3 Ways to Recognize Emotional Overload

In a lot of ways, our society has made huge advances and progress over a short period of time. I mean, we’ve gone from mailing physical letters to near-instant SMS in a few decades. Fifty years ago, computers weren’t connecting world together, but now that is a very real aspect to the world that we live in. This makes it easy to get items delivered to us in only a couple of days or hours. It also makes it easy to get information overload and it can become overwhelming to make decisions.  

Information overload happens when we get hit with so much data at one time that we cannot process it all. How much information we can handle depends on the person. We all have a limited amount of time, energy, and effort. So the more time, energy, or effort we spend trying to process information, the less energy we have for other things in our life. This also works the other way; information overload can happen when we’ve already spent our energy in other areas of our life, so we don’t have the energy to sort through or absorb the flood of information that we get hit with. Or, if we get hit with too much data at once, we can struggle with feeling overwhelmed in other areas of our life because we’ve already spent all of our energy trying to process all the data we got slammed with earlier.

No matter the reason, information overload can lead us to feeling overwhelmed and defeated. It can make it difficult to manage our lives and to do what we want to do. We can feel anxious when we’re overwhelmed by the data around us, and it can make it difficult for us to feel like we have the energy or capacity to do what we want to do.

Information overload can be a really difficult thing to cope with because a lot of times we struggle with recognizing that this is even going on! It’s hard to make changes when we don’t know what to even change. So if you’ve ever struggled with information overload, here are some thoughts on how you can start the first steps in changing how we handle this overwhelming wave of data.

Recognize that what you’re experiencing is information overload. Often times we get hit with information overload without even realizing that this is what is going on. By recognizing what is going on, we can feel empowered. That alone can give us a lot of hope and direction.  It’s also the first step towards managing the information we receive and how we handle it.

Remind yourself that you can limit the information you receive. Many times we tell ourselves that we cannot do anything about the situation that we’re in. By telling ourselves that, we end up feeling pretty powerless about our situation. In a way, it takes away our own power, when in reality, there are probably more ways than we realize to limit the information we’re receiving. If we tell ourselves that we cannot limit this information, then we’ll have a hard time seeing the ways that we could take a little more control because we’ve already decided that there’s nothing we can do about it. Whereas if we tell ourselves that we can do something about it and we can limit the information that we receive, we can feel empowered to do something.  If we tell ourselves this kind of statement, then we’re far more likely to be able to actually do something about the situation, because we’re seeing things in a more positive light.

Keep a journal. I’m a huge fan of journaling for so many reasons. One big reason I love journaling is because it can help us see patterns in our lives. We aren’t overloaded with information every second of the day - there are usually certain times that we’re more likely to get overloaded. But if we’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, we’re probably going to have a hard time noticing the times when we are more susceptible to information overload. Keeping a journal can help us notice when we’ve become overwhelmed. Once we figure this pattern out, we can do more to limit the information we receive or to cope a little more.  

Information overload is a complicated topic. It can be something that feels like we have no choice in, so we get sucked into an overwhelming situation that we may feel unprepared for.  However, we can also overwhelm ourselves with things that we think will be helpful. So I’m going to break up this topic over several weeks. Look forward to another post about ways to handle information overload.