499 | Stop Consuming

The Minimalists talk about minimizing mental clutter caused by loved ones, consuming less of things we enjoy, embracing minimalist dietary principles that last, and more with Dr. Paul Saladino. Discussed in this episode: How do I stop thinking about the intrusive comments that my parents used to make about my weight? (2:12) What's one thing you enjoy that you've decided to stop consuming? (19:06) Right Here, Right Now: Join us at our next Sunday Symposium. Plus, Ryan will join us for episode 500! (40:07) Listener tip: A recommendation for minimizing YouTube clutter. (41:18) Listen to the full Maximal episode on Patreon: patreon.com/theminimalists http://patreon.com/theminimalists Detailed show notes: minimalists.com/podcast http://minimalists.com/podcast Recorded at Earthing Studios http://earthing.com/simple.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing that's just feeding your greed. Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.

• 0:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes, hello, everybody. Welcome to the Minimalist Podcast, where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less. My name is Joshua Fields Milburn. Joining me here at Earthing Studios in West Hollywood, California, is my good friend, T.K. Coleman. Hey, hey, hey. Coming up on this free, public minimal episode, a caller has a question about minimizing the intrusive comments that her parents used to make about her weight. And then Dr. Paul Saladino is going to join us for the lightning round to answer some questions about when it's healthy to stop consuming certain things you enjoy. That's followed by our Right Here, Right Now segment and a listener tip. Plus, Dr. Saladino is going to stick around for pages two and three to answer a bunch of your food and wellness questions.

• 1:24Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You can check out the maximal edition of episode 499. That's the full two-hour episode where we answer three times as many questions on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our podcast archives, all the way back to the very first episode. That's a full decade of archives. By the way, big thanks to our patrons. Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement-free, because, sing along at home, y'all. Advertisements suck. Let's start with our callers. If you have a question or a comment for our show, we'd love to hear from you.

• 2:04Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You can give us a call at 406-219-7839, or email a voice recording to [email protected]. Our first question today is from Lenny.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Hi minimalists. My name's Lenny and I'm a Patreon subscriber from New Haven, Connecticut. When I was younger, my father would make passive comments about my weight from time to time, but they have stuck with me into my adulthood. And I find myself thinking about those comments whenever I'm trying to be more fit, or even just looking myself in the mirror in the morning. They're cluttering my mind with negative emotions about my body and I just want them gone so I can move on with my fitness goals unbothered.

• 2:44Joshua Fields Millburn?

  TK, this one hurts my heart, man. There's a lot of psychic clutter here, the psychic pain of sometimes the people we love, the people we let into our hearts, they say something that's hurtful. And they may mean to be hurtful, but most of the time, it's saying something because they mean well, but they say it in a way that just, it sticks with us. And then it becomes this baggage that we carry around and they say something else and it's another brick we put in the backpack and we keep carrying it. And man, it definitely weighs on us. So if Lenny was one of your clutter counseling clients, she came to you for mental clutter and emotional clutter and all the stuff that's going on here.

• 3:26Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And she comes to you and says, "I have these intrusive comments that my parents, my dad specifically, used to make about my weight and it still sticks with me and it's causing some mental anguish." What would you say to her?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  One thing I'd be interested in knowing more about is, what is the father like today? Is he still around? Is he still available for any kind of conversation? How good is he at receiving feedback and taking ownership of the impact of his words? Is he the kind of person who, if a mirror is held up for him and he's shown that the way he has affected people is different from the way he intends to be? Is he the type of person to look at that and humble himself and say, "I stand corrected. I'm sorry for what I did"? Lenny, only you know the answer to these questions, but I would love to have some conversation about that because there are cases where going back to a person who hurt

• 4:24Speaker 03

  you and telling them that can make things even worse. We talked, for instance, with Dr. Ramani about confronting narcissists and why that can be such a dangerous thing because they know all the tricks about how to make you feel bad and how to gaslight you. And sometimes it's just best for you to figure out what's the best way for me to move on without trying to get another person to agree with me about my perception or my story of what they did to me. But there are cases where we can go have a conversation with people and a lot of healing can result when we let someone know, hey, here's something about our past that had this effect on me and that I'm working with. And I'm not bringing

• 5:06Speaker 03

  this to you so that we can fight about it. I'm bringing this to you so that I could get an understanding. Why did you say those things to me? Where were they coming from? Here's the impact they had. Is that the impact that you wanted? If that conversation is possible, that can go a long way. It doesn't solve all of the problems. It doesn't make everything go away, but that can go a long way to produce a lot of healing if we have any reason to believe that he's the kind of person who can handle that conversation, assuming that he's still available to even have it. Before I go on, what do you think of that?

