Distorted, mistaken, or outright false information is as common as oxygen in our modern, interconnected communication ecosystem.

It should be no surprise, then, that we inhale so much of it.

This is true no matter who you are, what your level of education or social status, how intelligent you seem to be, or how deep your knowledge-reserves. Misinformation experts succumb to misinformation, and in-the-know people do ignorant things under the influence of seeming facts that, upon closer inspection, are not factual.

We’re all exposed to countless messages every day: through conversation, through sight and sound, via social networks and news networks.

We’re inundated with information, and it’s not a knock on our mental capabilities to acknowledge that our efforts to filter superfluous noise for haystack-needle signals might sometimes fail, allowing something that is untrue to infiltrate our larger, holistic sense of reality.

These particles of mistruth or misunderstanding may then inform the heuristics—the reflexive, mental shortcuts—we utilize to understand what’s happening, make decisions, and form opinions.

This in turn can influence our tribal affiliations, our behaviors, and our post hoc justifications for our actions.

It’s often unpleasant to acknowledge when we’ve been wrong, when we’ve been hoodwinked or misguided, when we’ve been the bad guy or made a knee-jerk decision that hurt someone else. But having the capacity and capability to recognize and accept when we have is part of what allows us to improve our informational filters over time.

Lacking acknowledgement of filter failure, we also lack the impetus and incentive to assess and improve our informational intake.

This may permit us to feel good about our decisions—it’s certainly more comfortable to compulsively pat ourselves on the back than it is to challenge the choices we’ve made and opinions we’ve held—but it doesn’t allow us to grow.

It’s possible to be held as intellectual and moral hostages to perspectives that we once found credible, even if they’ve since been unmasked as mere toehold-like excuses to which our egos cling in an effort to avoid being held accountable.

I try to view this dynamic, and the process of refining my informational intake, as a brain-, belief-, and behavior-shaping diet.

When you have the clarity of mind to realize that you feel unwell, that you’ve perhaps been harming yourself with a steady stream of junk food and other sorts of momentarily satisfying but somewhat toxic imbibables, it’s prudent to adjust those inputs to lessen your suffering and to give your body a chance to heal.

One common response to this polluted feeling is to avoid food altogether, but I would argue that the more ideal response to a harmful diet isn’t starving yourself: it’s intentionally building a better diet. One that is satisfying and healthful, optimized for you and your specific needs, and one that is intentionally built from the ground-up.

If you ever find yourself wanting to detoxify after mainlining an informational binge, consider what a healthy, balanced, growth-oriented collection of inputs might look like, and how you might reorient your personal habits and info-infrastructure to make that intake a sustainable reality.

For most of us, neither stress-inducing, filter-straining overwhelm nor awareness-depriving, responsibility-denying malnutrition are optimal defaults.

It’s worth keeping our intended outcomes in mind as we look out at the world, and as we assess what shapes our perception of it.

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