What’s One Thing You Can Stop Doing To Help

In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul, Martha and Peter discuss the importance of identifying habits to stop for better health and wellness. They explore the impact of staying up late and mindless phone scrolling, the benefits of boredom, and the challenges of overthinking decisions. The conversation emphasizes the value of learning from choices and maintaining perspective in life.

Key Takeaways

What’s one thing you could stop doing?

Stopping staying up too late would help me.

Mindless scrolling of the phone is a problem.

It’s okay to be bored – boredom has a lot of benefits for us.

You don’t have to overthink every decision.

We’re here to learn, we’re here to grow.

There’s no right or wrong at the end of the day.

What’s One Thing You Can Stop Doing to Help Podcast

Video Transcript

Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts, conversations to fuel the body, mind and soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living and with me is my brother and partner at Simple Nourished Living, Peter Morrison.

Peter Morrison (00:14)
Hi everyone. Hi Martha.

Martha McKinnon (00:16)
Hi. Hi, how you doing?

Peter Morrison (00:18)
I’m good, how are you?

Martha McKinnon (00:20)
I’m doing really well. I’m doing really well. So today I have a thought-provoking question. Are you ready?

Peter Morrison (00:27)
Mmm, sure. It’s kind of scary.

Martha McKinnon (00:30)
Okay, what’s… So we thought, it’s kind of scary. Are you ready? So what’s one thing you could stop doing that would make a difference on your health and wellness journey? We talk a lot, you know, about what’s something we should start doing. And sometimes we don’t think about what we might take away or something that we could stop doing that could be really helpful to us and really shift things and not change things.

And so for me, and I had the advantage of having a little time to think about it, this question came into my email this morning and I thought, my gosh, that’s a really good question. And I had time to think about it and I said, that’s would be a really good question to share with our listeners and our readers because it’s thought provoking. And what came to mind for me was what I could stop doing is staying up too late and blowing past my bedtime.

And that sort of came up as a result of, you know, another Weight Watchers meeting this week was talking about routines and morning routines and that came up. It’s like the fact that your morning routine is really tied to often getting to bed on time. So stopping, you know, staying up too late. That would be something that would really help me make the whole next day so much better.

It’s so much so easy at the end of the day to just kind of get lost in the phone, quite honestly. You start, check one thing, you check the other, and pretty soon you’ve been scrolling way too long. And so, that was the one thing that came to mind for me.

So it’s kind of tied with stopping, staying up too late, and also just stopping the mindless scrolling of the phone. You know, those are two. So mindless scrolling, mindless using of the devices and staying up too late.

Peter Morrison (02:28)
Mm-hmm. I was just thinking…

Martha McKinnon (02:30)
And if I sit here, I’ll probably… Go ahead. No, I’m sorry. I’ll probably think of something else if I sit here, but…

Peter Morrison (02:37)
Oh gosh, I wish I could remember, I read this really good article recently. It was, by who? Was he a doctor? Was he a psych? I mean, I don’t even remember. I’ll have to try to find it. I could add it to this video. But anyway, his whole, what was it? The whole thing was, like it’s okay to be bored.

Martha McKinnon (03:07)
Oh yes.

Peter Morrison (03:09)
Like we have this mental thing where we have to be doing something all the time. And he’s like, so many good things happen to us like when we’re bored. And he mentioned like the phone and he has rules with his family, like, you know, no phones during dinner and no screens, you know, after a certain time and.

It was just such a wonderful article. Yeah, so.

Martha McKinnon (03:39)
And maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s somebody else you’re talking about because of this, think is getting explored quite a bit in our world right now. But I follow a health and wellness writer named Michael Easter. He has a sub stack column and he’s written a couple of books called Scarcity Brain and the Comfort Crisis. And he’s talked very specifically about that in some of the writings that he’s done.