• 5:40Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I think there's a profound truth in knowing that the people that harm us can only harm us if we give them the keys to our heart. But your parents, especially when you're growing up, they have the keys first, right? They're the people you trust the most, the people you look up to, the people that are most profound. And we look at them as almost deities when we're really little because that's where the food comes from, that's where the shelter comes from, that's where the love comes from. So when you say something that I perceive to be harmful, even if they didn't mean to harm me, I pick that up. But also knowing that I pick that up, there has to be a way for me to set it down. Because

• 6:25Joshua Fields Millburn?

  even if the person tried to harm you, there are ways to set down that harm. I don't have to keep carrying it forward, even if it feels so tangled up in my mind right now.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  You know, when I was little, I would always ask my dad questions and I had no filter. If I was curious about something, I would ask him. And there was this time where he was answering me with a tone that to me felt like he was really irritated. And I, and I asked him, am I bothering you? And he said, no, no, son. I, I, I want you to keep asking questions like that. Sometimes it's me. Sometimes I, I don't know what to say, or I have to think, or I'm caught in the middle of something. But no, no, I want you to keep asking. Now, it's possible that I could have just held on to that and came up with my own interpretation, which would have been so much more self-defeating. And I am not by any means assuming or implying that that's what's going on in your situation.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  I accept your story exactly as you presented it, that your father likely said some things

• 7:26Speaker 03

  that were said in a tone or with timing that was insensitive and had a negative impact on you. What I'm highlighting here is the possibility for healing and validation that can come from seizing the opportunity for a conversation that, that seeks clarity when it's possible. Beyond that, something I would say is, you think about affirmations. When I think about the word affirmations, I think about that old school Saturday Night Live skit, Stuart Smalley, where he'd look in the mirror and say, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, doggone it, people like me. And everyone would laugh at that because that's considered to be cheesy. And affirmations take a lot of heat. One of the reasons being is because it's easy to abuse them. It's easy to treat affirmations like spraying perfume on a pile of dung.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  It's easy to treat affirmations as the art of telling ourselves something we know isn't true for the sake of feeling better about the lies, the nice sounding lies we feed ourselves. But I do think there is a power in affirmations when properly understood. And that is the recognition that the truth can't just be known, but it must also be practiced and rehearsed until it is internalized and becomes a habitual part of our thinking. It's possible to kind of know a truth in theory, but to be so unrehearsed with that truth that you need to re-remind it again, or you can easily feel as if what you know is true in theory is not true in experience. And so here's where I think it can be very important.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  To counter some of the negative statements you've internalized, which you are now mature enough to know isn't true, but they sure do feel like they're true. And it can be important to write down some counters that you began to practice. And so there are two things that I would write down. The first is my answer to the following question. What are my own reasons for being fit? Because it sounds like in your question, you do want to improve your fitness, but you want to do it for you. And every time you start making efforts, your father's voice takes over and it kind of invalidates the process because you're doing it for reasons that you don't like. You don't want those reasons to dominate your process, which is why there's that feeling of like, I gotta overcome the reasons first. So I would write down, what are some reasons I want to be fit for me?

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Maybe to feel good in my body, to be healthy, to increase my longevity, to enjoy more of the activities that I'm having a difficult time enjoying, maybe because of the lack of fitness, whatever it may be. And to write that down, write down like your top five answers to those questions and take a look at those every day before you work out. Those five minutes, it won't even take five minutes. Take a look at them and say them out loud and hear yourself telling the truth. Not telling a lie to make yourself feel better, but telling the truth in your own voice. The second thing is I would ask myself, how am I valuable and beautiful right now? Even as I work towards these fitness goals that I have? Well, I'm valuable and I'm beautiful in this way.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  I'm valuable and I'm beautiful in that way. I'm valuable and I'm beautiful because I do this right, because I show up in this way and so on. And then write down your top five for that. And this is gonna be your playlist. You've got now 10 statements that are not lies to make yourself feel good, but they're truths. And you hear yourself say them in your own voice and you just take the less than five minutes before you work out, before you begin your day, to say them out loud and begin practicing, conditioning your thinking with a new voice, not the old voice that you've been rehearsing in your mind for so long.

• 10:55Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I have a lot of trauma from my childhood that I carried forward for a long time. And I kind of hid it underneath a bunch of clutter. I mean, sometimes literal, physical clutter, right? There's other types of clutter as well, the sort of status games that we often play, especially growing up really poor and abusive household. And we were on food stamps and government assistance. And there was shame associated with that. The neighborhood we grew up in, and there were roaches and rats and just stuff you didn't want to deal with as a kid and stuff I don't want to deal with now even, right? And so you kind of suppress it for a while, but as you suppress something, it always comes back in. And, "Oh yeah, I remember dad used to say this. I remember mom used to say this."

• 11:36Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And I found for me, you've probably heard me say that our material possessions are a physical manifestation of our internal lives. For me, I had a lot of external clutter, partly because I had a lot of internal clutter. You could see the outside stuff, you know? The hundreds of thousands of material possessions in my home. And even though they were organized, the way I tried to organize the clutter in my head, organized clutter is still clutter. And I think the same thing is true with mental clutter. It's not just about organizing the mental clutter. It's about finding ways to, "I want to get rid of it. I want to eliminate it. I want to at least minimize it, right?"

