Is Your Information Diet Making You Unhealthy?

We live in a world overflowing with health advice.

One expert tells you to avoid oats.
Another says they're a superfood.

One says you need more protein.
Another says your hormones are the problem.
Then someone else blames cortisol.

No wonder so many women over 50 feel overwhelmed.

In this episode of Tea With Sophie, we're talking about something I believe is quietly damaging our health:

Our information diet.

I introduce the idea of "infobesity"—being mentally bloated by constant health advice—and explain why consuming more information rarely leads to lasting transformation.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why information overload keeps you stuck
• How social media constantly activates your nervous system
• Why protecting your peace is just as important as eating well
• The difference between collecting information and integrating wisdom
• How to create a healthier relationship with health advice
• Why the healthiest women aren't always learning more—they're living what they already know

If you've ever found yourself scrolling for one simple answer and ended up feeling more confused than when you started, this episode is for you.

Because healthy aging isn't just about what you feed your body.

It's also about what you feed your mind.

If you'd like to learn more about my Ignite Method and whether it's the right next step for you, you can book a complimentary conversation here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you are a woman over 50, maybe you are suffering from infobesity. Imphobesity? There's a term that I just recently heard and I thought it was so brilliant. It's just we are bloated with information now. And so in this episode of Tea with Sophie, I want to show you how to protect your brain before your body. And when I say protect your brain, I'm not talking about the mechanics of actual brain health, eating your blueberries and doing your resistance training and all that incredible stuff that we need to do to actually physically protect our brain. I'm talking about protecting your brain in a different way so that you can walk away from this episode with a little bit more understanding about why you feel a little bit discombobulated, confused, um, exhausted by this avalanche of information that is leading you to a state of infobesity. So let's get into it. How your information diet may be affecting your health more than you even realize. All right, so I just want to talk about something that I think we rarely discuss enough. And this isn't necessarily, we're not talking protein hormones, menopause, uh supplements. I want to talk about the information diet. So I want to ask you something. Have you ever opened Instagram or YouTube or Facebook looking for one simple health tip or to answer a certain question that you might have? And 20 or 30 minutes later, you found yourself just head spinning and actually more confused than when you started, because one doctor or person with an MD or something, initials after their name are saying that oats are inflammatory or cheer seeds are inflammatory. And then another says that they're the healthiest food in the world, right? And another says you need more protein, and then another says your entire problem is your cortisol levels, and another person says, no, it's not, it's something else. So no wonder so many women say to me, Sophie, I am overwhelmed. And I don't think we are suffering from a lack of health information. I actually think we're suffering from an overload of health information. And many of you have heard me say before, information is not transformation. And that's how I see sadly this happening with so many women who come to me that I work with. These are very, very smart women, very wise women. They are incredibly well researched. Some are even doctors. They have an enormous understanding, but they are not integrating the information that they are learning. In many ways, actually, it's going in one ear and out the other. Now, I want to explain to you why your brain reacts this way. So our brains are beautifully designed to notice uncertainty and potential threats, particularly the left part of our brain, the left hemisphere of our brain. So when something feels confusing, unsafe or threatening, our attention narrows. We become more vigilant, we start scanning for answers, and that is very, very useful if you are crossing a busy road. Um, you need to get all the information, you need to take it in at record speed time, you are threatened, you need the information, you need the signals, and you have to be vigilant. But it's much less useful when every second Instagram reel is telling you that you're eating the wrong thing. Our brain keeps searching for certainty. We want certainty. So if I just watch one more video, read one more article, hear one more podcast, then maybe I'll finally have the certainty and know exactly what I should be doing. Do you relate to that? The problem is that certainty never comes. In fact, the opposite comes because you're just getting more and more and more and more of like, wait, I thought I was certain about that. Now not anymore, because there's always another contradictory video waiting for you. So this is not about blaming social media. There is incredible inspiration on social media, and there is incredible health information available today from brilliant experts. And I follow many of them. In fact, I follow a few, a handful of experts who are absolutely brilliant at disseminating the sort of bogus health information and breaking it down that others are putting out there. You've seen all the sort of rebuttal and debating Instagram um Instagram reels, which I can definitely go down the rabbit hole on that one. But either way, social media algorithms, they're not designed to leave you feeling peaceful. They're actually designed to keep your attention. That's it. They're designed for novelty, controversy, fear, outrage, strong