Dealing with Digital Overwhelm
Okay, this is embarrassing. But I need to say it anyway, honestly. I checked my phone eleven times before I even got out of bed this morning, and yeah, I counted because lately I’ve been trying to catch myself in the act. Eleven. That number messed with me. My alarm started yelling at 7:15, and I didn’t actually stand up until 8:02, which is just a dumb little fact until you realize where the time went. Just scrolling, right? Email. Instagram. The news, for some reason, even though look, the news has never once made my morning softer. A text from my sister. Still unanswered. Three notifications from apps I swear I do not remember downloading, which honestly feels its own kind of bleak. And here’s what gets me: I didn’t even feel more awake after all that, I felt like somebody had poured wet cement behind my eyes. This has been going on a while. The heaviness, I mean. That scattered, buzzy feeling, like my brain is a shopping cart with one bad wheel pulling hard to the left. Last week I sat down to work on something that actually mattered to me, and I caught myself grabbing my phone, like, six times in twenty minutes. For nothing. No real reason, just the twitchy little reflex of it, the hand moving before the thought does. My therapist calls it digital overwhelm. My mom says I’m too online. Jake just shrugs and says it’s normal, like that ends the conversation. But still. If everybody is drowning, right, does that suddenly make the water fine?
So I started reading. Old stuff, mostly. The kind written by people who died before light switches and Wi-Fi routers and that awful little iPhone battery warning at 9 percent. Sounds pretentious, I know. I mean, look, I heard myself saying it too. But hear me out. These people—philosophers, monks, poets, whatever label fits—were dealing with distraction in their own versions of a loud world. Not phones, obviously. Ancient China did not have push notifications. But crowded streets, political mess, endless demands, people tugging at your attention like toddlers in a grocery store aisle? Yeah. They had that. And some of them, honestly, seemed to understand something I keep fumbling toward now. I keep coming back to four voices. Not because they fixed everything. They didn’t. The thing is, they were asking questions that feel uncomfortably current, and they’ve been dead for so long that I can’t just write them off as another generation panicking about change.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
Listen to what they noticed. About guarding your attention, keeping life less cluttered, and staying actually here while everything around you keeps blinking, buzzing, chirping, and practically grabbing your sleeve for one more glance.
“The five colors blind the eye. The five tones deafen the ear. The five flavors dull the taste. Racing and hunting madden the mind. Precious things lead one astray.”
Lao Tzu — Chinese philosopher, 6th century BCETao Te Ching
I found this at 2am. Couldn’t sleep, of course. I was doom-scrolling through some philosophy site with a beige background and tiny serif font—very on brand for a person trying to escape overstimulation by using a brighter screen. And this just stopped me. Lao Tzu was writing about ancient Chinese life, people chasing more color, more sound, more flavor, more excitement, more everything, honestly, and his whole point was basically: this is making you unable to notice what matters. Not literally blind. Not literally deaf. But dulled. Numb around the edges. I mean, I immediately thought about my Spotify Wrapped. 47,000 minutes last year. Forty-seven thousand. And I had this gross little thought, right, did I actually listen to any of it, or was it just wallpaper for my brain while I refreshed Gmail and stared at nothing? He wasn’t saying pleasure is evil. That’s not it. More like when you pour too much into your senses all the time, eventually your mind starts reacting to everything the way your tongue reacts to the fifth stale tortilla chip at a party. Barely at all. I’ve been there. I say that as someone who has had three tabs playing audio at once and still felt weirdly empty.
“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.”
Matsuo Basho — Haiku and Travel Journals
Basho was a Japanese poet, and yeah, he literally walked across Japan writing haiku, which sounds almost fake until you sit with it for a second. Seventeen syllables. Frogs. Rain. Moonlight. Muddy roads probably. I used to think haiku was just cute, honestly, the kind of thing printed on bookmarks or calendars in dentist offices. Then I tried writing one. Harder than it looks. You cannot write like that unless you’re paying the kind of attention most of us only fake now. I mean really paying attention. Not half-looking at a sunset while your thumb keeps sliding over your screen. Actually there. Actually noticing. He had almost nothing. Needed almost nothing. Saw everything. And yeah, here’s what gets me, I have 847 unread emails and I honestly could not tell you what I ate for lunch yesterday unless I went digging through my trash. So. That feels bad in a very specific way.