• 12:15Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And so I often would think about, "Okay, what is the best space for me to start sorting through this mental clutter?" And it was never in chaos. You don't go to Times Square in order to turn down the volume. You don't go to a Metallica concert to turn down the volume. It's already really loud. For me, it was like, "What material environments quiet the mental volume, quiet the anxiety, quiet the stress?" And at first, when you do that, the very first time I went to a sensory deprivation tank, it was in Spokane, Washington, and I go in there and I'm already a good minimalist

• 12:57Joshua Fields Millburn?

  and I'm a card-carrying member of the less anxious club. And I get in that sensory deprivation tank and all of a sudden it's pitch black, but the water's the same exact temperature as my skin. And now I can't feel anything. I can't see anything. I can't hear anything. And that mental clutter turns all the way up. The thing is, it was already that volume the whole time.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:23Joshua Fields Millburn?

  It's like if I'm talking to you at this same volume I'm talking to you right now, and we are at that Metallica concert, and you and I are what, six, seven feet away from each other, you're not going to hear a word that I am saying there, because it's so freaking loud. But as soon as Metallica leaves the stage, and the whole crowd leaves, and it's just me and you, six or seven feet across from each other, now you can hear, I'm not even talking that loud, but you can hear every single thing I'm saying. But it wasn't until then that I started turning down the volume in my physical space, that I was able to start decluttering that mental space.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  That's so good. And I think this invokes the concept of the lost art of the pilgrimage. Sometimes there are places we can go, or physical activities in which we engage, that can make it easier for us to quiet our minds. And it's important to not despise that. Sometimes we can sort of over-spiritualize the process of spiritual evolution by saying, "Well, if I'm doing it right, it'll work anywhere. I shouldn't have to, you know, go to the beach, or go to, you know, the Holy Land, or go into a church to quiet my mind." Well, maybe right now, maybe you do need to do those things. Maybe you do need to do something like, put yourself in a special environment, or engage in a certain type of activity. For some people, it's swimming, it's taking a walk, it's going jogging. For some people, it might be going to a library, or going to a church, or it might be going to a beach,

• 14:45Speaker 03

  whatever it may be. And there are millions of options beyond any of those things. Are there places you can go and things you can do that make it easier for you to quiet your mind? I remember there was a period of time where, around my college years, there were times where I just didn't want to go out and go party, and I wanted to kind of just relax and read. And whenever I would say no, people would say, "Oh, you're a loser. Oh, you're being lame." And I had no idea how deeply I internalized that. And I would truly feel like a loser whenever I would say no. And I began to, you know, talk to myself and tell myself the truth and say things like, I am not a loser for saying no to the things I don't want to do. I am a winner for saying yes to the things that make me come alive.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  And when I combine talking to myself in this way with meditating, I would recommend the first chapter of Anthony de Mello's Sadhana, where he talks about breath as prayer. I would recommend the first three chapters of Osho's Meditation, the first and last Freedom, the first two chapters of Ram Dass's Meditation, A Journey to Awakening. They all kind of capture similar themes about the power that meditation has to loosen the grip of these habitual thoughts that just seem to nag us. And they are so compulsive and so strong that it's almost as if our thoughts are thinking for us. And when you can learn to practice meditation and awareness that loosens the grip on that, combine that with a little truth telling. That can go a really long way with sort of letting go.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Lastly, don't use overcoming this as a prerequisite to do the things that you want to do. It's a practice. You grow as you go. Give yourself permission to start doing some of the things you want to do now as you embark on the process of dealing with letting go of the resistance you've internalized from your father.

• 16:27Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And as you let go of those comments from the past, what will happen is you'll find yourself accidentally picking them up again. It's habitual. It happens. But that's the best part, the noticing. Because as soon as you notice it, then you realize. I remember it was a few weeks ago, I was looking for my keys. And I was looking everywhere for my keys that were in my hand. They were literally in my hand. Yes. And I'm like, Bex, have you seen my keys? Ella, where are my keys? And then, within 15 seconds, I noticed they're in my hand. But as soon as you notice it, now you know what to do. I can stop trying to figure this out. I've noticed it. If I want to set the keys down, oh, I didn't even know I was holding these.

• 17:12Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I don't want to hold these. Oh, okay, I'll set them down. And if I pick them back up again, oh, I noticed it. I can set it back. Down. Lenny, I'd love to give you a copy of one of my favorite books. It's called Emotional Clutter, and it's free for everyone. You can download it over at theminimalists.com. There on our free resources page, just click resources at the top. We have a bunch of free resources. The Minimalism Game Calendar, the 16 Rules for Living with Less ebook, but also TK wrote this beautiful ebook called Emotional Clutter. I would encourage you to download a copy of that. And while we're at it, because we can't solve all of your problems in 15 minutes, but I would encourage you to, actually, let's give you a clutter counseling session with TK Coleman.

• 17:54Joshua Fields Millburn?