opinions. Those are the things that keep us watching. The more emotionally activated we become, the longer we stay. Isn't that interesting? You would almost think that it's the opposite, like, oh, I'm I'm emotionally triggered and activated, so I'm getting out of here, but no, we stay. We stay. That's what that's how they're designed. So we have to become just as intentional about what we're feeding our minds as what we're feeding our bodies. Now, what I teach inside the Ignite methodology, as as many of you know, and one of the biggest mindset shifts I teach is instead of asking, and this is about food, instead of asking, is this food good or bad? I encourage my clients to ask a much better question. How does this food leave me feeling? How do I want to feel? And how does this particular food leave me feeling? Emotionally, mentally, obviously, physically? Does it leave you energized, satisfied, clear-headed, strong, or feeling sluggish, bloated, uh, indigestion, gird, uh, craving more? So that question changes everything because we stop making food good or bad or right or wrong, and we stop chasing food rules, and we start really paying attention to our own experience. It takes the shame and the blame out of it. It's just having us understand it on a really deep, understand ourselves actually, and our bodies on a really deep level. So lately I've realized that we need to ask ourselves the same question about information. So, not just is this true when this information comes in, but more importantly, how does consuming this information leave me feeling? I'm gonna say that again. How does consuming all of this information on YouTube or wherever you're doing having your information, because you may be watching this on YouTube right now, and there's a little sidebar where all these other videos are grabbing and thumbnails and and with these hooks are just grabbing your attention over here? Okay. Um, and I know that because I have a YouTube channel and I'm on YouTube, and it's it's it it's it does not leave me feeling very good when I've when I've um when I'm done consuming. It really doesn't. So, how does consuming this information leave me feeling? Does it leave me feeling calmer, more hopeful, more empowered, more certain, or does it leave me feeling anxious, overwhelmed, frustrated, like I'm failing, comparing myself to other others, like I'll never get this right? So what I want you to do is to notice how you're feeling, or notice what you're feeling. So this is something that I think that we're missing that is very, very important. So in Ignite, I teach women not to override their emotions, not to override particularly difficult or unpleasant emotions. So those might be the emotions of feeling disappointed, frustrated, helpless, vulnerable, right? These are emotions that are unpleasant, so we don't want to feel them. And yet, interestingly, when we are doing a lot of scrolling and consuming a lot of information, those are the exact emotions that are being triggered, right? Feeling helpless. Wait, wait, wait, what a minute. I'm helpless. I don't know how to do all this. How do I put it together? I don't even now I'm confused. Helpless, vulnerable. I'm vulnerable. Now I'm seeing all these people who seem to be having it all together and I'm not. Suddenly you feel incredibly vulnerable. You might have been feeling good about yourself and certain and everything before you went in, and now you're not anymore. You might be feeling disappointed in yourself. So our instinct is to distract ourselves, fix the feelings, or push it away. And scrolling, ironically, is one of the easiest ways to do that. So when you're scrolling, you're far from feeling any of the emotions. You're just scrolling and scrolling. It's just another way of numbing our emotions. And again, what I teach Inside Ignite is let's let's recognize when we're feeling these emotions and then also recognize what we do to numb those emotions because we don't want to feel them. So are we reaching for a food? Are we comfort eating? Are we reaching for an alcoholic beverage? Are we reaching for the remote control to watch another episode? Or are we just scrolling, continuing to scroll, so that I don't have to feel that emotion? So here's what I would love you to try. The next time you finish scrolling, don't immediately move on to the next thing, but just take a pause. It can be for 30 seconds. Just one slow breath, in and out, close your eyes if you can, come back into your body and just simply ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? Now, is it joy? It could be joy, it could be inspired, maybe feeling hopeful, but it might not be. It might be I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling helpless, I'm feeling vulnerable, feeling disappointed in myself, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling angry. That a lot of algorithms can leave you feeling, particularly on Instagram, angry, right? Whatever it is, don't override it, just notice it. Name it, breathe into it, feel it in your body, feel it, because it'll dissipate that feeling in 60 seconds, right? Because when we name an emotion, we stop being unconsciously driven by it. And then when we feel it, it no longer has a hold on us. When we allow it to move through us, it's gone. Okay, because otherwise those emotions don't disappear, they'll accumulate a little anxiety here, a little shame here, a little anger here, a little sadness there, another moment of self-criticism. And before we know it, we're carrying emotional weight we didn't even realize we had picked up. So here's a little practical strategy that I want to give you. Because I want to encourage you to put, this is what I'm doing for myself, put a little friction between you and the scroll. So for me, that might mean simply setting a 10-minute timer. Okay, and I'll just set it on my phone and just go, hey, you know, Siri, just please set a timer for five minutes or 10 minutes. You decide. Now you are in