If you’re in a relationship chances are you’re pretty aware of the impact social media can have on simply being present, most successful relationships will not have you have to wrestle with being the third thing behind the other half and their phone, the problem comes when we aren’t aware of the impact it is actually having on our health and specifically in keeping your muffin tops, computer belly, love handles, whatever sexy name you give them increasing in size every single day.
We spend so much time on social media and I am not even going to dive into the science in this article, I am simply going to tell you about the basics which are enough to get you to be like ‘oh damn, what?!’
Firstly, be present, come on, remember that time when you actually had to have conversations, I have been guilty of it in the past too, that conversation you have with your wife on Facebook when your wife is sitting literally next to you on the sofa. Do we not owe the respect to just being present to people when we are in their physical presence?
Mostly though, here are two of the biggest things I was doing with my phone which I kept BSing myself were ok without looking into how much they were damaging my own health and it did take a hell of a long time for me to break these habits.
1. Using my phone before bed and as soon as I woke up – We know phones stimulate your brain, the blue light omitted will fire up your cells as if it is the middle of the day, blue light or junk light exposure is a real thing and can be damaging to your health long term if you let it. Not only this there is a diagnosed condition called FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out, where you have to check social media to get that dopamine release from the notification icon being lit up just to realise that ‘oh it’s just some douche inviting me to like their local gardening page’. Then when you wake in the morning the first thing you do isn’t even say ‘Morning’ to your partner, you reach for the phone, turn your alarm off (I’ll get to that bit) and get your morning scroll and troll on making sure you haven’t missed out on anything so important in the last 2 hours since you got up for that toilet break which brings me on to…
2. Waking in the middle of the night and checking my phone then, again this links to the first one too but so many people do this like it is an involuntary reaction of theirs, wake, check Facebook, have a toilet stop, check Instagram and back to sleep. It is detrimental to your health.
We live in a world full of EMF (electromagnetic fields) and no I am not going to go to the extent to tell you to turn your wifi router off every night, probably wouldn’t make a difference, what’s one less wifi signal being transmitted into your brain going to do when there are thousands around all the time?
So what can you do?
First off, keep your phone out of your room.
BUT OLLIE MY PHONE IS MY ALARM CLOCK…
Alarm clocks are no more than $10 unless you get one of those cool ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ ones you had when you were a kid, well, I did anyway, COWABUNGA. So if you can’t afford $10 to help you improve your health then you are in need of more than health optimization coaching and definitely in the wrong place maybe you should stop buying those Starbucks that are on your desk right next to you…because, well, you may not need so much of that caffeine thing-a-me-jig if you got better sleep, right?
The other thing I did with this is actually made a commitment to my wife, sometimes I have late calls as most of my clients are in the USA where I am in the UK so the time difference means I may work later but when I don’t I make sure I switch my phone off at 8 pm and keep it in my office, clients know this when they sign up and they know they will get responses when I have finished my morning routine in full. It allows me to switch off my brain a bit more and even, as scary as it may seem in this world we live nowadays, have a real conversation with a real human being, dread the thought! It won’t happen overnight, you may feel like you’ve even lost a limb, it’s kind of scary right away.
Another thing to get used to this also is that I don’t take my phone out on date nights, I schedule them in, no calls are booked and if anyone needs me for an emergency they can get me on my wife’s number, that was so hard at first but I soon got over it when the steak arrived (it didn’t count to my macros as I didn’t have a picture on Instagram – pro tip). You can also get a second burner phone and just give a couple people the number for emergencies if you are going out on your own, they cost hardly anything and the benefits are amazing if you’re anything like me and have to get things completed as soon as you are told they need to be done.
So why do we need to do this?
Stress is one of the biggest things impacting your health, in a negative way and keeping you fat. We live in a world of stress, from 9-5 at the office, to relationships listening to the other half’s stresses from their office, to fighting it with workouts to the environment we live in all the way to the fluids and food we put into our body, one of the biggest ways to lower stress (apart from getting good nutrient rich carbohydrates in your body, sorry no #ketogainz around here) is to rest, recover and sleep. If we can get any way of lowering stress it will help you with not just your overall wellbeing but those muffin tops too, got to be a win-win situation right?
So next time you find yourself mindlessly trolling on social media do me a favour, get up, put your phone in another room (not just airplane mode) and start to really give yourself the respect you deserve as a real-life human being.
If you need that extra accountability to make sure your health is optimized then let’s talk, hit me up ollie@revitalizationblueprint.com and we can book in for a Revitalization call to see if you are a fit for my Health Optimization & Accountability coaching.
Have a great day.
Ollie