let go & GROW

The Way Home: Self-Mastery as Liberation

There was a time when obtaining information required effort.

We had to go looking for it.

We opened a book. We went to the library. We waited for the newspaper. We asked someone who knew more than we did. We sat with a question because the answer wasn’t immediately available.

Today, information comes looking for us.

Before our feet touch the floor in the morning, we can know what happened overnight across the world. Politics. War. Wellness. Trauma. Spirituality. Recovery. Celebrity. Medicine. Relationships. Tragedy. Inspiration. Someone else’s breakfast.

All before our own minds have had a chance to wake up.

Access to information is one of the extraordinary gifts of our time.

But access and capacity are not the same thing.

Just because we can consume something doesn’t mean we have the capacity—or the need—to keep consuming it.

And perhaps self-mastery now requires something generations before us didn’t have to practice in quite the same way:

Knowing when we have had enough information.

When information stops becoming knowledge

Last week, we talked about algorithms.

We talked about cleaning up our feeds, intentionally choosing what we follow and understanding that our behavior teaches digital systems what to bring back to us.

That’s important.

But there’s another side of that conversation.

Eventually, we have to stop looking at the algorithm and look at the person holding the phone.

Because even after we clean up our feeds, we can still consume too much.

We can doomscroll tragedy.

But we can also doomscroll healing.

We can spend three hours watching videos about spirituality, recovery, nervous-system regulation, nutrition, entrepreneurship, relationships, self-improvement or becoming our “highest self.”

The information may be wonderful.

The relationship with it may not be.

At some point, we aren’t integrating information anymore.

We’re accumulating it.

There is a difference between learning something and endlessly searching for the next thing to learn.

Twenty videos about healing are not necessarily twenty acts of healing.

Sometimes we already have enough information.

What we haven’t given ourselves is enough silence to do something with it.

Our minds are paying attention—even when we aren’t

This isn’t simply philosophical.

A 2026 review examining 17 empirical studies on doomscrolling found consistent associations with anxiety, depression, stress and reduced resilience. Researchers described doomscrolling as habitual or compulsive consumption of negative information, reinforced in part by features such as infinite scrolling and algorithmic content delivery. Importantly, researchers also caution that much of the existing evidence is correlational, so we cannot responsibly say doomscrolling alone causes these conditions. (ScienceDirect)

Another 2026 study involving women ages 20–59 found relationships among doomscrolling, stress, and emotional distress, with doomscrolling emerging as a significant predictor of anhedonia—the diminished ability to experience pleasure. Again, because this was a cross-sectional study, it identifies relationships rather than proving cause and effect. (ScienceDirect)

That distinction matters.

We don’t need to exaggerate science to take its warning seriously.

Maybe the better question isn’t:

Is the internet destroying us?

Maybe it is:

What is my relationship with the information I consume?

We didn’t exactly get a practice round

I think we sometimes forget how strange this moment in human history actually is.

Most adults alive today were not raised by generations of people who understood how to live with smartphones, social media, infinite scrolling, notifications and personalized information streams.

There was no ancestral wisdom telling us how many notifications were too many.

No grandmother could tell us what thirty years of carrying the internet in our pockets would do because she hadn’t done it either.

We were given an extraordinary tool while simultaneously learning what that tool could become.

And now we are discovering boundaries while already living inside the experiment.

That matters when we talk about children, too.

In August 2026, Meta agreed to a multistate settlement of up to $16.68 billion resolving allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to addict children and that the company misrepresented safety. The settlement requires significant safeguards, including usage and nighttime restrictions for young users. Meta denied wrongdoing. (Reuters)

The legal questions surrounding children deserve their own careful examination.

But they also raise a question for adults:

If developing minds may require intentional boundaries around technologies designed to hold attention, why would we assume adulthood makes the human mind immune to those same mechanisms?

Being an adult does not give us unlimited attention.

It doesn’t make comparison harmless.

It doesn’t make sleep deprivation healthy.

It doesn’t make compulsive behavior intentional.

And it certainly doesn’t mean we automatically learned how to use a technology responsibly simply because we were old enough when someone handed it to us.

This conversation is older than social media

Information consumption did not begin with the internet.

Human beings have always lived inside systems of information—religious systems, educational systems, political systems, economic systems, medical systems, family systems and cultural systems.

Those systems have always influenced which ideas become legitimate, which voices receive authority and which explanations become conventional wisdom.

Throughout history, wealth and institutional power have also influenced education, medicine, industry, media and public life.

We don’t have to invent a secret room or prove that a handful of people designed every aspect of modern society to recognize something much simpler:

Power influences what societies normalize.

And systems often continue long after the people who created them are gone.

Sometimes they continue because they work.

Sometimes because people benefit from them.

Sometimes because changing institutions is extraordinarily difficult.

And sometimes simply because this is how we’ve always done it becomes its own form of authority.

That is why discernment matters.

