The Information Diet: The Starvation of Abundance
We aren’t suffering from a lack of answers. We are drowning in the noise.
For decades, I treated my brain like a garbage disposal rather than a high-performance engine.
I operated under the assumption that “more information” equaled “better decisions.” In the financial markets, this is a fatal error. In life, it is a recipe for chronic anxiety.
I was wrong about my reading habits. The stock market—and my own nervous system—taught me a hard lesson: you cannot produce high-quality output if your input is toxic.
We obsess over the quality of the food we put into our bodies. We cut sugar, track macros, and avoid processed chemicals because we understand the link between nutrition and physical performance.
Yet, when it comes to the mind, we gorge ourselves on the cognitive equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup all day long.
We are suffering from a collective case of Mental Obesity: bloated with data, yet starving for clarity.
The Conditioning: How We Were Trained to Binge
I didn’t arrive at this state by accident; I was conditioned for it.
From a young age, I was a voracious reader. I remember sneaking the daily newspaper into my room early in the morning, scanning the sports and entertainment sections before my father—who hated anyone touching his paper—woke up. I would fold it back perfectly, hiding the evidence.
It seemed innocent at the time. I thought I was just curious. In reality, I was training my brain to seek dopamine.
This habit escalated in college. I once skipped an entire day of classes to finish Helter Skelter in one sitting, reading overnight well into the following evening. I wasn’t just reading; I was binging.
When I entered my corporate career, the binge became “professional.” I consumed the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times religiously. I felt intellectual and stimulated. I believed that the more I knew about international politics and financial markets, the more I was growing.
I trusted the publishers implicitly; their reputation was enough to validate the quality of the information. But I was confusing “stimulation” with “learning.” I wasn’t acquiring wisdom; I was acquiring noise.
The View from the Inside: The Economics of Attention
My perspective shifted when I stepped behind the curtain. After my corporate career ended, I launched a short-form media outlet focused on news and entertainment.
For four years, I worked directly with major news outlets, syndicating content and stories. That experience stripped away the illusion of “truth-seeking.”
While there are honest journalists doing good work, the business model of modern media is not designed to inform you. It is designed to harvest you.
Since the advent of the internet and social media, the industry has devolved into a rat race for eyeballs. The media understands human biology better than most consumers do. They know that the brain is a survival machine, prioritized to detect threats.
To capture your attention, they must trigger your amygdala. Every headline, every “breaking news” alert, and every controversial take is engineered to create a spike of cortisol or dopamine.
They want your eyes because you are the product. The content is just the bait.
The Biological Cost of “Junk Info”
When I transitioned to trading financial markets, I carried these consumption habits with me. I read everything—books, market news, predictions, opinions. My view of the world became a reflection of what I read. But in trading, clarity is currency. If your internal map doesn’t match the territory, you lose money.
I began to notice a pattern. The urge to “know more” was actually degrading my performance. When market events didn’t unfold exactly as the pundits and articles predicted, I felt unhinged and stressed. My nervous system was reacting to the “prediction errors” created by bad data.
Biologically, this is what happens when you consume “junk info”:
High Caloric Density, Low Nutritional Value
Just as processed food is engineered to be hyper-palatable but nutrient-poor, social media and 24-hour news are engineered to be hyper-stimulating but fact-poor. You feel “full” of information, but you have no actual understanding.
Metabolic Inflammation
Constant exposure to conflicting, urgent, and negative information creates a state of chronic low-grade stress. Your brain is constantly in “threat detection” mode, burning glucose that should be used for deep thinking.
The Dopamine Loop
The “scroll” is a variable reward schedule. We check our feeds for the same reason a gambler pulls the slot machine lever—not for the reward itself, but for the anticipation of the reward.
I realized my brain needed a diet. The information I was feeding it lacked quality, and the sheer quantity was clogging my processing power.
The Protocol: The Information Diet
To regain my clarity—and my trading performance—I had to treat my information intake with the same rigor as a nutritional protocol.
I call this The Information Diet. It requires two fundamental shifts: Quantity and Quality.
1. Quantity: The Feeding Window
Just as we practice intermittent fasting to give our digestive system a break, we need “feeding windows” for our brains.
I eat twice a day and strictly avoid snacking to protect my metabolism. I realized I had to apply the exact same discipline to my mind.
I stopped the all-day grazing. No more scanning headlines while waiting at the checkout line, for a table at the restaurant or any sort of waiting. No more checking feeds between tasks. I created strict windows for information consumption. Outside of those windows, I am fasting.
This was difficult at first. My brain pulled at me, craving the stimulus just as the body craves sugar during a detox. But the rule was absolute: no snacking. And it still requires effort.
2. Quality: The “Whole Foods” Rule You become what you consume. If you consume fragmentation, you become fragmented. If you consume depth, you become deep.
I quit the daily news cycle almost entirely. I stopped reading the predictions and the hot takes. Instead, I redirected that energy toward “nutrient-dense” sources: books, long-form essays, and primary documents.
A book is a “whole food.” It requires chewing. It demands sustained attention and synthesis. It builds the architecture of the mind, whereas a tweet merely spray-paints graffiti on the walls of your consciousness.
The ROI: Clarity as a Competitive Advantage
The result of this diet wasn’t just that I felt “calmer.” That is a soft metric. The real return on investment was performance.
By cutting out the noise, I cleared my field of vision. I became aware of my biases and understood where they were coming from, rather than having them unconsciously programmed by an algorithm.
I still read a lot—perhaps even more than before in terms of total words. But the energy I used to waste on filtering out garbage is now applied to synthesizing wisdom. I have more time for thinking, writing, and simply being present.
The Anchor Recommendation
In an era of uncertainty, the person who can tolerate the most reality wins. But you cannot see reality if your windshield is covered in mud.
The Information Diet isn’t about ignorance; it is about sanitation. It is about deciding that your mind is a sacred space, and that you—not an algorithm—decide what enters it.
The Protocol To Get You Started This Week
Define your Window: Pick one hour a day for “News/Social.” Outside of that hour, the kitchen is closed.
Sanitize the Feed: Go through your following list. If an account makes you feel anxious, inadequate, or angry, unfollow. That is a toxic ingredient.
Read “Whole Foods”: Replace the morning scroll with 10 pages of a book or a primary source document.
Why would your brain deserve any less care than your body?