SLIDING ECHO CHAMBERS

November 13th, 2018

Even with the biggest theatre, it’s possible to slowly change the background color of any scene with almost no one noticing.  Everyone is too wrapped up in the action on stage to notice such things, even though they are relatively huge changes in comparison.  The important difference is the speed of change.  The slower something changes, the harder it is to notice.

The most insidious way this unfortunate fact of human memory impacts us is with regards to health.

If one’s health could be stratified into distinct levels from poor to excellent, each level would form it’s own echo chamber.  As long as the shift from one level to another isn’t drastically quick, the difference is hard to notice.  Such a trend across levels compounds until people find themselves in a state far from what they remember being able to do with their bodies years and decades prior. 

Like an individual whose viewpoint is never challenged but only supported by like minded people, the realization of a certain level of health can be a subject of ignorance.  Simply put, we are used to how we currently feel and imagining feeling better can be difficult, even if we have experienced  such an improved condition at some point in the past.

The individual whose viewpoint on some matter is stuck in an echo chamber only benefits from productive challenges to that viewpoint.  The analog for the echo chamber of health would be to challenge our bodies with different experiments, whether they be with food, exercise, sleep or even breathing.  Just as negative changes in health are only noticed with sudden changes like getting hit with the flu, so to is the case with the positive that we might discover.  Our experiments in health are better done in concentrated isolated ways so as to make any potential effect as noticeable as possible. 

Bear in mind that performing multiple experiments makes it harder to differentiate which strategy is creating the effect we are experiencing.

Most important is simply to bear in mind that any current mindset or state of health is generally extremely convincing.  It is hard to imagine change without either experiencing it to some degree, or witnessing it.  Skepticism about our own state can be our saving grace.  A curious skepticism can the thin edge of the wedge – our tool to start prying open our current state in order to potentially level-up and live a better life.