control. The algorithms are not in control, you're in control. And that timer will go off. And I'm really disappointed when the timer goes off. It's like, it's off. We're done now, okay? Because these platforms are brilliantly designed to keep your attention and keep you engaged. Or you could use something which is called a brick. And a brick is this little gray little sort of device, it's tiny, it's like the size of a little old school matchbox, and it's magnetized, so you can stick it to your fridge, and you just have the app on your phone, and then you decide on the um apps that you want to brick. And it could be, for me, it might be Instagram, Facebook, um, YouTube, whatever. And it could be other apps for you, it could be gaming or something like that. There's anything that you spend a lot of time on and you wish you didn't, and then you just scan your, you it's called bricking your phone or your device, and you just brick it. And it just means that the friction is that when you want to go back into that app, you have to scan. You have to walk over to your fridge and scan it to sort of unbrick it. And I think that's absolutely brilliant. The person who turned me on to it actually was my daughter who's at medical school, and our boyfriend, also medical uh school students, and so they can't afford to be on their feed, their apps, they just can't because it's eating away hours that they they need to be studying. It was just literally robbing them of this valuable time. So I thought that was pretty brilliant of them to do that. But the tiny pause is often enough to interrupt the automatic habit. Now, I laughed at myself recently because I charge my phone outside of my room at night, and I was chart putting about to put my phone in the on the charging station, and I thought I'll just very quickly check my texts. So I went in, checked my text. No, we're all good there, you know, nothing to respond to. No, not from my daughter or you know, anything uh uh, you know, emergency. And then I thought you'll know how this goes. I thought I'll just very quickly open the Instagram app. Twenty minutes later, I am still standing up by the charging station. Twenty minutes later, that's 20 minutes robbed of my precious life, my precious time that I could have been journaling, breathing, doing a beautiful yoga nidra, doing all the lovely things that I love to do and intend to do every evening, but it robbed me of 20 minutes. And I thought, okay, this definitely we need another, another layer of discipline here. So this is your takeaway this week. Don't just notice what you're eating, notice what you're feeding your mind. And understand that there is this um infobesic environment that we're all living in. Um there's no going away from it, getting away from it. AI, you know, now is a whole nother lair that's that's happening in there. And the the bots, you know, the um artificial intelligence. And so it's it's there, it's not going anywhere. And and honestly, I just think that if we we have to we have to master it. We have to learn to be in control, we have to learn to be in the driving seat, much as those of us who have raised children and grandchildren, there are rules. This is when your phone goes off, this is when you don't have your iPad, this is when you eat your meal, this is when you play, this is when you go to bed. Um, I'm finding anyway for myself, um, in this uh environment that I have to be a lot more disciplined about my own boundaries around, particularly around the information that I consume. Um so your little action for this week is uh is instead of just noticing what you're eating, notice what you're feeding your mind after you consume your information, pause for 30 seconds and ask yourself, how do I feel? Not how do I think, not who's right, but how do I feel? Breathe. A couple of breaths, come back into your body, because protecting your health isn't only about nourishing your body and doing your weight training and all of that. It is about protecting your peace. It's about regulating your nervous system. And if your nervous system is constantly triggered and irritated, then no amount of eating healthy or exercising well is going to move you into an optimal health state. It's just not right. So the healthiest women that I know, and many of them are my clients, aren't the ones who are consuming more and more information. They're the ones who found a few trusted principles, a few trusted voices, and they spend the rest of their lives living them, living them, integrating them. Um, because we spend so much time worrying about ultra-processed food, I wonder if it's time we start worrying about ultra-processed information. And the one thing I will say, and I know the clients that I work with inside of the Ignite methodology know this, is the beauty and why I created the Ignite methodology is because I wanted to create a method where everything that you need to know and do, and then show you how to integrate it with a psychology, is all in one place. So you can just trust it. So you don't have to keep on searching and searching and searching and searching. It's just done, is done for you. And then you can have the freedom to go, okay, great. Now I can really go and live my life. And then when you are using your social media or your apps or whatever, it is truly for information, for inspiration, and you can learn how to manage that, you know, in in in in the way that's going to really work for you instead of against you. So I'm curious, please, if you're on YouTube, leave me some comments about how you manage your consumption of information. I would love to know. And if you want to find out if the Ignite methodology is a good fit for you, you are welcome to book a one-on-one complimentary session to talk about what that if if if it might be a good fit for you and what that could look like for you. And I'll pop a link in the description to this video. And I'll see you next week for another episode of Tea with Sophie.