What I stopped feeding my head

During the World Cup, something happened to my podcast feed. Slightly unintentionally.

Normally, I split my listening and watching across current affairs, self-development, business, and technology conversation and debate. It’s quite a heavy diet most weeks, an episode on a walk, another in the car travelling, occasionally one while I’m writing this newsletter. This time round, without really deciding to, I swapped a chunk of that for football podcasts. The proper entertainment ones, Gary Neville and Roy Keane arguing about formations, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes with some good-natured banter with Paddy McGuinness, nothing more serious than Peter Crouch riding a bull, with Robbie Keane in tow.

Within a week, my energy to actually sit down and listen had increased. Not a little. Quite dramatically.

That surprised me, because I hadn’t changed how much I was listening to. Roughly the same number of hours. What had changed was what I was putting into that time.

So I sat with it for a bit, and the answer that came back was uncomfortable. An awful lot of my usual feed is negative. Global affairs coverage that’s mostly bad news dressed up as analysis. The UK economy is covered almost entirely through the lens of what’s broken. AI content that swings between hype and doom and rarely lands anywhere useful in between. And social media commentary, which at this point exists mainly to make you angry at someone you’ve never met.

None of that is new information. I knew the news cycle skewed negative. I’d just not clocked how much of it had become my default, on autoplay, episode after episode, because those were “my” shows and I felt some quiet obligation to keep up with all of them.

Around the same time, I heard someone on a podcast use a phrase that really resonated with me, ‘your diet drives your lifestyle’. They weren’t talking about food. They meant everything you consume. What you watch, what you read, what you scroll, what you let into your head through a pair of earbuds on a Tuesday morning.

A year ago, I’d have nodded along to that and moved on. This time, it struck a chord because I had a live example sitting right in front of me. My own energy levels had just told me something my calendar never would.

Since the World Cup ended, I’ve kept the habit. I no longer listen to every episode of my preferred shows out of loyalty. I dropped from six shows most weeks to maybe three, and I’m choosier even within those. Before I hit play now, I ask myself this simple question:

Is this going to add something new, or create low-grade static for the rest of the day?

If it is, I simply skip it. This isn’t a dramatic digital detox, no thirty-day challenge. Just a slightly more deliberate finger on the play button.

As a business consultant, not just a podcast listener, this bothers me a bit. I spend a lot of my working life helping business owners diagnose why performance has dipped somewhere. Almost every time, the instinct is to look at output. Retrain someone. Redesign a process. I can’t remember the last time a client asked what’s been feeding the person making the decisions.

I include myself in that blind spot. I’ve spent years helping clients sharpen their thinking, and I’d never once properly audited what I was feeding my own.

It’s a strange gap once you notice it. Most of us are careful about what we eat. We count things and cut things without a second thought. Nobody thinks twice about three hours of low-grade negativity a day through headphones, because it doesn’t show up when you step on the scales.

I’m not going to hand you a formula for the right ratio of current affairs to football punditry. I don’t think one exists, and if it does, I haven’t found it. What I’ve taken from this is smaller. Energy and clarity are shaped by what you’re letting in, day after day, as much as by sleep, exercise or workload.

So, here’s the question for you to ponder this week:

Would you recommend what you’ve been feeding your head with to someone you care about?

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

For 30 years I’ve worked with business owners and leaders who are stuck on the wrong question. My job is to find the right one.

That usually means sitting with the messy “what if” long enough to turn it into clearer thinking and harder questions.