“Make sure that at least every day we are nudging the right ingredients into our mental diet, even for just a little time. Just like you wouldn’t eat only pizza every day for days on end, we shouldn’t just live on focus time and little sleep. Mental wellness is all about giving your brain lots of opportunities to develop in different ways.”
~Dr. David Rock, Executive Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute
There is a hunger for constant feeding of information.
The digital age is both a blessing and a curse. The internet can be a place to feed our minds and ambitions, share ideas, grow and learn. It can also be the source of endless searching, always looking for the next bit of information as an attempt to feel satiated, yet this sense never fully arrives and so the searching continues.
Yet, empowerment is also available to us….
The gift of technology is that we can use it to be more empowered and effective. Our sense of the world and global responsibility has heightened. The outlets for creativity and for sharing your personal voice is endless. For the adult learner, the digital age can be a place of empowerment and growth. As Merriam and Bierema state, “our ability to access information has facilitated learning in a way that is particularly meaningful to adults: it is just-in-time, relevant, and self-directed.”
I don’t think it is a secret or a surprise that the Internet is a powerful tool to the lay person and life long learner alike. In fact, it seems that to thrive in the working world, most people need to know how to access the Internet. However, how can one take in so much information? At what point does one become overwhelmed and unable to process?
The author’s of our textbook note the negative effects of “information overload.” An interesting point is that as a society, we have done a lot to improve working conditions, whether at a factory or restaurant, or even office jobs to name a few. We have done a lot to protect people from harm. Yet, I believe that information overload can have deleterious affects on our brain that can result in both mental and physical harm. This section of the chapter really stood out for me. I went back to school and chose a career so that I could engage “live” with folks as I have been quite burned out by being on a computer for 7 plus hours a day. As adult learners, I think having a plan for balanced Internet use should be a part of our wellness plan. I’d love to see this as part of the curriculum or teachings in particular, within the online learning community.
To recap, here are the seven elements needed to optimize healthy brain function:
Merriam, S. B., & Bierema, L. L. (2014). Adult learning: Linking theory and practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Siegel, D. (2015). The Healthy Mind Platter. Retrieved from: http://www.drdansiegel.com/resources/healthy_mind_platter/
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