How to Practice Conscious Consumption: A Conscious Guide for Beginners
Image by Kasia Sikorska Pictures
The act of conscious consumption is but a branch of mindful living that demands personal responsibility. So what is it, what does it mean? Conscious consumption can be defined as “a social movement that is based around increased awareness of the impact of purchasing decisions on the environment and the consumers health and life in general. It is also concerned with the effects of media and advertising on consumers” (Swap-O-Matic.com).
With changemakers on the rise everywhere, it’s becoming clear that the catch-all term extends far beyond being just a social activist or entrepreneur. The word flawlessly summarizes communities and individuals who are making high-vibrational living a priority, even if at a slow, subtle pace. But what do you do when you’re just starting out as an active participant in the mindful movement? Well, I invite you to refer to this guide to help changemakers everywhere consume and create wisely and with care:
1. Mind Your Headspace
Taking care of your headspace means monitoring your thoughts, your ego, your inner saboteur, your conditioning, and your unconscious bias. Can you tell the difference between all of them? Get to know the inner workings of your thought patterns so you know how to challenge, nurture, or keep them in check.
Are your thoughts kind? What about the stories you tell yourself? How does your ego, your wounds, and your bias want you to respond to discomfort and other pressing situations? As they say: perception is reality. Do your best to ensure your perception is as grounded in reality as it can be, not based on your wounds or inherited beliefs. Affirmations, journaling, meditating, moving your body, and getting out in nature are all low-risk resources if they’re available to you. Therapy, hypnosis, and coaching are additional resources that can double as a viable support system as well. Being proactive about your mental health is a gateway to peace. It’s the first step to understanding the gravity of what you take in and surround yourself with.
2. Mind Your Boundaries
Protect your energy. The digital age, depending on how you interact with it, can leave the door open to prying eyes and platforms that thrive off of infinite scrolling. Using trackers like Screen Time or connecting with conscious tools and communities like Brick: Digital Wellness can help you identify when and where your digital bounds shant be crossed. If you can’t seem to stop scrolling or whipping out your phone to fill the awkward silence, you can enter Brick Mode throughout the day or when with loved ones as a reminder to be present in the moment, rather than blurring the lines of privacy for the sake of connecting with an audience.
Unfortunately, the internet does run off of self-exploitation, so it’s really up to you to determine what in your life is sacred and what can be broadcast on immortal chat forms. Be mindful that some will respect how you share your energy or curate a community online, and others may feel entitled to all of you or judge what you don’t share. This begs the question: can boundaries and social media exist and/or coexist? Can privacy exist and/or coexist in the digital age and with the prominence of social media?
3. Mind Your Time
Outside of scrolling multiple feeds to fill the void of boredom, minding your time means being thoughtful of how you spend your days as a whole. For example, are you working a dead-end job that you absolutely despise? There’s a phenomenal movement occurring around the world right now, which happens to be an unexpected byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, coined as The Great Resignation.
This movement embodies the concept of conscious consumption in terms of how it’s inspiring people all over the globe to question how they’ve been using their time to line the pockets of corporation fat cats, in addition to how they’ve been duped to strive for goals that exist only outside of themselves. With the last year-and-a-half of our lives being spent indoors, the overabundance of time has been a gift to the working class everywhere. Time to breathe, to live, to heal; time to reevaluate cost-saving career options and online monetization; time to rediscover themselves and what they’d really rather be doing with their days.
I challenge you to do the same, Beloved! Think about how you’re spending your time and energy daily. Is it actually benefiting you in the long run or pouring into the life you’d like to build? Is it actually fulfilling you?
I challenge you from here on out, Beloved, to use your time wisely. Use it to consider how to not only get out of the rat race and matrix but also how to get back to living out your legacy-building purpose altogether.
4. Mind Your Media
This especially goes for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, sexual assault and abuse survivors, disabled, highly sensitive, and other disenfranchised folks. The media you consume may not have your best interest at heart. The common tropes, mangled takes on mental health, whitewashed history, and storytelling could find you consuming trauma and/or covert microaggressions that retraumatizes or stigmatizes you.