  We'll reach out to you and get that set up. But anyone else who wants to schedule a clutter counseling session with TK, you can do it here at our office in LA or via Zoom, anywhere in the world. Head on over to theminimalists.com and just click Counseling at the top. Okay, before we get back to our callers, it is time for the lightning round where we answer the Patreon community chat's question of the week. Joining us in the studio for the rest of Page 1 and all of Page 2 and Page 3 is our returning champion, Dr. Paul Saladino is here.

• 18:29Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Let's go.

• 18:32Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Wow, thanks for having me. Paul, as a multi-time guest, you'll recall that we do this little thing called the Lightning Round. This is where TK and I attempt to answer questions with a short, shareable, minimal maxim. Our listeners can find this episode's maxims in the show notes over at theminimalists.com and every minimal maxim ever at minimalmaxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox every Monday for free if you sign up for our email newsletter at theminimalists.com. We'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements. We'll start your week off with a dose of simplicity. All right, here is the question of the week this week. Think about this one, Saladino. What's one thing you enjoy?

• 19:14Joshua Fields Millburn?

  That you've decided to stop consuming. What's one thing you enjoy that you've decided to stop consuming? Now TK, before we get to our pithy answers here, I do want to hear from Saladino as well, but let's hear from some of our listeners as well. Linda, Kate, and a bunch of other people all said they've stopped consuming sugar in processed foods. Now Paul, we're going to discuss processed foods coming up on page two. In fact, you brought several healthy packaged foods, so-called healthy packaged foods, that might actually be harmful. But right now, let's focus on sugar. Now, you used to be a carnivore, which meant you never ate any sugar, right?

• 19:54Joshua Fields Millburn?

  But now you eat a lot of fruit and honey, even though you avoid processed sugar and sweeteners. What does the average person need to know about sugar?

• 20:04Speaker 04

  So the thing about sugar is that most of us, I think, understand that sugar is not good for us broadly. But there's a real difference between sugar in a natural form, fruit, honey, even maple syrup, and processed sugar. And the simple answer is that a refined sugar, a table sugar, a sucrose, and added sugar like you're going to see on labels, looks to be harmful for humans at the level of the gut microbiome. But honey and fruit do the opposite, they're healthy for us. So I think that the most important thing for people to understand is don't fear fruit, don't fear honey, maybe don't even fear a little bit of maple syrup, as long as it's real maple syrup. But you are doing the right thing when you are avoiding processed sugar, and it looks like sugar, or dextrose, or maltodextrin, or just sucrose on labels.

• 20:44Joshua Fields Millburn?

  So not all sugar is created equal. And we often think about these things as a blanket statement TK, like, oh, don't eat sugar. And then we like, we see honey and we're like, oh no, I can't eat that. Or I shouldn't eat fruit either. Why is it so much easier just to blanket everything and dismiss it without really picking up on the nuance?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  I mean, any process that requires fewer thoughts is going to be easier, right? So if it takes two steps and we only like to take one step, then we're going to reject the one that has the complexity. But I like what Paul is saying here because sometimes that's your way out, knowing what you can eat. So if you've got the craving for those Snickers, for those Skittles and the potato chips, you can say, alright, this is me wanting. Something sweet, but I can go to honey. I can go to maple syrup. I can go to the strawberries and get it from there.

• 21:30Joshua Fields Millburn?

  So good. Steffi said, I stopped consuming alcohol. While I initially appreciated its relaxing effects and the social aspects that accompanied drinking. I eventually realized the negative consequences outweigh the perceived benefits. Paul, what are your thoughts on consuming alcohol?

• 21:47Speaker 04

  So I've kind of said tongue in cheek in the past to my audience that whoever you are listening to this, you are attractive enough. You are charismatic enough. You are socially engaging enough to do everything you need to do in your life without alcohol. You do not need alcohol to be friendly, to be romantic, to make, you know, new acquaintances and to share your ideas in the world. So I think that there's this kind of fake messaging that we get that alcohol is a social lubricant. Things are better without it. But I think we should rely on who we are intrinsically and try and use that, lift those, you know, work those muscles and be who we are without the alcohol lubricating ourselves. And the way we interact with people, what we know medically is that even up to seven drinks a week, so on average of one drink per day.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Over the course of a week, when you look across multiple weeks or months, leads to thinning of the neocortex of the brain. So even one drink per day is probably harmful for humans.

• 22:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Wow. Well, and, and we often think that like, oh yeah, a couple of glasses of red wine is actually healthy, right? Because of what the resveratrol or whatever story that we tell ourselves. What you're saying is, uh, well, it seems like even just a little bit of alcohol each day might be negative.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  It's pretty negative for our brains.

