Information Overload is Killing Us

Pollution. When you hear that word, what do you think of? Perhaps dangerous gases are being emitted into our atmosphere, garbage floating around the ocean, sick animals due to toxic food. But there's another pollutant lurking in our society: an invisible one that we encounter every single day—information.

It's in our phones, televisions, text chains, and email threads. It's packed into devices we wear on our wrists and in the checkout lines at the grocery store. In our modern society, escaping the barrage of information is impossible, but are we equipped to handle it?

In a 2024 letter published in Nature Human Behavior, scientists argued that we should treat this information overload like environmental pollution. It may not affect our drinking water, but it affects our brains at every turn. The endless stream of media and content leaves no facet of society untouched. Are we even able to process that amount of knowledge and data?

The brain is the most complex organ in the body. It controls the functions of vital organs like our heart and our lungs. The brain coordinates the movement of our arms and legs so we can walk, dance, or hug somebody. It creates memories and feelings so we can interact with the world around us and change our behavior accordingly. But the brain can only process a certain amount of information.

When we exceed that peak level, it can almost feel like our brain is filled to the brink and totally frozen, incapable of performing its most basic duties that help us get through our days. When we reach that point of paralysis, we can't process and act on the information we consume. If this is feeling familiar, you're not alone.

Many of us wake up determined to have a focused day, but then we succumb to checking social media and end up in a rabbit hole of dog videos. Suddenly, it's 5:00 p.m., and we haven't accomplished that focused day we hoped for, and we get down on ourselves. Our addiction to the rapid dopamine hits that an endless stream of information provides got in the way, but it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.

According to the Realtime Statistics Project, as of January 2023, there were nearly 2 billion websites on the internet, 1.175 million tweets were sent every day, and 30 billion pieces of content were shared monthly on Facebook. How was it possible to not get distracted by all that information? If we tried to process all the digital information available, it would be like watching hundreds of billions of movies.

Now, of course, technology is useful. We can look up healthy recipes, determine if a headache is just a headache or something more problematic, work more efficiently, and stay connected with people we'd otherwise lose touch with. But because of modern technology, we're all slaves to the amount of information we can consume.

There is the perfect answer to every question; we just have to find it. And if we don't, we feel like we're letting down ourselves, our boss, or our loved ones. The American Psychological Association sets out information overload as the state when the intensity of information exceeds an individual's processing capacity, leading to anxiety, poor decision-making, and other undesirable consequences.

With the internet at our fingertips and various screens and social media channels to entertain us, we can access information anywhere we want in seconds. So reaching that capacity is pretty likely for most of us. Can you think of a time when you had to process so much information that you felt like your brain was going to explode? Maybe it was research for a work project, endless scrolling of a good TV show, or an unintentional deep dive into beekeeping on TikTok.

It's a horrible feeling, and you probably didn't feel equipped to make great decisions after that cognitive overload. Perhaps your state of mind caused you to feel unsatisfied with yourself, unmotivated to talk to your friends, or negative about something in your life. Information overload can develop into frustration and detachment from reality as we're consumed by information we don't necessarily need to process.

Information overload has drastic effects on our mental health, and scientists have taken note. In a 2022 meeting, scientists, supported by a European Union grant for international collaboration, met and compared information overload to other historical shifts in society. They concluded that it eroded emotional health, job performance, and satisfaction, and influenced the actions of individuals, groups, and whole communities.

Ultimately, they called for more studies to discover the acute ways information overload takes over daily life and what comprehensive solutions, on an individual and societal level, might look like.

There's different degrees of information overload. For example, at an individual level, one might try and get in shape and follow multiple fitness accounts. Before you know it, you've been fed 10 different diets and 20 different fitness philosophies and a whole lot of bodies that don't really look anything like yours.

On a group level, a team at a company might be working to solve a problem. They start digging into the causes and effects of the problem they're working on. By the end of the workday, they'd consumed a lot of information that could impact the report, but they reached no solid conclusion because all of the information they looked up contradicted each other.

Furthermore, when overloaded with information, our individual and group interactions can impact our larger society and community. More information overload today comes from digital overload. Digital technology plays an important and necessary role in our daily lives.

