Life Altering

It’s been about three years since I started this blog. A project I embarked upon to dissect how a three-year relationship could go up in smoke and die, I had no idea that what I was doing would be life altering.

Lately I’ve been on a serious binge of reading. I have just been gobbling up any and all material related to writing, writing for the web, and content. I believe I’ve found a new calling. Writing for the World Wide Web. Mostly because I enjoy alliteration more than most normal people.

During my latest web reading and link clicking (one said click seriously leads to 10 or more finds) I found a treasure of a blog post. This guy.

The author takes us through his own journey to find the creative energy to write well in the face of the information overload.

As I sat here reading this post I excitedly right clicked “open-link-in-new-tab” more than a few times. One of the links sent me off into a Psychology Today article that talks about how to have more insight. As I read on, I made a connection to my own search for answers. AKA insight. This very blog is my own public way of searching for insight. Up until now I’ve just thought of it as something I liked to do. But nawwww. There is SCIENCE to back this mofo up. I LOVE IT.

“Having more insights is fun and engaging. It gives your brain a great lift of dopamine from the novel connections. It helps energize you to get things done, and helps people unlock some of life’s toughest puzzles. The trouble is, we have to get used to letting our non-conscious brains do the work. Relax, let go, and you might find a whole world of new insights emerging.”

My other open-link-in-new-tab discovery led me to a New York Times article about our brains much needed access to downtime. I kind of already knew this though. I mean, you can physically feel it when your brain has had too much. Your eyes start going crossed; your body feels heavy. But the part I never thought about was this, “when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.”

OK, so what SCIENCE (love it) is telling us is that in order to be better, faster, stronger we have to give ourselves a break. And by “break” we’re not talking about absorbing yourself in the latest and greatest episode of Bones. We are talking about a break from media, information bombardment, things-with-screens.

So translating this to life in general. I have also figured out that when I feel annoyed or angry about something (or someone) sometimes I need to stop thinking about it. Put it out of my head. Because it has proven to be the case that the next day, when I’m daydreaming or chatting with a friend, I put the pieces together. They float together like they always made sense, but it was me that was missing the point. And then, like a mini-ephiphany, it all seems so clear. Thanks science.