• 22:57Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Lindsay said, I've stopped arguing with people. She stopped consuming arguments with people. I like this. It never turns out to be a fruitful conversation. Once it gets argumentative. Now TK, you're better at arguing than anyone I know. Because arguing with you never, ever feels like an argument. What kind of mental jujitsu are you doing to accomplish that?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Man, you know, I think it's this goal that I have. So, arguments are incredibly powerful in their ability to make us feel bad, especially when they're poorly conducted, terribly moderated, or gone about it in an uncharitable way. And I want to be stronger than that. I want to be more powerful than an argument's ability to make me feel bad. So if I find myself in an argument and it feels like crap, the likelihood that I'm coming back is 100 times greater. If I have a great argument, I'm probably not coming back because I got everything I needed. If it goes to hell and I feel really bad and can't sleep at night, think about it for three days straight, I'm coming back for more of those because that indicates that the arguments are more powerful than me. And I want to know how to navigate those conversations in a way so that I maintain my composure

• 24:04Speaker 03

  and my ability to stay connected to the energy that I want to represent. And so, that's partially what motivates me is I use arguments as a mirror, not just for my beliefs, but also for my self-control and my relationship to the energy of disagreement.

• 24:17Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Dr. Saladino, a lot of people like to argue with you online, people you've never met, or even people whom you've had a cordial relationship with and they're unhappy with something you've said. How do you handle that?

• 24:30Speaker 04

  It's changed over the years, but I'm in a place now where I generally just don't engage as much as I used to, or if I do engage, I engage in different ways. I really try to embody what TK is talking about. I don't always do it perfectly, but I try. I try to stay neutral. I try to stay centered. I think of like, I think it's one of the Sammeri sayings, like, you know, the best warrior is a calm lake. I'm not always the calm lake, but that's what I aspire to be when I'm disagreeing with people. And yeah, I think the Socratic method, asking people questions, trying to understand the disagreement, is what I've found to be helpful. I think that differences of opinion are often points for mutual learning, but social media has this way of just bringing out the worst in people, so I try not to get pulled into that as much as I can avoid it.

• 25:12Joshua Fields Millburn?

  It feels much more like a battlefield than it does the Times Square of intellectual discourse, or the Town Square where we're all going to meet and share ideas. It's like trying to share ideas in the middle of a war zone. Liz said, "To improve sleep hygiene, I stopped using the snooze button on my alarm clock." That's one thing that is so pernicious, like just constantly waking yourself up every nine minutes. Paul, I love this. I love that someone is trying to be more hygienic with respect to their sleep. What are your three favorite ways to improve sleep?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  The simple fact is that there are very few things you can do in your life that will improve the quality of your waking hours more than improving the quality of your sleep. For me, my sleep starts really the morning I wake up before I go to sleep. So I'm getting in the sunlight first thing in the morning. I'm going outside probably without shoes. So I'm grounding. I'm looking at the natural sunlight in my eyes too and train the circadian rhythm. And then during the day before I go to sleep, I'm thinking about the time that I finished my last meal, at least a few hours before I go to sleep. I'm trying to calm down and wind down before I go to sleep, either with an audiobook or something, trying to lower that resting heart rate before I go to sleep. And I'm very personally conscientious of the screen use, the type of screen, and not, basically avoiding screens of all types,

• 26:29Speaker 04

  but especially my phone because of the way it flickers in the hour or two before I go to sleep. And that makes a huge difference for me.

• 26:35Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And I imagine it's different for different people. Like I am a morning lark. I like to get up really early. TK prefers to stay up late and do his creative things at night. And it's not that one person is worse than the other or is doing it better, but it seems to me that there are people who have a natural circadian rhythm that's going to be a bit different from mine.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. I think there are maybe different chronotypes. I think that when people are up late, the trick is just be aware that you're going to, if you're up until one or two or midnight, you're still going to need a few hours free of screens to really let your body do its thing and kind of calm the nervous system shift from a sympathetic nervous system, a fight or flight nervous system, to a parasympathetic rest type of nervous system and really allow sleep to happen. And then as you're sleeping later into the morning, then the important thing becomes how dark is your bedroom, right? Because we are very sensitive to light. And if you're going to sleep at 1 a.m. and you're aiming for seven or eight hours hopefully of sleep, the sun is going to be up at eight or nine in the morning, or seven in the morning, depending on the time of year. And at that

• 27:37Speaker 04

  point, if the sun is coming into the windows and the room is lightening naturally, that may interrupt your full pattern of sleep eight hours. So you have to then have a very dark room.

• 27:47Joshua Fields Millburn?

  It's a thing I always tell my daughter because she doesn't want to always get up in the mornings. I say, well, you know, going to bed early is the same thing as sleeping in late. Marissa and several other people said they've stopped consuming social media. Now, Paul, the minimalist left social media for a year last year. It was after our most quote unquote "successful" year ever. We reached half a billion people, hundreds of millions of views, and we decided, hey, what would happen if at our peak, we decided to walk away? Would we die? Would it ruin our business? Would it make us miserable? And we learned a lot of lessons. In fact, we're going to give a talk later this month over in Fargo. We're doing a TEDx talk about scrolling is the new smoking, a year without social media. What's your current relationship with social media?

• 28:32Speaker 04

  So at this point, I have a team which supports me. So I don't engage directly beyond occasional commenting on posts. I try to go onto X sometimes and actually do the tweets or engage, but I find myself, I'm really careful about it. I try and do it very intentionally. I do not scroll. I've made that rule for myself. So I don't scroll myself. I don't consume social media. I put myself into social media to engage with an audience occasionally and intentionally, and then I exit gracefully out the side door and go on with my life.