The 2022 report showed that, on average, US adults spend more than 13 hours a day using devices. Now, of course, our devices make life much easier, but they also present many problems. After excessive use of technology, we can feel anxious and stressed when we try to process large amounts of information while multitasking, like looking at social media while watching a true crime documentary.

More of the stress hormone cortisol is released. Additionally, that state of cognitive overload releases more adrenaline, and both cortisol and adrenaline are associated with the fight-or-flight response. It's overwhelming to feel the need to process every piece of information, and when our brains simply won't let us, we end up in an unstable mental state.

Here, we might have trouble discerning what really matters. When we're stirred into states of anxiety, confusion, tension, and restlessness, we make bad decisions. Why? Because every decision, no matter how small, requires a certain amount of energy. If you're sitting on your phone, consuming scary, stressful news for an hour, your heart rate might be elevated, and your body becomes fidgety every time you click on a new article or pay for a new video.

You decide to do that. Each of those little decisions takes energy, so by the time you're done with your scrolling, you've made dozens if not hundreds of decisions that have eaten away at your decision-making energy. Then perhaps your partner approaches you with a simple question about what to cook for dinner, and in your overwhelmed state, you have depleted the energy to answer this question and make yet another decision.

So you flip out and get stressed or maybe even angry over what to cook for dinner. But it was never about dinner; it was about exhausting your brain to a level where it could no longer function properly in the easiest circumstances. What if your partner's question wasn't about dinner, but something more important, like a house purchase, a medical issue, or a financial decision?

After that information overload, you'd be much more likely to impulsively or angrily make a big decision that could have a real impact on your life. Adults with ADHD acutely feel this state of paralysis because the inability to focus would make decisions that can kill their confidence both at work and at home.

We're still a society built on multitasking, which those with ADHD kind of struggle with, so when they're unable to meet certain personal or professional expectations, the depression and burnout can creep in. These mental health complications can also arise when it comes to a lack of sleep.

We've all had the experience of sitting in bed in the dark, clicking on the latest vacation pictures of a person we kind of know or watching a series of ASMR videos on YouTube a few inches from our face. Our phone screen emanates its dangerous blue light, and then we try to go to sleep, but we can't.

Our desire to stay in the know or to just entertain ourselves means that we're in a perpetual connection with the digital world even right before we go to bed. This endangers our sleep quality and duration. Constant interaction with screens and their blue light disturbs natural sleep rhythms and leaves us tired and mentally strained, not to mention all of the information that ends up swirling around in our heads and keeping us awake.

A disrupted sleep cycle impacts our physical health and can impair our mental abilities. Fatigue worsens stress, decreases our ability to regulate emotions, and impacts our moods. Eventually, we end up in a cycle of unrest all because of information overload.

Then in waking life, we can barely concentrate. A world with countless sources divides our attention and makes concentrating on singular tasks feel impossible. It impacts our ability to maintain focus on the things that are actually important because we're always preoccupied with something else. We have trained ourselves to be multitaskers even when we don't need to be.

This leads to a decreased sense of accomplishment because it takes us longer to complete whatever tasks we're trying to complete. Then we perceive ourselves as unworthy or incapable because we're not operating in the way that we used to or would like to. This fractured attention span restricts our intellectual capabilities, reducing efficiency and productivity, and making even the most mundane tasks feel like a challenge.

Think about a morning when you've woken up to a big news story. You check your phone, look at a news app, scroll through the barrage of posts on social media, and turn on the TV to learn more. All of this can happen in just 30 minutes, and then suddenly you realize you have to get dressed for work, walk the dog, and eat breakfast, and these otherwise easy and routine tasks feel almost impossible because you've spent so much energy consuming information about the news event.

It's important to stay informed, but knowing the limits of our brain capacity when consuming information is key to keeping a steady flow of life. This kind of information binge can also impair our memory. Anthony Wagner, a Stanford professor of psychology, wrote a report summarizing findings around media multitasking and cognition. Its biggest conclusion was that there is no positive relationship between our working memory capacity and multitasking ability.

Even if you think you're winning at life by getting so good at multitasking and processing information, you are impairing your ability to pay full attention to tasks and effectively complete them. The price we pay for multitasking is called the "switching cost." That cost is the time it takes to refocus our attention.

