Healthy or concious?

Recently I was thinking about when people make health decisions, like to cut out carbs, or to go vegan. Often they say they feel pretty good. On the other hand there’s often the argument that “you don’t want to be skinny, you want the feeling that you think you’ll have when you’re skinny” which I think is pretty interesting. Obviously not everyone is making health decisions to be skinny, but it seems across the board that it generally seems to be a positive thing for the peope making the change.

I was thinking about how much of it really just comes down to being intentional about your decisions. For example, some of my friends have cut out things like red meat, or some of them have cut out carbs. Some people do it for ethical reasons, they just don’t want to be part of the environmental impact that meat farming causes. Fair enough. Others are doing it for weightloss, and though some people say losing weight sucks, ehhh. Sure being in a caloric deficit isn’t the best feeling, but losing weight DOES feel good. You feel accomplished, or succesful (of course, thats the same kind of thinking that can get you locked into disordered patterns, but the feeling is there nonetheless.

I also have friends who have decided to do things like stop using social media, I’ve done the same myself. In most cases, it seems pretty rewarding for the people who do it. In my experience, there are some detriments. For example, it can be tough to not know what’s going on. You’ll miss your aunt’s wedding shower, you’ll never realize your friend form highschool graduated early. But on the other hand, does it really matter? I tend to find that a lot of the things I thought I would miss I end up adapting to not having. And thats fine. You might worry about not knowing about events happening around you. Well, one thing that I found was that by not having my face glued to my phone, I end up, you know, talking to people. And you know what that means? Getting invited to things. I hardly need to keep up with whats going on around campus because people tell me, and they invite me.

Now on the other hand, there is also the inability to contanct people over social media, like I stop talking to the people whom I only communicate with via snapchat. Is that so bad? At first, I thought no, becuase everyone who I really want to talk to has my phone number. On the other hand, sometimes I don’t want to give out my number, or the people I meet are just first time acquaintances who would rather just give me their snapchat. That can be a bit of a doozy, but I think I generally find a way to work with it.

Anyway, enough of my soapbox on limiting social media usage. The thing that I’m wondering about, is why? Why does this make us feel good? In the context of social media, I genuinley thing that it has to do with less social media usage. I’ve honestly never heard anyone say “man, deleting tiktok was the worst decision I ever made!” They get used to it, they adapt. In regards to other things, like biking places, or taking more walking breaks, or maybe just changing how they eat, I think it comes down to being intentional. We like being intentional.

Humans are really good at automating tasks. There’s huge chunks of our brains that do this for us. It’s how I can walk to class everyday and not get lost (and its why we’re all thrown off when Monday was a holiday). Its how all those stupid illusions work, the ones where we can read things that don’t look readable. It’s just how we work, pattern recognition and automated processes, anything to save attention and energy for the important things. But what happens when things like social media, or being sedentary highjack that? We move through the motions until we become intentional. We set ourselves free a little, I think thats why we feel so good.

It kind of makes me wonder if I’d feel just as good setting myself 30 minutes on Friday afternoon or something to scroll through instagram as opposed to just cutting it out? Or intentionally eating red meat once a month at a nice restaurant with my friends, rather than cutting it out all together. If thats the case then it comes down to preference, which one is better for you? But the fact is it seems to just come down to being intentional about my time. So maybe I should start setting myself time to just be intentional. Time to schedule nothing? To intentionally do nothing? Or to intentionally evaluate how I have been spending my time for the last few weeks? Of course that all relies on me sticking to it, but I think it could be nice to add more intentional time to my schedule.