Hey all,

This post is designed to help us take a step back and think about our thinking.

Contemplation Questions

1. How do you choose the health content you consume (watch / read / listen to)?

   • Does an algorithm pick for you?

   • Do you seek out specific people?

   • Do you seek out specific topics?

2. What is your objective and how do you engage with the health content you’re consuming?

   • Do you consume for pleasure? For personal growth? For learning?

   • Do you want to challenge what is presented? Or do you wish to simply receive the information?

   • Are you OK turning off or leaving the content midway through?

Intro

When I turn on a podcast (my preferred media format), I have many different objectives - and sometimes those objectives exist at the same time.

• Entertainment / Distraction / Brain Break

• Establishing General Awareness or Context on a Topic (or Topics)

• Deepening My Understanding on a Topic (or Topics)

• Getting Tangible Next Steps to Implement in my Day-to-Day

When I am in the midst of consuming media, I’ll often switch between these states. One topic may interest me more than another. One topic I may be completely brand new to, so I allow myself to simply intake and marinate on the information. Other topics I may be steeped in and I’ll voraciously consume, replaying and dissecting every word.

Here’s an approach I (now subconsciously) use when I consume any health and wellness-related media.

Step 1: Begin with the End in Mind

Build awareness around what success looks like during consumption. What do we want to get out of the time we are spending?

• Bucket A: If you’re coming into a session with the mindset that you just need a break from being “on” - remember that! Giving yourself a break is not only OK - it is NECESSARY. Your objective during that session is to turn the brain off and be entertained / distracted / “off” for a while.

• Bucket B: If you’d like to build context, deepen your understanding, or get tangible next steps from what you’re consuming - keep that in mind as you consume.

Step 2: Have a Framework for Bucket B

There are times when you’d like to learn or grow while you consume. Let’s use a podcast as an example.

Example

Let’s say a podcast episode is 60 minutes long and has 6 chapters that are ten minutes each on different topics.

• Chapter 1 - the hosts talk about what they did over the weekend

• Chapter 2 - discussion on a cute, newly born panda at the San Diego Zoo

• Chapter 3 - analysis and comparison of a panda’s diet versus a human’s diet

• Chapter 4 - the biological mechanisms of fiber digestion in pandas

• Chapter 5 - the biological mechanisms of fiber digestion in humans

• Chapter 6 - Recommendation that humans and pandas should both only eat bamboo and 10 reasons why that’s true.

In this example, I’d:

• Likely wholesale skip Chapter 1

• Listen to Chapter 2 for entertainment value

• Build context and/or deepen my understanding in Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5, and

• Take home next steps in Chapter 6 

For Chapters 3 through 6, I’m squarely in Bucket B. Because my objective in Bucket B is to move closer to TRUTH and UNDERSTANDING - I’d apply a repeatable, objective framework to the scenario to take emotion out of the equation.

Framework Component 1: Assessing the Claim on its Merits

Ask questions like:

• Is this claim backed by scientific evidence?

• If so, can I look up the science?

• Is the science peer-reviewed?

• Where does the evidence fall in the Hierarchy of Evidence?

• Was the claim formed based on culture, society, and emotion or formed through analysis of data?

Framework Component 2: Assessing the Claim’s Delivery

Ask questions like:

• Is the claim positioned within context?

  • Is the scene set, or is it taken as an overwhelming, universal truth regardless of circumstances?

• Is the claim’s strength of evidence presented to be equivalent with another, much stronger claim’s evidence?

• Does the claim support the goal of media to “…afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”?

• Does the positioning, statement, and delivery of the claim trigger a response from the amygdala?

  • The amygdala is the part of our brain that processes our emotions and triggers fear, anxiety, and aggression.

• Does the claim come packaged with potential pitfalls, downsides, and counter-arguments? Or are those completely ignored?

  • Including a different point of view from the claim not only provides an opportunity to strengthen the claim, but it also shows mental flexibility and logical consistency.

• Relatedly, does the information include nuance to account for the complexity of multifaceted, dynamic, self-informing processes? Or is the claim all or nothing?

  • In the realm of health - our bodies include many systems, and these systems are informed based on one another. When one lever goes up, another could go down, a third sideways, and a fourth turns off completely (as an example).

Framework Component 3: Assessing the Person Delivering the Claim

Ask questions like:

• Does the person state their intentions, purpose, values, and objectives in presenting claims?

  • If goals in their presentation are implied, dig deeper to understand their motives. Do they have any incentives (money, influence, prestige, or otherwise) that rely on this claim being true?

• Does the person exhibit logical consistency?

  • E.g., do they require other claims to be held to a high standard of evidence strength, but they don’t subject their own claims to that same standard?

• Is the person exhibiting traits of reflexive contrarianism?

  • Do they take the opposite side of the scientific community just to oppose the dominant scientific view? Or do they assess information and critically analyze the data before making a statement of position?

Conclusion

Coming back to the contemplation questions, I encourage us all to take a look at why we consume the media we consume, how we pick the media we consume, and how we engage with the media that we do consume.

A systematic framework for “Bucket B” consumption helps us take our emotions out of the equation, and judge the claim, its delivery, and its messenger based solely on their merits. It puts our critical thinking squarely back in the driver’s seat, instead of relying on our fear and anxiety to dictate our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and eventually actions.

Let me know if you agree or if you have specific feedback on my systematic approach!

Until next time -

Yours in Health,

Nolan