Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t trust everything you read on the Internet.”
That was him, right? I never met him, but hear he was a pretty smart dude.
Anyway, it’s good advice. When I was a kid, any time we used the excuse, “Well our friends are doing it.” The response our parents said was, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?”
Just because someone else is doing something doesn’t mean we have to also.
We are inundated with information all day, every day. And there are even folks known as “influencers” whose main job is to share information and, well, influence people.
Here’s a recent example I witnessed first hand that happened at a trendy little grocery chain in the US:
A new product was introduced and within a day, someone (of great influence I’m sure) posted about this product on TikTok. Within days, every store in the country was sold out and the warehouses couldn’t get more. People were buying armloads of this product without even having ever tasted it! Great for the stores’ sales and the manufacturer, right?
I think the main person who benefitted was the influencer who got clicks, likes, and notoriety online.
So, it took about two months to get more product on the shelf from the factory overseas. And, the manufacturer has decided to invest in additional equipment so they can boost production by the end of the year.
We’ve seen these trends before. A post goes viral, the product sells out, and eventually the hype dies down. At this point, I wonder about the manufacturer. By the time they get additional equipment up and running, will the hype have died down and they are stuck with an investment that doesn’t bring in the hoped for revenue?
We get information like this in all areas of life including the wellness industry. The health and wellness industry is famous for this. We believe everything because it’s all based on “scientific studies”. What we often fail to do is decide for ourselves if this new wellness regimen is really in alignment for us, or are we just following the next trend. Do we even know who did the studies and what the findings actually were?
For years, and even today, when people got sick, they would increase their vitamin C intake. They take super doses to “knock out that cold before it takes hold” because that’s what everyone says to do. (Never mind that your body can only absorb about 400mg at a time. The rest literally goes down the toilet!)
So we’re taking this “commonly known” information and following it blindly without a) checking for validity or b) checking if it’s even right for us.
Rather than following the emotionally charged trends on social media or taking wellness advice blindly from (supposed) scientific knowledge, how about we start using our own experiences to decide what is good for us?
When you hear helpful information like “Hey, you need to do xx, because it’s amazing or it’s the cool thing to do” follow that up in your head with “ok, maybe I’ll check it out first to see if it’s amazing for me”.
Take the advice and the trends for what they are: someone’s opinion. Do your own research, try the wellness tip or taste that cool new food, and then decide if it works for you.
Figuring out what’s right for ourselves takes a lot of trial and error sometimes. The more we learn about how we operate best in the world, the easier our decision making becomes. And when we can follow our intuition and trust our own bodies to lead us in the right direction, life becomes a more joyful game to play. Find out what your Human Design says about you!