The fact that boredom is healthy and it has a lot of benefits for us and it’s something that was part of our culture like forever until like these modern times and we just have these devices and these distractions at the ready. Where because of those we just don’t have the kind of just empty time and space that we had you generations ago and it’s yeah to our detriment.

Peter Morrison (04:34)
Right. I just Googled him. It’s not the same person, but I want to look at that a little more.

Martha McKinnon (04:39)
Okay. Yeah, for sure.

Peter Morrison (04:42)
So let me, I’m still thinking, but I totally agree. I’m with you with the, I’m very inconsistent with my bedtime. And I love those days, those nights when I allow myself to, it’s eight 30 or nine o’clock and I’m, I’m just done with the day and I just love, I just get such a good sleep and yeah. And I’m, then there are those nights like last night where it was almost midnight and then it set the course for a rather hectic morning, so it’s kind of interesting.

Martha McKinnon (05:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Morrison (05:20)
Something I could stop doing? This is hard when you’re on the hot sea.

Martha McKinnon (05:34)
Well, You could always fill it in. I’d love for our readers to share with us. And again, this is going to be a really short podcast, but I think short is sometimes good. You know people can just turn this off and again, take some moments to just ponder and think about what would make a real difference for them in terms of changing things up. So you have time to think about it.

Peter Morrison (06:03)
Yeah, and it’s kind of a general thing. But one thing I would like to work on is like to stop overthinking things because I tend to overanalyze and research and think through any possibilities. And I think there are times, you know, you’re buying a house or you’re doing a major life change. That’s good. But for the, you know, buying a TV or what movie to watch, I mean, it’s, you know, you don’t have to sort of…

Martha McKinnon (06:32)
Which spaghetti sauce to choose off the shelf? I know it’s like the paradox of choice is real and over analysis and over analytic analyzing things is a real issue. Yeah, stopping that overthinking. I think the key is just to figure out how you go about stopping that right? Like how do you notice that it’s happening and what maybe do you do as an alternative when you when you realize that you’re kind of spinning your wheels?

To think about well what can I do to stop that? What can I do instead? How do I break that cycle? And that could take a little thinking.

Peter Morrison (07:10)
And to be okay with just making a decision, being okay with the outcome. You know, again, I’m talking small, not very meaningful choices. And knowing that, well, if it’s something you don’t like or doesn’t work out, then make a different choice next time. But you don’t have to, you know, it’s not life changing, earth shattering. It’s just a learning.

Martha McKinnon (07:36)
Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. I think the learning is key. As I was preparing to get on the camera with you here today, I was sort of scrolling through potential topics here. And one thing that popped out for me was a statement like that from Ellen Langer, who I think I’ve mentioned before. She wrote a book called The Mindful Body, and she talked about that very thing. To try to just, what if we just treated everything that happens in every choice and every decision as just an opportunity to grow and learn?

And not like a life threatening situation. And sometimes it’s just how we position it to say, yeah, we’re here to learn, we’re here to grow. There’s no absolutes. There’s no, there’s really no right or wrong at the end of the day.

Peter Morrison (08:16)
Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (08:18)
So if we could just reposition it to say, we’re going to learn one way or another. And sometimes we’re going to learn more from a choice that doesn’t go absolutely perfectly. So maybe just thinking about it in that regard, I thought that, my gosh, that’s just another really good reminder to help get us off that tendency to just overthink and over worry and over stress about decisions that aren’t really in the whole scheme of life. I mean, just keep keeping our perspective if we can. Yeah. Well, cool. Those are some really good thoughts. So again, I’d love for readers to share their thoughts, their ideas, what comes to them as they ponder this question because I love learning from our readers and our listeners.

Peter Morrison (09:08)
Thanks everyone.

Martha McKinnon (09:10)
So thanks for going in the hot seat, Peter. I appreciate it.

Peter Morrison (09:16)
That’s a lukewarm seat, it wasn’t that hot. All right, take care everyone, see you next time.

Martha McKinnon (09:24)
Okay, have a good one. Bye bye.