We might think that multitasking saves time, but that's not always true. These moments of switching are small, just a few tenths of a second. However, that adds up over time, and according to the American Psychological Association, can end up being as much as 40% of a person's productive time.

Perhaps one of the most pervasive effects of information overload is its ability to wreak havoc on our self-esteem. Social media, particularly, is a breeding ground for comparison and leads to serious issues of self-worth and self-doubt. We're exposed to the highlight reels of other people's lives, which can feed into dormant feelings of inadequacy in ourselves.

This distorted perception of reality fosters envy and dissatisfaction with our lives, and suddenly that lesson sense of self permeates our daily lives and affects our relationships, behavior, and overall outlook on life. This type of information overload isn't just about our brain short-circuiting from too much information; rather, it's the type of information we're allowing into our precious mental space.

We reach a state where just because of what we've been fed on the internet, we feel we should live a completely different life with different goals and experiences. These doubt-driven ideas go hand in hand with another danger of information overload: our obsession with measuring everything. Humans have always been interested in systems of measuring to make sense of the world.

The kilogram and pound quantify mass; the meter and foot tell us about length. We even have units to measure niche ideas, like radioactivity. The first units of measurement appeared 6,000 years ago in river valley civilizations like ancient Egypt. A unit called the cubit was equal to the length of the human arm from elbow to middle finger and was used to measure the pyramids.

The problem is that as much as we have an innate desire to quantify things, it's impossible to measure feelings like ambition, imagination, friendship, or love. These ultimately are the things that are most important to us. Usually, the workplace is governed by different metrics like time, productivity, and efficiency—not other unquantifiable things like community and inspiration that can have a huge impact.

Our modern economy evolved from its roots in the industrial revolution. The systemic flaws in our obsession with measurement come from that factory floor mindset, where everything is considered a resource to be optimized. Advancements in science have given opportunities to study the world, gather data, and create replicating processes that can be taught and evolved.

Because of this, humans can manipulate nature. Even the small act of changing the temperature of your house is manipulating the natural world with the click of a button. Out of this, we start to crave that level of control and measurement over everything. But life is ambiguous and unpredictable, and we try to tame it with data collection to make reality fit our vision.

According to the National Institute of Health, one in five Americans uses a wearable device to track fitness. But do these trackers work? Why have we become so fixated on them? Fitness trackers are a form of getting information about ourselves. We might find it intriguing and use it to make decisions. Most people who track their activity do so for self-awareness and to better understand what they're doing and, in turn, modify their actions and goals.

Trackers can help us develop healthier habits. Keeping track of movement allows us to see that sometimes, even if we thought we were on a long 4 km walk, we actually only made it half a kilometer. This leads to accountability for what we did or didn't do. Trackers can help us get back on track if we fall off the wagon. They can also instill confidence in knowing that we're on the right paths towards our larger goals.

And it's not just the Apple Watch. Health trackers have transformed healthcare and made people's jobs and lives easier. But are we becoming a little crazy about it? The term "Quantified Self," coined in 2007 by authors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, refers to gaining knowledge of oneself through numbers. But are we really quantifiable, tracking everything from our calories to our heart rate to the number of times we stand up during the day?

Does tracking really make us better? It's easy to get caught up in this excess information and think that we can exact some sort of control over our well-being. And maybe we can, but maybe it's also a false sense of security. Are we measuring ourselves to get recognition from others? Is it really about seeking validation externally instead of internally?

For the average exerciser, tracking fitness can be problematic. It can lead to instances of comparison when we get down on ourselves for only running a couple of kilometers while our friend, who shares their data with us, is doing 10 km a day. In 2023, a study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research showed that participants who had their Apple Watch unknowingly manipulated to show a lower step count at the end of the day were more likely to demonstrate unhealthy behaviors.

Their self-esteem dropped and their blood pressure shot up. The mere possibility that they were falling behind—or at least perceived that they were—caused immediate mental and physical health issues. Devices have the potential to reinforce negative behaviors by fostering obsessive tendencies, imperfectionists, people with a history of eating disorders, or people prone to overexertion.

If you fall into any of these categories, you might want to think twice before indulging in tracking your fitness or eating, or anything else. Even athletes, for whom tracking and measurement information is incredibly helpful, can fall prey to information overload. Some suffer from orthosomnia: an obsession with optimal sleep data that makes it possible to see exactly what type of sleep we get and when we're getting it, rather than just being our sleep quality based on how we feel the next day.