• 29:03Joshua Fields Millburn?

  How do you execute on the no-scrolling policy?

• 29:05Speaker 04

  I just, I actually don't have the social media on my phone. So if I'm going to engage, I have to use a content phone or something else from the team, and I have to be very sort of disciplined. And like, I can't scroll on a content phone if my team is watching me, right? If it's not even my phone, it's the team's phone, sort of thing.

• 29:23Joshua Fields Millburn?

  So you've just taken away your ability to scroll just unscrupulously?

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very addictive, these things. By design.

• 29:29Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. On the surface, it feels anti-minimalist, but I think it's one of the most minimalist things you could do. If you buy an extra device that you consume on, this is a Seth Godin thing where he talks about, he has one device, computer, in which he writes and works and does those things, and he associates it with those tasks. And then he has this other device where you can go to, it's a tablet or a phone or whatever, he associates with scrolling. And in fact, TK, you make a distinction between scrolling and searching. Can you talk a bit about that?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Scrolling is when I lazily gaze in the direction of whatever is served up to me by people who study me and know what I'm likely going to be enchanted by. Searching is when there's an element of intentionality. I want to know who won the baseball game last night, and so I have to do some work. I've got to type in what I'm looking for. I've got to select something out of a number of different things. And even though it may be superficial, what I'm looking for involves a lot of agency and autonomy. But what's happening now is we're moving from searching to scrolling to where we're just sort of like passive recipients of titillation, rather than seekers of information.

• 30:35Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I've found that my phone and searching on my phone can often be an on-ramp to accidentally scrolling. Like, I've gone to my phone because I need to respond to Nicodemus. I know he was going to send me this text today. I need to look it up. And before I know it, it's like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of half naked people on Instagram that I really like looking at. And it's like, well, wait a minute. What am I doing right now? And I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at those half naked people, but I didn't intend to do it. And I think that's when it becomes a real problem. One more here from Victoria. She said, I stopped buying new clothes last year after I lost my job. I realized I had too many anyway. And plus, I was actually buying dopamine to de-stress from work. That's a

• 31:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  great insight. I'm buying dopamine. And there's a bunch of ways we do it. We can say gambling is one way, which has proliferated the culture recently, as it's become more legal in different states. And now there's a whole lot of gambling going on, especially for young kids who don't have the sort of musculature built up around the culture that we grew up in. They start gambling in high school and they find ways around it. And they're losing all the money they have immediately, before they're even an adult. And I think that's one way that we're buying dopamine. But there are all these other ways. Consumerism is another way to buy dopamine. And one of the biggest ways there is buying clothes, because it feels like I can change myself. My clothes are my identity, in a way. Now, Paul, speaking of clothing, can you talk about why avoiding synthetic clothing might be worthwhile?

• 32:06Speaker 04

  So with synthetic clothing, we're talking about polyester clothing. It comes in a lot of names. Sometimes it's called elastane or, you know, other, other types of incarnations. But synthetic clothing is differentiated from natural clothing, cotton, bamboo, wool, these type of things. And the difference with synthetic and natural fibers happens at multiple levels. It happens at an environmental level. When you wash synthetic clothing, you actually create thousands and thousands of microplastic particles that go into reservoirs, that go into our sort of water supply, that go into the atmosphere. Even when you dry the synthetic clothing, the dryers can exhaust microplastics into your home environment and sort of polyester dust in our homes. And then when you put these things onto your body, they, they probably affect us in certain

• 32:49Speaker 04

  ways that are unique to these synthetic fabrics. The last time I was on your show, we actually talked about the Lululemon leggings and the fact that Lululemon, not specifically, but Lululemon and other manufacturers do coatings of their leggings that are moisture wicking or moisture barriers, especially in the crotch region of leggings for women or whatever. And those coatings are often involving chemicals that can be endocrine disrupting, the forever chemicals.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  And what's the problem with that?

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Well, when they go into your body, they stay for a very, very long time. And these can be disruptive to your normal hormonal flux and balance. These are called the PFAs, the forever chemicals. And so we don't want to be putting these on our skin in terms of sunscreens or lotions or cosmetics. But if we're wearing clothes that are also then giving us this dose of these endocrine disrupting chemicals, that can be problematic as well. So this is kind of where the whole thing gets, gets fraught, but the simple solution is natural clothing in some incarnation.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Okay, man, when you start riffing like this, two things. One, I just love you talk. I just love the sound of that intelligence. Sometimes it can feel like, man, I'm doing everything wrong. Everything. I mean, even like with my laundry, everything is going wrong. So what's something simple that a person who's listening to this can do without having to do a complete makeover for their life overnight? What's one small thing they can do?

