19h • General discussion
Digital Wellness
One of the many hats I have worn over the years is the health coach hat.
I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in 2011 and completed their advanced program the following year.
IIN, as we call it, talks about nutrition a little like Jake Van Clief, who wrote a paper called ICM, talks about AI.
Most people hear AI and think model.
ICM asks us to widen the frame.
IIN did something similar for me with nutrition.
Most people hear nutrition and immediately think about what goes into their mouth: protein, carbohydrates, calories, vegetables, supplements.
IIN introduced another idea: Primary Food.
Exercise. Work. Relationships. Purpose.
The premise, grossly simplified, is that what we eat is only one part of what nourishes us. Our relationship with food is influenced by everything else happening in our lives.
I know I am compressing an entire philosophy into a few sentences.
But I am not really trying to teach you about nutrition.
I am trying to steal the frame.
Because I think we need to do something similar with the word wellness.
We usually associate wellness with the body.
- Do I eat well?
- Do I exercise?
- Do I sleep enough?
- How is my stress?
But increasingly, there is another environment we inhabit for hours every day.
Our digital environment.
And I think it belongs in the wellness conversation.
Your computer is a room you live in.
One of my best friends lives in a house that, to me, feels incredibly cluttered.
Records everywhere. Posters covering almost every inch of the walls. Boxes of memorabilia. Toys from when the kids were younger. Piles of magazines.
Miscellaneous objects accumulated over decades.
I would lose my mind.
He and his wife are perfectly content.
More importantly, they can find everything.
Somewhere inside their brains is a perfectly functioning Rolodex telling them exactly where everything lives.
My computer used to look like their house.
- Files from a year ago.
- Screenshots.
- Short videos.
- Random notes.
- Half-written articles.
- Five versions of the same manuscript.
- Downloads I looked at once and never touched again.
Files called things like:
- final.docx
- final2.docx
- final-FINAL.docx
You know the folder.
When I first started working with ICM, none of this was what interested me.
I was blown away by what it could make.
- Images.
- Content.
- Research.
It helped me clean up my Instagram grid. Then I started using it to create images for a book I was working on.
It probably took me a month before I asked a completely different question:
- Could ICM clean up the mess it wasn't responsible for creating?
I started with Downloads
I didn't give it my entire computer.
I started with one folder. Downloads.
I built the Claude and Context MD files, gave the system a skill, and let it work.
Within minutes, the folder was organized.
- Files had descriptive names.
- Things were placed where they belonged.
- Duplicates were identified and trashed.
- And nothing important disappeared.
So naturally, I did what any reasonable person would do after cautiously testing something on one folder.
I set it loose on everything.
Then came the real test.
I plugged in my external hard drive.
Years of digital accumulation.
And I still remember the feeling when it finished.
It wasn't excitement.
It was relief.
That surprised me.
Because relief is a 'wellness' word.
Digital environments affect us
Yesterday, driving home from surfing, I remembered that feeling.
And I realized that my definition of wellness had quietly changed.
Unless you live completely disconnected from technology, your digital environment is now one of the environments you inhabit most.
Notifications affect your nervous system.
A desktop covered in files creates friction.
Twenty browser tabs occupy attention.
Five versions of a document create uncertainty.
A bloated context file changes how your AI system performs.
A missing backup can turn one broken hard drive into a crisis.
These aren't simply technology problems.
They affect how we feel.
How we focus. How quickly we work. How easily we stop working.
How much mental residue follows us after we close the laptop?
That, to me, makes them wellness problems too.
And it made me start asking different questions:
- How do I maintain my digital wellness?
- Do I run weekly or monthly maintenance on my workflow?
- Do I regularly organize what my systems produce?
- Do I check the growing size of my MD files?
- Are old instructions still influencing current work?
- Are my backups actually working?
- What digital clutter am I carrying simply because I haven't looked at it?
Before organizing my files and folders, I rarely thought about any of this.
Even my backups were irregular.
Which is funny when I think about it.
I have talked about detoxing and maintaining the body for roughly 30 years.
I recently finished a three-day water cleanse, something I do every few months. And we don't even need to get into my longer annual fasts.
I understood maintenance when it came to my body.
I simply hadn't applied the same thinking to my digital life.
Digital wellness requires maintenance
Cleaning the folders was only the beginning.
Today I run weekly and monthly maintenance on my digital environment.
And recently the maintenance process caught something else.
My CLAUDE.md file had grown to almost 300 lines.
Nothing was technically broken.
It had simply accumulated.
A rule here. An instruction there.
Something useful from three months ago that was no longer useful today.
Digital weight.
I brought it back down to around 60 lines.
The workflow became cleaner. The system became faster. Token usage dropped.
Same system.
Less baggage.
That sounds strangely familiar.
Nutrition versus wellness
Nutrition is often something we suddenly think about when we want a short-term result.
Summer is coming.
We want to lose weight. We ate too much over the holidays.
We are halfway through a tub of ice cream watching our favorite movie and a little voice says:
"This probably isn't nutrition."
No judgment.
I love chocolate.
And even there, we can talk about quality.
Wellness is different.
Wellness is maintenance.
It is lifelong.
It has good weeks and terrible weeks.
It changes as we change.
And it looks different for every person.
I think our relationship with AI may be developing along a similar divide.
Playing with ChatGPT can feel like consumption.
Ask something. Get something. Consume the output. Open another chat.
ICM, at least for me, has become something different.
It is an environment.
And environments need to be maintained.
That is where Digital Wellness started making sense to me.
Not as another productivity hack.
Not as "clean your Downloads folder."
But as an ongoing relationship with the digital environment in which we increasingly think, create, communicate, remember, and work.
So, thanks for following me through the nutrition analogy.
I made a video showing how I approach this, along with an ICM starter kit for anyone curious about another way into ICM.
It includes the basic package I used to begin organizing and maintaining my own digital environment.
If you use it, I would genuinely love to hear what works, what doesn't, and what you would change.
Constructive criticism is more than welcome.
To your well-being — physical and digital. :)
2
0 comments
Digital Wellness
skool.com/wellness-and-ai
Lost in AI chats and models?
Sitting long hours?
Over 30 years in Wellness and Digital Creation
Access AI lessons and well-being programs
Free
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
🔥
+2
Powered by