This often ends up leading to a greater loss of sleep because there's now stress associated with missing the mark on sleep quality or duration. Ironically, for the athletes trying to optimize their sleep for peak performance, they'll end up performing worse due to tracking their sleep. For some people, even being unable to wear the tracking device because it's not charged or it got misplaced can lead to frustration and anxiety.

If we didn't track our activity, did we even do it? Was it even worth it? Well, of course it was. A huge benefit of living a healthier lifestyle, one that would warrant tracking, is to live a more enjoyable life. Trackers can be helpful, but they shouldn't exist in the place of pleasure.

We can get more out of activity than just information; we can get mental health benefits, better relationships with our community or nature, and simply joy. The 2016 study from the Journal of Consumer Research showed that we're less likely to enjoy activities if it's being measured. If information is the motivator, we're missing out.

The truth is that a lot of information is arbitrary. Take the classic 10,000 steps daily target. This has been widely labeled as the ideal target for activity and is built into fitness tracking apps and programs. It's presented with authority, and we assume it came from years and years of research. However, the origins of the 10,000 target are actually from a 1965 Japanese marketing campaign promoting a new gadget: a digital pedometer.

It needed a snappy name, and the decision was made to call it "manpoke," the 10,000 steps meter, because the Japanese character for 10,000 looks like a figure striding forward. There wasn't any science involved; it was just a visual pun. Even though 10,000 steps is arbitrary, it can be useful. Actual research has shown that people who pursue the 10,000-step goal have fewer signs of depression, stress, and anxiety.

Ultimately, when you decide to track your life, you're gaining accountability but possibly setting yourself up for information overload. Whether it's the right option for you is completely dependent on your individual tendencies.

The flip side of information overload lies in the digital divide, which is the divide between those with high-speed internet access and those without it. The internet is a critical aspect of modern life; it's the gateway for public services, education, and economic opportunity. In the US alone, more than 40 million people lack adequate broadband access. Around 11 million citizens in the EU have the same problem.

Research conducted by Visa in 2020 suggests that lack of access to the internet is an even more acute issue in developing countries. For example, in South Africa and India, as many as 70% of people struggle to get online. The divide exists across socioeconomic status, geographic location, age, and education level. For those with access and knowledge, the digital world offers immense opportunities in education, networking, and business.

Without access, people are at a disadvantage, missing out on opportunities in crucial areas of life, like the job market and healthcare. But the problem isn't just geographical or economic; it's generational. Older populations are often at a disadvantage as they attempt to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of technology.

The digital divide also creates barriers to e-learning. Students without reliable internet access or devices are at a disadvantage. These growing disparities in educational outcomes widen the academic achievement gap between socioeconomic and geographic groups. Nowhere did this become clearer than during the height of COVID-19, when kids had to be homeschooled.

The National Education Association highlighted that one quarter of US students lacked access to remote education at the beginning of the pandemic. As companies and schools take more and more activity online, how many students will be left behind on necessary information? Similarly, the internet is critical for finding employment. Not only are jobs mostly listed online these days, but the jobs themselves involve more tech-focused skills than ever before.

Without those skills or resources to find employment in the first place, people are inevitably getting squeezed out of the job market. Similarly, healthcare is moving online. Have you had a telehealth appointment with a doctor in the last few years? For many, the answer is probably yes. Not only did COVID-19 force many of us to talk online with our providers, but it showed hospitals and other large healthcare companies that high-cost in-person visits weren't always necessary, at least when it came to their bottom line.

Now, with the rise of telemedicine, it's more important than ever that people have access to the internet to get the care they need. Patients with limited connectivity or digital literacy face challenges in accessing telehealth services, which can be critical for managing chronic conditions and mental health.

On top of that, in a lot of the communities that lack internet, traditional healthcare is increasingly scarce due to cost-cutting. In all of these areas of life, many live in a cycle where the lack of digital access and skills leads to missed opportunities that can be life-altering. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission is working to publish detailed maps of broadband access around the country, and the Biden Administration enacted an affordable connectivity program. Both are examples of initiatives aimed at expanding internet access and making it more affordable.