• 34:07Speaker 04

  I would start with your bed sheets, right? Because you're spending eight hours in them a day and make sure they're cotton or some sort of natural fiber. Preferably in organic cotton. And then every time you're washing your bed sheets, you are not creating this microplastic environment in the water supply and the atmosphere in your home in the same way. And you're spending so much time in them while you're sleeping. So start with your bed sheets and kind of go from there. And then you can pick pieces of clothing and move those. And I think that the option, the ideal here is not to be 100% because there are a lot of clothes which simply do not occur in natural fabrics. You know, I'm thinking of nice clothing for women especially. I mean, for guys, it's kind of easy. You can get natural fiber suits. You can get natural fiber shirts, like suits. You can get like the highest

• 34:50Speaker 04

  luxury quote unquote, things that we would wear in natural fibers. But for women, it's a little trickier. And so, you know, hopefully women aren't wearing ball gowns day in and day out for their jobs. So they don't have to have that all the time. But yeah, start with like single pieces of clothing and maybe start with the bed sheets.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And at the heart of it, I'm hearing, don't use, I can't change everything as an excuse to say, I can't change anything.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Right.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:13Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You heard that show, Adam Ruins Everything? That's how I refer to Paul's Instagram feed. Paul just ruins everything for me. I'm wearing Lululemon pants right now, but I have cotton underwear on underneath because I used to wear synthetic underwear until this guy came into my life and was like, hey, and it actually made a difference for me. And what's fascinating is like, he ruins it in a way that it's not impossible for me to change it. Subtle changes over time. Yeah, you're not going to see me wearing any leggings anytime soon, but I'm also not wearing, like my shirt that I'm wearing right now is cotton. I'm allergic to wool. So that's a problem that I have. But most of the things that I want, I can, I can buy in cotton, or at least have cotton underwear on. And you realize there are alternatives

• 35:56Joshua Fields Millburn?

  out there. And it's becoming more and more difficult now because the things that are either trendy, or convenient, or super comfortable are all synthetic.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  It's the trend. Yeah, it's a shame.

• 36:04Joshua Fields Millburn?

  How about you listeners? What's one thing you enjoy that you've decided to stop consuming? You can let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat, which by the way, you can join for free, even if you don't support our private podcast. It's just patreon.com/the minimalist. Okay, give me something pithy TK. What's one thing you enjoy that you've decided to stop consuming?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Consume products, not people. So I was with my barber and obviously not too recently. But I said to him, I said, hey, what do you think of the Drake Kendrick Lamar beef? And he said, neither of those guys know that I exist. Neither of those guys care that I exist. Neither of those guys are interested in supporting anything that I'm doing. So I don't really pay attention to it. And he wasn't being snobbish. He wasn't being elitist, but he was reminding me of something that's important to keep in mind when in this age where we've got so much information and we've got more and more current events. Who won the game? Who said what? Who did something stupid? Who made a mistake? Who tripped on their way to pick up their award at the Grammys? Like, what did the Pope say?

• 37:11Speaker 03

  What did the president say? And most of it is stuff that you can't do anything about. And most of it is stuff that you just don't need to hear 50 different takes on. And so for me, I've stopped trying to keep up with people and everything that everyone is doing. And I just focus on my people, the people in my life that are affecting me and the work that we can do together to bring forth the vision that we want to achieve in our lives.

• 37:34Joshua Fields Millburn?

  But that also might mean that you are a less informed citizen and there's an acceptance of that, right?

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank God. There's nothing, there's no faster way to be informed than to be less informed by somebody else's definition. I mean, who gets to define it, right? That's who controls you. Are you informed about Shakespeare? Are you informed about Hemingway? Have you read James Baldwin this week? Are you informed about medieval theology? Oh, why not? Because the world isn't telling you to be informed about that, right? The world is telling you, you're not smart unless you focus on the things that we say you should focus on because they want to sell you something. I want to be informed like Paul Saladino about the things I care about, about the things that are going to make me healthy.

• 38:11Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And the things that affect you and make you unhealthy as well. So that brings me to my pithy answer. Are you talking about consuming products, not people? And as minimalist, we believe in consumption. We, we consume things. It's about the intentionality behind that. And that's what I hear there. And so my pithy answer is consumption is not the problem. Consumerism is. Consumerism is an ideology that those products are going to make me a better me. They're going to make me happy. The truth is, many of those products might harm us. And it's whether it's the synthetic underwear, or it is the chemicals that we're going to talk about on page two that are in the so-called healthy foods. Or maybe it's processed foods that are making us mentally unstable. Or they're harming our bodies, our organs. And so we'll talk a bit about that as well.

• 38:53Joshua Fields Millburn?

  We need to consume, obviously with food, we have to consume. But the question is, what am I consuming? How about you, Paul? Is there anything that you really enjoy? That you've given up because you've realized that it makes more sense to stop consuming?

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, you guys are going to appreciate this one. It's tomato sauce.

• 39:11Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Why?

