Intuition

I’ve had this belief for a while now that the comforts of modern society are disrupting our ability to listen to or even hear our intuition. And it’s for that reason that we are both sick and divided. Let me explain.

Food I think is the easiest one to understand. Food today we know is not the food we ate 100 hundred or more years ago. Maybe not even 50 years ago. And most of it isn’t even really food.

The food that many of us consume today is engineered to be extremely tasty (I won’t say delicious), palatable (easy to eat), and therefore addictive (you want to keep coming back for more). And our body doesn’t know how to handle that.

So even if we’re not hungry, we want to eat. Even if we’re trying not to have sweets, we reach for the candy. Our intuition is saying we don’t want it, but it’s been engineered so perfectly that it disrupts what our gut is telling us.

And it’s not just what food we put in our body that determines what and how much we’re going to eat. It’s the advertisements that we see all around us. It’s the grocery store filled with these manufactured foods.

When we walk into the grocery store we might know what we’re going in for, but the second we see the shelves lined with treats that all changes. All of a sudden what we need (our intuition) gets hijacked by what we want.

Social media is another easy example to understand. How many times do you open your Instagram when you’ve told yourself that you’re not going to? I know that happened to me all the time until I deleted my account for a period of time.

How often are you scrolling through your feed while thinking “what am I looking at?” Again, that used to always happen to me too.

Developers have figured out how to override that voice in your head. They’ve figured out the formula, much like the food companies, that tricks your brain into coming back for more when you know you shouldn’t. It’s the same feedback loop that drugs play off of.

This is true of the 24 hour news cycle. It’s true of streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Prime.

So for many of us the majority of our daily interactions with food and technology are getting between us and our intuition and the result is we’re out of touch with what we want and are therefore unknowingly being conformed to what they want.

That’s why when you talk to someone face to face or on the phone the conversation is a much different one than the one you have online. You can tap into what you want and most people want the same thing.

It’s the reason why when you eat real food you don’t over indulge. Your body is able to signal to you and say “hey, we’re good.”

I think for most of human civilization people have been able to listen to their intuition and now there is so much noise and poison in our environment that we’re having a tough time tapping in. If we can eliminate the noise and limit the poison I think we’ll all see a big change in our health and more people come together.