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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of ‘personal bandwith’.

I feel that it’s a pretty good analogy to apply between internet access and personal levels of input information.

Realistically I am now past the point of middle age (certainly in terms of life expectancy) and that means I have picked up half a life time of habits and information. Although we try to ‘spring clean’ and cast aside some of our old ideas, assumptions and some of the information that we obtained which is now of little use, we’re continuously flooded with new streams of information which becomes faster and faster while not ever being able to off load everything that we already had.

This is what tires people out, not the physical labour of working down the mine or (like my dad) working physically on motor cars for 50 years.

It’s the emotional labour of worry, stress and just processing information constantly, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day.

It’s struck me in a particularly stark way on Good Friday when I had to come to the practice to see someone who had a chip on her front tooth.

The tooth was a crown, the patient had only ever been to see us once but decided they didn’t have a dentist anywhere else and came to ‘make use’ of our on-call service.

On my desk was some post that I took the chance to have a look at while I was there, I had discovered a flyer from The British Dental Association insurers Lloyd and Whyte offering me terrorism insurance.

Terrorism insurance.

Nobody is offering me obesity insurance (perhaps that’s health insurance). The likelihood of my practice being hit by a terrorist attack must be considerably less than the chances of me winning The Voice whilst dressed as a female version of Elvis Presley.

The problem is not the ludicrous nature of how some people are trying to make money or ‘expand their market place’ the problem is I read it.

It’s hard to stop the spam coming into your inbox these days, you could spend more time unsubscribing to spam you’d never subscribed to in the first place than you would take ever reading any reasonable emails.

It is possible though not to read your emails at all.

It gets harder and harder to control the input and hard to stop everybody sneaking under your door and shouting at you.

Because of that it’s important that we spend time and effort controlling the input because at the end of the day the bandwith pipe will get bigger but the receiver at the other end (our brains) will just stay the same and they will fry.

Blog post number: 1608