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
Buddha — Buddhist teachings
The Buddha said suffering happens when the mind keeps leaving the room. That’s the version that stuck with me, anyway. Getting snagged on yesterday. Sprinting ahead to tomorrow. Missing the actual moment you’re standing in, which, look, I know sounds obvious until it’s 3am and you’re replaying some awkward thing you said in 2019 like it’s evidence in a murder trial. This landed hard for me then. His answer wasn’t fancy. Just come back. This breath. This room. This lumpy pillow with the hot side somehow touching my face again. Not forever. Just now. And yeah, I’ve been trying that. It works for maybe three seconds before my brain wanders off and starts composing fake arguments in the shower or remembering an email I forgot to send. But still. Three seconds is three seconds. I mean that. Sometimes three seconds of peace feels weirdly luxurious.
Seneca was basically the Mark Cuban of ancient Rome, which is a ridiculous sentence, but you know what I mean. He was successful. Connected. Busy in that high-status, everybody-needs-a-piece-of-you kind of way. So when he talks about distraction, it doesn’t feel like some guy off in a cave lecturing the rest of us about purity. He knew what overload felt like. And he said something that honestly kind of punched me in the throat: we don’t get a short life, we just burn huge pieces of it without noticing. Life is long enough, if we use it well. I keep coming back to this idea that so much of what eats my time doesn’t even leave a mark. Hours on my phone this month. Just gone. Scrolling posts I couldn’t quote back to you ten minutes later, reading strangers yelling at each other about things neither one will change, watching videos I didn’t even like and then letting the next one autoplay anyway because my hand was too lazy to close the app. If I actually added up those hours. No. Honestly, no. I don’t want that number sitting in front of me like a receipt.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.”
Seneca — Roman philosopher, 4 BCE–65 CEOn the Shortness of Life
What connects them
What they all understood
These four were separated by centuries. Different languages. Different worlds. Never met, obviously. And yet they all kept circling the same sore spot: your attention decides the shape of your days. Maybe your life, honestly. Give it away to chaos all day long—to the ping, the headline, the random guy with an anime avatar being aggressively wrong online—and your life starts to feel thin and weirdly secondhand. Like you’re watching it through glass. But back to—attention isn’t some vanished thing once you lose it. That’s the part I need to hear over and over. You can get it back. Not by white-knuckling it, not really. More by noticing. Oh, there I go again, reaching for my phone because one second of stillness feels itchy. Oh, I’ve been scrolling for twenty minutes and my neck hurts. Oh look, I’m refreshing email again even though nothing has changed since twelve seconds ago. Just noticing. And then maybe choosing something else. Then failing. Then noticing again. Honestly, some days I am laughably bad at this. But some days I’m less bad. And yeah, the less-bad days seem to be showing up a little more often.
Before you go
A Moment for You
I’m not about to throw my phone into a lake. Not doing the cabin-in-Montana thing either. But I am trying to get a little less automatic about all of this, which is less dramatic and probably more useful anyway. Leaving my phone in another room sometimes. Walking without earbuds, which still feels strangely illegal. Letting boredom sit there for a minute instead of immediately stuffing it with noise. It’s not perfect. I still check Twitter too much, I still have mornings where I lose twenty minutes before I’ve even washed my face, and I still get that itchy little urge in my hand like the phone is calling me from the table. I’ve been there, I am there. But it’s something. And if this sounds familiar, you might like InnerCalm+. It’s basically guided practice for being present in a way that doesn’t feel incense-heavy or weirdly performative. Just learning to be where your body already is. Anyway, that’s where I’m at. Thanks for reading.
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