Similar strategies are appearing in Europe. The European Commission enacted the Gigabit Infrastructure Act and the National Subsidy Support Program to bring internet access to low-income citizens. But to really tackle the adoption barrier, more has to be done on the local level through community-driven programs.

In the UK, a charity called AGUK helped thousands of older people get online and employs advertisers in 120 outlets around the country. In France, there's a national family allowances fund that launched a digital skills program to support vulnerable people in accessing online services. In a world with endless and often overwhelming information, it's important that everyone has the opportunity to access it, but it's also important that everyone knows how to consume and process it.

Media literacy education is a term sprouting up in schools and institutions around the world. With so much media and information consumption, many of us are forgetting how to actually think critically and independently about it. Because we have such vast access to information, it's necessary to have new approaches to thinking and new skill sets on how we consume using our devices.

It's not just about using your phone to read the news; it's about training yourself how to process the news you're reading. Media literacy education teaches people how to apply critical inquiry and reading and reflection skills to all forms of media they encounter. Rather than offering predetermined ideas, educators would ask students what they notice in a piece of media or information and help develop the skills to think more deeply.

It's very easy to get lost in echo chambers and forget that we have the freedom to process information on an individual level. We don't need the loudest voices on the internet telling us what to do and how to think; we can decide that for ourselves. Media literacy isn't just about consuming media, though.

In an ideal world, this kind of media literacy would lay the ground for civic engagement that's evidence-based and diverse in viewpoint. That might seem like a long way off, but with the amount of information we have access to, it's more important than ever to try and push ourselves toward that ideal before we collapse under the pressure of opinions that swirl around the internet.

Beyond keeping ourselves up to date with how to process all the information we're bombarded with on a daily basis, how else can we fight the stress and fatigue of information overload? One of the most simple solutions is a digital detox. Set limits on your device use or only use one device at a time to combat the tendency to multitask.

Turn off unnecessary notifications, especially ones from social media or news. These notifications give us information that we aren't even looking for and force us to multitask when we don't need to. These digital guardrails can act as a mental palate cleanser. Instead of digging deep into your phone or TV, connect with your physical environment and the people around you.

Now, it sounds cheesy, but one of the best ways to combat anxiety and depression is to be outside or spend time in person with friends. During these tech-free times, you have the ability to process information that is only enriching us. If you're someone who struggles to set digital boundaries, consider just a few minutes a day of mindfulness and meditation.

Meditation can be a sanctuary in a chaotic world of information. It provides a sense of stability and peace in an otherwise cluttered mind. It allows us to observe thoughts and feelings without being overwhelmed by them. This approach to mental health has no judgment. If you sit down to meditate and you're anxious, you're giving yourself permission to be anxious for 15 or 20 minutes.

By the end of that meditation, you'll feel less stressed and more joyful. Now, sure, sitting down to meditate or swearing that we won't look at our phones before bed sounds doable, but the hardest part of information overload is just managing the amount of information that's allowed to enter your brain.

But what if we compartmentalize that a little bit? If you're deep in research for work, you can challenge yourself to detach from the information swirling around your head once you get home, and vice versa. If you happen to look at TikTok while you're at work and see an alarming video, can you wait until you get home to see what's going on with it?

The more we can limit the temptation to multitask and overload ourselves with different types of information at the same time, the better we might fare in keeping our anxiety at bay. All this takes discipline because we live in a world that's constantly trying to push us into information overload mode. It also takes an often-overlooked skill: listening to our body.

Watch yourself for cues to slow down or step away from actions that are affecting your well-being. If your eyes start to twitch or you feel fidgety, it might be time to step away from the TV and go for a walk. Stress, fatigue, and frustration can all indicate cognitive overload.

We don't always need to stay up to date by reading the news every single day. We can find other ways to stay up to date, like asking informed smart friends or family about what issues they've learned about and what opinions they have. You don't need to comb the internet to decide what to think; you can sit and ponder questions that you have about the world and about yourself.

Now this might all sound a little bit ironic, considering you're watching a video consuming information about how difficult it can be to consume information. So I'll let you go. There’s no need to feel overwhelmed. Day by day, minute by minute, you're building a life experience that's not dependent on YouTube videos or news segments, but rather on who you want to be, what brings you joy, and the relationships you have with people you care about. That information, in the end, is all that matters.