The advent of social media has increased our consumption of information over the years. According to Cybercrew on average people in the UK spend 7 months of their lifetime on Facebook. An average person in the UK spends 110 minutes per day on social media and 169 minutes on TV per day. This has been exacerbated by the advent of many social media platforms that share information constantly. Internet penetration has also played a role in ensuring that information is easily accessible to many of us. This has been good because we have become a generation of the enlightened. However, the new era has also come with its cons. According to The Telegraph, on a daily basis, one is bombarded with information equivalent to 174 newspapers. This by any standard is too much information per person and it sometimes makes it difficult to sift through the information and find what is relevant and what is spam. This has paused a problem for people who will then spend hours scrolling on the internet, looking for information that’s relevant to them. This has led to people spending hours and hours on the internet, for example, in America, people consume 34 GB of information per. day. Too much of anything is harmful to any system and in some cases, people have been forced to go on information diets.

By definition, an information diet is restricting the information you consume per given period in order to not fall prey to the dangers of consuming too much information. Just like eating clean to improve your physical wellbeing, one needs to ensure that the information they are consuming is not affecting their mental health. Bearing in mind, one needs an information diet because too much information could cause confusion, anxiety and affect one’s productiveness among other things.

In case, like the majority of us, you are wondering if you need to have an information diet, you need an information diet if you are experiencing any one of the following:

• You often spend over 3 hours per day scrolling on the internet or browsing social media
• You get anxious when you read or watch some things or certain content on the internet
• You are addicted to a certain social media platform you cant spend 30 minutes without logging into it.
• You spend most of your productive time on the internet not doing anything productive or income generating or educational.
• Your use of the internet is affecting your productivity
• You cant finish your daily tasks because of the internet.
• The internet is limiting your physical social time with other people

5 Tips on How To Curate A Healthy Information Diet

In case, you have acknowledged you need a digital detox and thereafter a healthy information diet. These 5 tips will help organise the information you consume and set you up on a path to a healthy information diet.

1. Find an application that times the time you spend on each app on your phone or PC, check the apps you spend the most time on, make a decision to cut that time in half at first until you reach a point where you only check that app 10% of the time you used to use the same app.
2. Do a complete digital detox on regular intervals. Unplug yourself partially or completely from all electronic devices during that digital detox time
3. Find other hobbies that do not include the use of tech gadgets like TVs and other electronic devices.
4. Identify social media plaforms that are counter productive to you and practise staying away from them for a month till you can log into them once a week.
5. Decide the media players that will inform you on the things you are passionate about, or things important to you subscribe to them and ignore the rest on many occassions unless its imperative that you check them and you will not be baited to keep scrolling once you open them.