Lenten Acceleration

I’ve always managed to be relatively successful during Lenten observation – and as I was considering which of the goals I wanted to pursue as part of it this year I thought to myself “Hey, what if.. now hear me out.. what if you gave them all up?’ The willpower to stop one particular thing is difficult so does adding a few more things make it exponentially more difficult or is it the law of diminishing return of willpower? So in order to accelerate 4 of the 50 goals for Lent this year I’ve decided to give up:

Diet Soda (and sugar soda by proxy, since I don’t drink it anyway)
Social Media
Fast Food
Sugar

I mean three of those things can be easily controlled with a change in overall diet philosophy (linked to my overall health goals anyway) but social media? That is a challenge. I’ve read quite a few books over the last year or two around how social media is affecting our ability to focus and is damaging our ability to relate to other people in meaningful ways (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport are three I highly recommend). It’s enlightening to understand how these social media platforms are directly impacting your dopamine and serotonin release pathways to emulate addictive substances. How many times have we been working on something and really trying to focus and we blink and somehow we’re scrolling social media without realizing we’ve picked up our phone? Breaking this habit will likely be the hardest of all due to the unconscious mind looking for a dopamine fix.

So we start by removing the apps from all my phones, then we block the sites via iPhone content controls and then go in and change the local host on my laptop to redirect all calls to those websites to 127.0.0.1 – this removes the ability of the unconscious mind to take over and forces you to make a conscious decision to visit these sites and you can hope the hurdles you’ve put in place are brakes enough to stop you from doing it.

Not sure what will happen over these 40 days but I’ll be tracking them all in my habit tracker and I can share the tracker weekly to keep myself honest and I’ll share any highlights from the time that I feel are worth mentioning.