A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was feeling unwell and the hypothyroidism that has affected and is affecting me as I travel through the journey of getting better and getting used to this and moving on.
Please don’t mistake this for me asking or looking for any sort of pity or even self-pity, I’m just trying to intellectualise the whole process and in a bizarre and twisted way quite enjoying the understanding of what’s happening.
And so, in the middle of this and not really being able to read very much for fun (too exhausted and really lacking in concentration late in the day) I know I’m feeling better because I’ve started back onto the audiobooks and to ease myself in gently, I went back to ‘Talking to Strangers’ by Malcom Gladwell.
Definitely in the top 10 books ever and one of the most important ones I’ve ever read but following on immediately from that I realised I’d bought Stolen Focus by Johann Hari a little while ago and I began to listen.
Hari is brilliant. He’s from humble beginnings, his Grandmother cleaned toilets whilst his dad went out to work after his Mum passed away, yet he managed to wiggle his way into Cambridge and then become a journalist.
He’s written and travelled and commented and been entirely honest about his own mental health problems in his landmark book ‘Lost Connections’.
Stolen Focus is an exploration of what’s so obviously happening to everybody, everywhere all the time in relation to lost attention, addiction to media and a failing struggle against the firehose of information that gets fired at us every single day.
What’s interesting about this book is that it’s encouraging us to slow down and that’s cross referenced against my current situation where my body is encouraging me to slow down.
That’s completely at odds with my constructed psychology which is always encouraging me to speed up.
It’s easy to understand this though, as a bill curve, like the one I always use in teaching about competency.
On the left-hand side of the bill curve, it’s possible to go too slow and to waste aspects of your time and aspects of your life and aspects of your attention but on the other side of the bill curve when you’re too fast your concentration disappears, your thoughts about deep things and important problems vanish and you try to survive.
The problem with the right side of the curve is that it’s addictive and the problem with trying to move from the right side to the left side of the curve is that it creates guilt that you’re not doing enough.
Hari suggests in his book that it’s too late and there’s not a lot we can do because we can try to use willpower to change our own circumstances, but the world will stay the same.
It’s at this point that I look back to my decision in 2015 to go off all social media (f*ck that was really difficult) and I celebrate the fact that I’m 7 years ‘clean’ and I’m still here and still doing fine.
My constant struggle every day is to use technology as a tool and refuse to allow technology to use me as one, but I’ve lost control of my children and they’re mired in the world of Snapchat and Instagram even though I’m trying to set an example where I hope they won’t be.
My HYPOT situation, at least for the short while, will make time even more precious and make my effort and attention even more scarce and while I’m doing entirely fine, I’ve had to restrict some of my activities (particularly exercise based) which has created a little bit of space and time which I refuse to be used for someone else to shoot me in the face with an information machine gun.
Blog Post Number - 3071
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