Give Your Brain Some Idle Time In Between Learnings To Process It All

Too many of us spend all of our time engaging our brain in one way or another, not giving it even a second of rest, unless we are sleeping. But if we truly want our brains to work at its full capacity, we need to give it some idle time, we need to let it pause.

Transcript

Hey everyone,

I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Bloomshekha and I welcome you to my channel,

Guys and gals I should say.

Thank you so much for watching and for being on my channel.

If you want to support me further,

You can do that by going to my Patreon or Ko-fi link.

The links are in the description below.

In this one I want to speak to you guys about the low information diet,

Something that I've spoken about previously I think,

In passing perhaps,

Not really done a video on it.

And actually again,

I came up in a conversation with my friends a couple of days ago and I thought that it would be an interesting thing to bring up again because I feel like a lot of us as INFJs,

As individuals,

As people in this over information age have become addicted to information in general.

And I noticed that a lot of you will send me hundreds and thousands of YouTube videos and books and blog posts and things like that.

None of them which I read because I don't have time to read all of them and I don't have the energy to focus on all this stuff anyways.

I'm doing my own thing.

But I'm grateful that you're sending them to me.

But the thing is that I am,

And that's one of the reasons I'm actually doing this video as well,

Is that I am definitely on a low information diet and I have been on one for a while now.

There's many reasons for it and I want to kind of go through them,

Kind of hopefully inspire you to go on one as well because it is extremely important not only for our brain,

For our brain structure,

For the way we process information,

But also extremely important for this day and age where you are living in the world where it's extremely easy to become inundated and overwhelmed with information that's coming at us.

So what's the basic tenet of the low information diet?

When you feel,

And you probably do at this moment in time because there's a lot of information coming at us in many different ways,

Not only the notifications on our phones,

But if you have news sources kind of activated on your phone,

They'll be sending you news items every single day or every hour on the R.

Or you might probably have blog posts that you've subscribed to,

So you have emails coming from them or email notifications from 100,

000 sources.

You probably have books if you have a library card,

Books being told that you have a book coming or you can borrow this book or you can borrow that book.

And people telling you all this information,

People that you speak to probably giving you 100,

000 sources and information and books and blog posts,

Things that they're recommending you do or read.

And so I mean there's probably billions of bits of information coming at you from all different sources.

And of course our job as a color of all this information is to figure out what's important,

What's not important,

To get rid of all the stuff that's not important and not look at it again,

And to actually focus on the stuff that's actually important.

Unfortunately we're not very good at culling information.

And so what happens is you become like one of my guy friends who is an ENTP and he literally has a thousand tabs open,

Well not maybe a thousand but two,

Three hundred tabs open from things that has been recommended to him.

So blog posts that he should read or articles that he should follow or podcasts that he should be listening to.

And so he has all of these tabs open and he spends days and days and days opening tabs and then closing them,

Reading through them,

Closing them,

Reading through them,

Closing them.

And there's so many of them popping up that he can never catch up and he always has an overflow.

He always has too many tabs open,

Not enough time to read all that.

And then he feels overwhelmed and he feels sad and depressed because he feels like he's not doing enough and he's not reading enough and he's lazy.

He's not lazy.

He's just trying to do too much.

His brain,

His body,

His capacity to read is only so much and he has to kind of allow for that.

Unfortunately we kind of treat ourselves as robots.

We treat our brain as if it's a robotic device,

Not an actual living,

Real,

Breathing thing.

One of the things that I am so grateful that I learned recently,

And I think I learned it from the book called scatter brain by Henning Beck.

So if you are interested,

It's a good book on how the brain works written by a neuroscientist,

I believe.

Anyways,

Great book.

One of the things that I read in that that really kind of shocked me and I was surprised by was the fact that your brain actually cannot process information on a continuous basis.

We think as human beings,

Because we have this robotic assumption about our body,

Is that our brain is constantly processing information and can constantly process information without any fail,

Without any problems,

Can just keep on going forever and ever and ever,

Just like the heart keeps on beating forever and ever and ever.

But even the heart takes a break if you really look at it.

And so what happens if you take in too much information for your brain to handle is that if you don't give it enough time to process that information by giving it idle time,

It does not actually process that information.

It just throws it out.

It's not able to process it.

It's not able to take it in.

It's not able to move it from short term memory to long term memory.

So it's thrown out like garbage,

Basically garbage and garbage out.

And so you're taking in all this information,

You're thinking that you're doing a great job,

You're learning and studying on a constant basis,

You have an audio book whenever you're walking around,

You're reading all the time,

You're watching videos all the time and you're taking in all this information.

