Move Your Mind

CHAPTER 4START THE CONVERSATION

Starting the conversation is the perfect step to follow owning your story. It sounds simple, but it's two-fold: it relates to you personally in the way you interact with people, and then it creates a ripple effect on society. Let's dig in.

Connection is a funny thing. We live in an age that's more connected than ever before. Technology can be fantastic for solving problems in modern-day life, where you can access whatever you want whenever you want, order on demand and have the information you need at your fingertips instantly.

At the same time, we're bombarded with information, often as soon as we get out of bed in the morning. We open our phone when we wake up and there are notifications, messages, emails and other distractions that lure us to stay locked on to our screens. Social media is funny and entertaining for the most part, but it actually has a more insidious, manipulative function. It's designed for people to pay continuous attention to it, with the interaction stimulating the brain's reward system and breathing life into addictive patterns of behaviour.

It's easy to feel helpless and unable to control the never-ending notifications — they're hard to ignore. We'll talk more about the impacts of social media later, but for now this is about how being more engaged in a screen is taking us away from what's going on in real life.

A classic example is a music concert. Back in the day, the audience would hold up their cigarette lighters ...