We’re not even 3 weeks in to 2024 and so many people are telling me they’re feeling scattered, they’ve had enough, are not ‘with it’, or need a holiday, that I think we need to rethink how to reset.
Back in the old early 21st century days there was an end-of-year break, things felt finalised and January really did feel like a fresh start. This is because work information (yang), was balanced by non-work holiday time (yin) so everyone’s organs got a chance to do the reset.
If you’re sitting in a deck chair sipping a cocktail, there’s not too much going on and your data processing / digesting organ (spleen) gets a break.
Well fast fwd to now and what was a stream of work-related information has turned into a tidal wave. We’re each getting on average 34 gigabytes of data & information every day (around 100,000 words) and 365-days-a-year.
In the deck chair these days there is a cocktail, a couple of screens and 34MB of data. That’s great, it’s entertainment. but it’s of a sort that hits your spleen hard and it’s the organ responsible for mental clarity, boundaries and feeling like you belong here / are at home on earth (spleen is earth element).
Data is coming in 24/7, it’s everywhere, not just on our down time, but even in bed with us. At the same time we’ve got reduced sleep, nutrients, and time for ourselves, and all of this adds up to overtaxed organs, especially your spleen. This is where those frustrating scattered, brain-foggy and ‘not with it’ feelings come from, and the general inability to cope with change.
The screens aren’t the problem. It’s amazing to be able to access limitless information, because that resonates with our expansive limitless nature, and information isn’t the problem either, our lifestyle is. The solution is to take-up a lifestyle (chi cycle shout-out) that upgrades our own system (organ health) to make our processing capacity more effective.
Our organs are the one thing that hasn’t changed because they don’t have to. They are state-of-the-art hardware designed to be constantly upgraded (like every day). And we’re going to need constant upgrades. Scientists reckon we can already process as much as 74 GB of data a day (that’s every single article on Wikipedia x 4) and that’s going to be coming at us.
So I reckon we need to get this year off to a restart by making it the year of internal organ health. That’s how to feel grounded and be focussed and productive enough to work on our real job of making ourselves happier healthier people, and the planet a better place for everyone.
For a reset you need to set some no-data-zone rules. This is critical for your mental, physical and spiritual health. These are my go to ‘self-love comes from organ love’ essentials:
- Never take your phone / screen to bed. Your organs will think you love information more than yourself and your health.
- Never check your phone during the night. You’re telling your soul you don’t have time for it.
- Never look at your phone first thing in the morning. Your organs will think that other people’s lives are more important than yours. This impacts on your mental state, it prevents a reset.
- Don’t scroll while you eat. Your spleen thinks you don’t care about nourishing yourself (it can’t process food and data at the same time so it goes for data instead of digestion and you’ll gain weight).
This still leaves huge chunks of the day to use screens and information for work or fun. Chi-cycle best times for proper work-type information processing are 9am-1pm, and for fun 3pm-5pm.
It’s never too late to restart!