Questioning a system doesn’t automatically make someone a conspiracy theorist.

But questioning something doesn’t automatically make the alternative true either.

Self-mastery asks more of us than either extreme.

Investigate.

Ask questions.

Look for evidence.

Recognize interpretation.

Notice who benefits.

Be willing to change your mind.

And remain humble enough to say:

I don’t know yet.

That, too, is discernment.

What have we left out of the human being?

Even the history of psychology gives us an interesting example.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were once close intellectual collaborators before profound disagreements separated them.

Freud developed psychoanalysis. Jung eventually developed analytical psychology and placed considerably greater emphasis on symbolism, mythology, religion, and spiritual experience.

Their disagreement was far more complicated than simply science versus spirituality, but their divergence leaves us with a question that remains relevant:

What happens when one understanding of the human being becomes dominant while other dimensions of human experience are treated as less legitimate?

Perhaps healing sometimes requires talking.

Sometimes medication.

Sometimes behavior change.

Sometimes community.

Sometimes movement.

Sometimes meaning.

Sometimes spirituality.

Sometimes silence.

And frequently, some combination of them.

There may never be one universal model capable of explaining every human being.

Maybe there isn’t supposed to be.

The danger comes when we stop questioning altogether.

We are also teaching our children how to know

Monitoring children’s information consumption shouldn’t only mean counting screen hours.

We have another responsibility.

We have to teach them how to encounter information.

How do you know whether something is factual?

What’s the original source?

Is someone reporting evidence or offering an interpretation?

Could both sides be leaving something out?

Does a dramatic headline accurately represent what happened?

What would change your mind?

And perhaps one of the most important questions:

Is knowing this information actually useful to you?

Those are not merely internet skills.

They are life skills.

And adults need them too.

Because sometimes information isn’t false.

It simply doesn’t belong in our minds all day.

Feed your spirit before you feed the feed

Maybe we don’t need another complicated solution.

Maybe we need boundaries.

Turn the notifications off.

Have a silent morning.

Spend a day away from social media.

Put the phone in another room.

Go outside without documenting it.

Read ten pages instead of watching fifty people summarize the same idea.

Cook.

Pray.

Garden.

Walk.

Write.

Talk to someone.

Listen to music without doing something else simultaneously.

Allow yourself to experience boredom again.

And when something meaningful reaches you, give it enough time to become something inside you before immediately consuming something else.

We don’t have to know everything happening everywhere.

We don’t have to participate in every controversy.

We don’t have to follow every rabbit hole simply because the entrance appeared on our screen.

And we don’t have to abandon technology either.

Technology can educate us, connect us, entertain us, help us find community and expose us to ideas we might never otherwise encounter.

This isn’t about rejecting the internet.

It is about changing our relationship with it.

The goal isn’t deprivation.

The goal is intention.

🌿 A practice for this week

For several days, don’t immediately impose a screen-time rule.

First, observe yourself.

Before opening an app:

Why am I opening this?

While you’re scrolling:

Am I still choosing to be here—or am I simply continuing?

When you close it:

How do I feel now compared with how I felt before?

Then create one boundary based on what you discover.

Maybe social media doesn’t enter your morning.

Maybe notifications disappear.

Maybe Sunday becomes an offline day.

Maybe you stop taking the phone into your bedroom.

Maybe after learning something meaningful, you stop searching and practice what you just learned.

Your boundary doesn’t need to look like mine.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

The important part is that you chose it.

And that you honor what you chose.

Reflective Prompts

1. What kind of information receives most of my attention, and how do I feel after consuming it?
2. When does my curiosity become automatic consumption?
3. What have I learned repeatedly that I haven’t yet given myself time to practice?
4. What information am I allowing into my life simply because it was placed in front of me?
5. What boundary with technology would create more room for my relationships, creativity, peace or spirit?

The next question

There is one more layer to this conversation.

Because while we are consuming information, something else is happening.

Our behavior is producing information too.

What makes us stop.

What makes us click.

What makes us return.

What keeps us watching.

What we ignore.

What we buy.

What catches our attention.

What we repeatedly seek.

Technology has become extraordinarily capable of identifying patterns in human behavior.

So perhaps the next question isn’t only whether we understand the technology.

It’s something far more personal:

What happens when technology recognizes our patterns before we recognize them ourselves?

🌿 Next: Reflection Ten — Pattern Recognition

Until then, remember:

Feed your spirit before you feed the feed.

Because information should be something we use.

Not something that uses us.

🌿 Honor the experience. Share the transformation. 🤍🌿🤍

References:

Ghouri, S. (2026). Impact of doomscrolling on stress, emotional distress, and anhedonia among women aged 20–59: A cross-sectional survey. Journal of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy.
ScienceDirect

The influence of doomscrolling on mental health: A scoping review. (2026). Mental Health and Digital Technologies.
ScienceDirect

Reuters. (2026, August 26). Meta settles with U.S. states over social media harms.
Reuters