Analog or Digital?

My question for you today is to consider whether you are a more analog or digital type of thinker. Do you approach life in a more analog or a more digital way?

The difference between the two has to do with a mindset that recognizes a continuum or one that sees things as on or off. A digital approach is binary – so it’s on or it’s off, it’s 1 or it’s 0. Analog is capable of sending a signal of varying amplitude.

I find that we (especially logical thinkers) tend to approach our lives in a more digital way, and we could benefit by moving more to the analog approach. I used to use the analogy of a rheostat for light when I taught yoga, because I found that a lot of people, especially logical minded people like myself approached things in a digital way. I also started my yoga practice like this, which is also how I approached other things in life – either I felt like I wasn’t doing it at all, or I was doing it ALL THE WAY. 

Like me when I started, I’d see people in my yoga class shaking with the sheer muscular effort they were putting into their practice. What I had learned since then is that that’s exhausting, and usually it’s actually counterproductive. When you are approaching it in such a forceful way, you’re actually stressing your system out, which is actually causing more tension in your nervous system. So the very thing you went there to do, which is to try to create greater range of motion, you are actually preventing through your approach.

I find that the digital approach actually does that in many areas of our lives, and I want to encourage you to look at it for yours. Instead of a light being on or off, we have the ability to dim it, and that’s how we need to look at many areas of our lives. When we approach something, it’s not either all or nothing, there’s a continuum available. I think we can apply this idea of a continuum in many ways that would benefit our lives, but for right now I want to focus on how we approach our goals.

Consider the example of a diet. If you are cleaning out your diet, but at the end of a long day you decided to eat a piece of candy…what happens next? In my experience, there’s a part of us that thinks “Now I’ve ruined it. Now I might as well eat everything in the refrigerator.” But what if you had stopped after one piece? What if you’d thought, “Well that was off track, but I’ll go back to my plan now.” That would have a very different outcome.

It’s not about we “failed” or we “succeeded,” it’s about progress. I find that when we approach our lives in a binary or a digital way, we tend to actually lose progress. We tend to actually feel like we’re going backwards in some cases.

So think about that for yourself. How can you take this idea of a continuum in how you approach things? I think that in many places in our world, we define things in too much of an all-or-nothing way. Not only our lives but the lives of the people around us could be really improved by realizing life is a continuum.

It’s not that you’re either on the Earth or you’re down deep in the ocean! The bottom of the ocean starts as the shore and it goes deeper as you progress. If you think more of the continuum for yourself, it could really help you gain perspective, and actually enjoy the process more!