Do I have a dopamine loop? What does it look like? How often am I letting it happen daily?

2. What does creation look like for me? What are 3 ways I know I can create? What are 3 ways I’d LIKE to be able to create?

3. When was the last time I sat still with no external stimulation for 5 full minutes? Do I think I am capable of it? Only one way to find out, challenge yourself.

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Thank you for being here.

Sails up, eyes open.

Until next time,
Dan Baird