If your brain had a service manual, this warning would be on the first page in bold red letters: The more information you cram into this wet computer, the less bandwidth you will have to process it.
You already know that overloading on information can be addictive. The emotionally charged stuff on the news and social media doesn’t just distract you. It dilutes your thoughts, muddies your perspective, smudges the line between your soul and the flat nothingness of the screen.
We’ve all been there, stuck in those spiderwebs, buying into narratives and briefly becoming mouthpieces for things we don’t truly believe or understand. But seriously, you don’t have time for that anymore. Let the troglodytes at the gas station argue about the shape of the earth.
Let’s expand your concept of what’s eating your mental bandwidth. Think of information not just as content, but also as the clutter on your desk, which your brain has to repeatedly evaluate and decide to disregard. Information is that colorful, strobing menu you skim at the fast-food drive-thru. It’s waiting in your mailbox, and in every ad you scroll past. It’s in your hemming and hawing over whether you should work out today (you should). It’s in the podcast you’re listening to while doing that other thing you’ve deemed less than worthy of your full presence.
Each of the thousand little shifts in your attention throughout the day requires your mind to reprocess information. Let it, and the world gets noisy fast. Distraction is an ugly cycle. Distractedness makes you crave more stimulation, which leads to more negligent indulgence, which makes you more distracted. On and on as your brain seeks increasingly potent hits to feel normal.
When you’re caught in this stimulation loop, you’re less capable of doing the good shit you want to do. Good shit being listening, learning, connecting, playing, solving things… The more distracted you are, the less you’ll feel the big, meaningful life happening right in front of you (the messiness of which is often why you seek distraction in the first place).
Beyond pruning sources of noise from your life, be mindful of these things that erode mental bandwidth:
- Task switching: Jumping among varied tasks.
- Multitasking: Trying to focus on more than one thing at a time which, even if briefly possible, is impractical.
- Attention residue: Sticky leftover focus allotted to a previous task that can deter your ability to focus on the current task.
- Decision fatigue: Each choice (even the mundane, unimportant ones) depletes your mental energy throughout the day.
Your presence is inversely related to your hunger for distraction. Focus is about what you choose to pay attention to and what you refuse to notice. Constantly interrogate the triggers that disrupt and drain you.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
~Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Book)
“Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”
~David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Book)
“Being online is equivalent to living in the past.”
~Ling Ma, Severance (Book)