But because you're not allowing your brain to rest and some of us are insomniacs,

So you're not even sleeping enough to actually allow for that processing time.

And so what's going on with your brain is just it's overwhelmed.

There's just too much coming at it,

Not only in terms of the visual input and the sensory input,

Auditory input,

But on the daily basis of intentional input that you're actually reading,

Listening to and taking in all the time.

And because as I say,

You're not giving your brain that idle time,

It's just not able to process it.

It's not using that information.

So it's basically like you're wasting your time reading all that stuff,

Putting it all into your body because on your brain,

Because you're not actually going to transfer it to long term storage.

There's no point.

It's like it's wasted time.

And so in fact,

It would be actually much more useful if you read one book at a time,

Read it completely and then gave yourself time every day to process it.

And in fact,

Our brain's so smart and so powerful that even the article or the book says even five to 10 minutes of idle time,

If you can just sit for five to 10 minutes after you integrate some information,

That's all you need.

That's all really sometimes that you need is five to 10 minutes.

A lot of times we're not even giving ourselves five to 10 minutes.

We'll take our phone into the bathroom while we're pooping,

We'll be like on the toilet seat even reading at that point.

We're reading while we're eating,

We're reading while we're walking,

We're listening to audiobooks while we're walking,

You know,

Or we're talking to someone who's giving us information while we're sitting,

You know,

We're reading,

If we're doing anything,

We're just putting in information into our body all the time,

Into our brain all the time.

When will our brain have the time to process it?

It's not possible.

It's just not possible for it to do that much work and to take in that much information.

And so for you guys and for me as well,

A lot of times what I do recommend is that if you are doing this to yourself,

Not only of course should you take that idle time,

So maybe 10,

20,

30 minutes of relaxation time where you don't take in any information,

Not reading anything,

Not listening to anything,

No music,

No nothing.

And that's why meditation is such a great thing for that because you're basically just sitting doing nothing.

And so giving yourself your brain the time to inculcate all that information is so powerful.

But also again,

Putting yourself on a low information diet because the point of all this information is not so that you take in information and hoard it like a lot of us do,

But to actually use the information.

And my friend,

The guy friend I was talking about earlier,

He's a prime example of this where he takes in hundreds of thousands of bits of information,

Does nothing with it,

Does not use any of the information for his own health or his benefit.

Maybe a couple of things he'll put in here and there,

But mostly all that information is wasted because it's in his head perhaps,

But he's not using any of it.

He's not using it to change his life,

To improve his life,

Nothing.

It's just complete wasted time,

Complete wasted energy.

I don't know why he even bothers.

And so a lot of the point of this,

And I've said this in videos before,

And the point of all of these things that you're doing is not so that you can just have this information in your head so you can look smart in front of someone else when they ask you a question about it because you're actually using the information that it gives you.

If you're reading a book on health,

Take a couple of ideas from it and actually inculcate it into your daily routine.

For example,

If it tells you green tea is the best thing on this planet,

Don't just read about it.

Start drinking green tea,

Right?

If you can.

Or things like that.

Actually take action or put it into your to-do list to actually take action on the items that you're reading about and learning about rather than just reading about it and learning about it and just becoming a hoarder of all of this data information digitally or electronically or whatever you're doing for yourself.

And I know I do that as well because I am addicted to books.

I love books.

And the more books you can give me,

The more books I'll collect.

Do I read all of them?

No,

Of course not because I don't have the time for it.

And also being on a low information diet,

I'm trying not to read as much.

I still read a lot,

But I'm trying not to as much as possible.

So when I'm walking around,

I try,

I won't read an audiobook every single time.

I'll try to have some silent moments where I can just let my brain relax and idle and go through just inculcating and processing all that information that I've gathered on a daily basis.

I hope this is useful for you.

As I said,

The book's name is Scatter Brain by Henning Beck.

It's kind of hypocritical of me to give you a book suggestion when I'm telling you to be on a low information diet.

Again,

One book at a time and try not to overwhelm yourself and your sensory inputs and try as much as possible to give yourself a little bit of idle time.

It doesn't require a lot,

Five to 10 minutes,

20 minutes at most is all your brain needs in order to process information that you've taken in from a book or from a blog post,

Things like that.

So allow your brain that time.

Again,

If you guys have any questions,

Please do comment below and I shall reply back to it as soon as I can or I'll do a video on it if it's possible.

Again,

Thank you and I shall see you guys next time around.

Bye for now.