Content Creator Jess of Bowties & Books explored how profitable trauma porn is and how consuming the genre happens on a regular basis with modern-day media. Activist-led channel, The Root also explains how reporting on racial inequities — which I also expand to include the traumas associated with “otherizing” folks — is a double-edged sword. Staying informed about worldwide happenings as well as the realities of marginalization is important for change to occur, but it should also be noted that the circulation of said images and multimedia products also desensitizes the human race to these issues over time as well.
So, it’s not just what you eat or share online. Conscious consumption is a facet of self-care that also extends to the media you take in, share, and create. The possibility of you and/or others being triggered, traumatized, or retraumatized are all things to be mindful of when putting on your favorite tv show to end the day, penciling in that movie date to escape the week’s heaviness, or publishing your rendition of a viral skit that’s culturally appropriating. We all bear the burden to mind our impact and intake now.
5. Mind Your Idols
True Crime Content Creator & Podcaster Bailey Sarian would say, “Get better idols.” I, however, would challenge you to question why idolizing another imperfect human being is even necessary. The internet is a place where people can be sainted and/or vilified in a matter of seconds. This could be due to the exposure or self-reporting of gross misconduct, racism, and abuse of influence/power, or because the masses impart an unconscious bias that holds another imperfect human being to ungodly standards.
This makes exposés a tough pill to swallow because the parasocial nature of social media friends, communities, relationships, and cult-like followings makes it nearly impossible to report or hold those in power or those with influence accountable. It’s even harder for those with influence and power to hold themselves accountable when their base becomes more like an echo chamber for toxic behavior than one of compassionate, impartial observers. With corporations operating more often than not like people in the United States, one could say this line of thinking applies to businesses and service providers as well.
However, when we remember that we are all equally flawed human beings, it’s not as jarring to hear that another has behaved as such. In fact, it becomes easier to:
Extend compassion where needed
Decide for yourself who and what kind of behavior you support
Allow people the room to grow
Remember that you have the right to buycott, boycott, and demand better of service providers, businesses, creators, or prominent figures in society. They’re all human beings — or, in some cases, run by them — who will not only mess up from time to time but are also capable of evolving if they want to. So do your best to reserve judgment without enabling bad behavior, remain neutral, release expectations, and don’t rely on the court of public opinion to draw your own conclusions.
6. Mind Your Ingredients
Allergies, health scares, increased infertility rates — the contents of your food and household products can be harboring secret resentment. As within, so without is a mantra that usually references the stars’ effect on one’s affairs, but it works here too. Reviewing your ingredients is more than just food deep. I’m talking about paying attention to the contaminants that are in your everyday haircare, skincare, beauty, hygiene, and cleaning products as well as the more than 80 contaminants that could be in your drinking water.
If available to you, acquiring a water distiller or shower filter from H2O Labs can offer you some much-needed peace of mind. Also be on the lookout for triclosan, aluminum, petroleum, pesticides, lead, phthalates, parabens, sulfates, silicones, and other harsh chemicals. Instead, do look for: non-GMO, organic, cruelty-free, pesticide-free, PETA-approved, plant-based, pet-safe, sustainably or ethically-made labels. Mind your fabrics and their imprints, too.
Shop small and local to not only increase your chances of connecting with well-informed sellers and growers but to also send the message that quality comes before profit. Be mindful that greenwashing is a common tactic used in marketing to trick consumers into buying products that aren’t actually manufactured or sourced using sustainable practices. A quick Google search will pull up articles by Earth911, The Guardian, and Medium.com that point out how you can recognize greenwashing before placing another order to restock your cabinet. I know, determining the validity and toxicity of your favorite things is definitely a learning curve. Detailed lists, like those created by Truth in Advertising, can help you stay informed about which companies have been accused of greenwashing and selling harmful products.