• 39:12Speaker 04

  I'm Italian and it's great. And I like making tomato sauce from organic tomatoes from the farmer's market. It triggers my eczema. You know, this is the thing that for some people, certain foods, especially the nightshades like tomatoes, they do seem to trigger the immune system. So yeah, maybe it's a little foreshadowing or maybe even a, you know, a throwback to the things we've talked about in the past on the show. But yeah, I enjoy tomato sauce and I don't consume it because I don't think my immune system likes it.

• 39:38Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah, it's not worth the trade off. If cyanide was delicious, I know I wouldn't want to eat it, right? But with something like this, there are some people who are willing to, you know what? I'll deal with the skin issue. And as long as you know that, we're not going to moralize and say you shouldn't eat tomato sauce, right? It's just understanding that there is a cost beyond the price tag that's on that tomato. There's a cost of consuming the things that my body doesn't agree with. That's almost the end of page one. We still have an entire switchboard of callers to talk to. But first, real quick for right here, right now, here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. Actually, I've got two things for you. Our very next Sunday Symposium is July 27 in Santa Barbara. The next month will be in Orange County and then back here in Los Angeles.

• 40:22Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Every month, the last Sunday of the month, we do these live events, a simple gathering for simple people. We gather 200 people in a room. So get your tickets while you can. Every single one of them sells out. If it does sell out and you go there, sundaysymposium.com is the address. As soon as it sells out, put your name on the waitlist. We'll reach out to you as soon as some tickets open up. Because what happens inevitably is someone gets a ticket and then they, for whatever reason, they can't make it. They turn it back. Back in and we give that out to someone else. If you want to attend any of our live events here in Southern California, oh, by the way, they are free. Get your free tickets. Sunday Symposium.com. Also, next week is episode 500 of the Minimalist Podcast. A decade into it, every week we've given you, almost every week, we've given you a podcast episode.

• 41:06Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And Nicodemus will be back with us next week to entertain your questions and comments. Look forward to that. We're going to celebrate together with Ryan Nicodemus on episode 500. All right, a lot more to talk about, but first, here is a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  Yo, minimalists. What up? This is Ariel from Brazil. I'm just here to send you a greetings from Brazil and tell you about this minimal tip. It's about episode 476. 476, about the waste of now in the part towards the end, where you guys talk about how to minimize clutter from your YouTube. I've avoided totally social media, but I use YouTube a lot. And what does this, what this extension does? First, the name of this extension is Unhook. The full name is Unhook, Remove YouTube Recommender and Shorts. And what it does, it basically, you open YouTube

• 42:09Speaker 05

  and you can remove anything from your, your face. You can go to YouTube and have a blank page and only have the search box. And you can remove comments, shorts, subscriptions, whatever you want from the YouTube pages. And it's totally free. But the sad part that it only works to computer browsers. It works on like laptop computers and desktop computers. I use it on Brave as my main browser. It's the same as Chrome, but it works in Safari, Mozilla, and maybe others, I think. But the best part is that it only forces me to use YouTube when I'm on a computer.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  And you can send donations too, if you like to help the creators. It's the best thing that I've ever been done to YouTube. You get on YouTube and do whatever you want to do. Don't waste your time. This is really great. But thanks for everything, for real. You guys changed my life.

• 43:14Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Ariel, thank you so much for that useful tip. I kind of tried this out. This is what you were talking about earlier at TK with respect to searching versus scrolling. YouTube is great for searching. I remember when Nicodemus and I moved to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn't figure out how to keep the fire going all night. And so I look up a video on YouTube, and there's a guy who shows me exactly, and it's searching. I got exactly what I needed. I didn't have to bring someone over to the cabin. But then it's really easy to say, oh, yeah, but what about, oh, wow, there's politics going on. There's a war in another country that I don't know anything about. I need to be informed about this. And before I know it, and I could tell myself all these disempowering stories, but it feels empowering in the moment. And what he's talking about is blocking out all of the noise that's surrounding the thing you are searching for, so you can actually search and maybe scroll

• 43:58Joshua Fields Millburn?

  a little bit less. For anyone else has a listener tip or insight about this episode or any other episode, you can send a voice memo to [email protected], so we can feature your voice on the show. Up next, page two and page three with Dr. Saladino. But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break. We'll be right back.

• 44:20Joshua Fields Millburn?

  All right, that's the first 39% of episode 499. We'll see you on Patreon for the full maximal edition with Dr. Paul Saladino, which includes answers to a bunch more questions. Questions like, what are the five worst grocery store foods that people think are actually healthy? How will the grandma rule, I actually think he calls it the great grandma rule, help you think about the foods you eat? Also, why does Dr. Saladino refuse to wear sunscreen and sunglasses when he's outdoors? Plus, a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon. Big thanks to Dr. Paul Saladino for joining us today. We'll put a link to his podcast and his Instagram in

• 45:02Joshua Fields Millburn?

  the show notes. And that is our minimal episode for today. Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space. On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, post-production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, Buella was in the studio today, Professor Sean taking notes on the couch, and Savvy D on the board, and the rest of our team. I'm Joshua Fields-Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this: Love people. And use things. Because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing that's just feeding your greed. Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it.