If you had to describe the landscape of your mind, what words would you use? It recently dawned on minimalist me that my inner life looks more like the home of a maximalist: a multi-level scaffolding gingerly housing urgent and near-future to-dos, long-held personality traits and newly-forming attitudes, and thousands of memories and reactions to things already said and done. On top of everything? The sensations of the present moment—sounds, sights, smells, feelings—rushing in like a current ceaselessly reconstituting a riverbed.
Many of us are familiar with the concept of sensory overload or overstimulation. Depending on the level of your personal sensitivity to stimuli, a cluttered or loud or fragrant space can be a source of distress, sounding alarm bells throughout your body and leaving you feeling anxious, uncomfortable, paralyzed, or all of the above. Easing sensory overload is commonly talked about in terms of controlling your physical environment and lessening sensorial inputs. But we can also become overwhelmed by what we let into the walls of our mind, an environment that is ultimately much harder to reorganize.
Chronic overstimulation is a condition that can leave you feeling exhausted, irritable, emotional, and unable to cope with daily tasks or maintain close relationships. Often related to other conditions like ASD, ADHD, or OCD, overstimulation is now having a widespread effect on the population: Burnout from overstimulation is on the rise, and sensory historians have deemed our current pandemic era a “sensory revolution” due to how rapidly our environments and lifestyles changed in order to avoid the spread of COVID-19.
But speaking for myself—and I’d wager many others—it’s tech, and its truly bottomless well of content. We live in the information age, where our attention is currency. With unfettered access to articles, books, blogs, and podcasts, for those of us who love ideas and are alive to the world, it’s easy to go from consumer to consumed—feeling like you are a channel for all the world’s insights, opinions, aches, and pains.
So what should you do when the overstimulation call is coming from inside the house?
Simple living has been practiced by spiritual groups across time and around the world, from Buddhists and Taoists to Quakers and Mennonites. Within simple living is a commitment to being aware and measured when it comes to the types and amounts of resources your body, home, and community uses. The idea is not only that by using less you’re being gentler on the planet (though that should be reason enough to sign on), but that you experience personal and collective liberation when you’re not burdened by the demands of stuff. “’Tis the gift to be simple,” the Shaker song says, “’tis the gift to be free.”
The movement of simple living has been adopted in the mainstream in many ways, with growing interest in material minimalism and slow [insert your choice of noun or verb here] showing up in retail ventures, restaurants, brand statements, publishing models, etc. The focus is often on fewer, more meaningful things. What’s often missing from the conversation is how we can practice the same principles when it comes to our mental experience.
In his book The News: A User’s Manual, cultural theorist Alain de Botton puts the buyer’s desire up against the news junkie’s, writing that “what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a deeper, often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation. We don't only want to own things; we want to be changed through our ownership of them.”
What we consume most of these days is content. Are we ready for slow media? How do we love ideas and stay informed without being inundated, overstimulated, or unable to spend quiet time with ourself? Here are a few tips:
Spend time away from devices
The world has a lot to teach us beyond what we can learn on our phone or even read in a book (which, at one time in history, was also a cutting-edge device!). Spend a day or two tapping into your sensory knowledge by spending unplugged time outside, cooking a flavorful meal, gardening, seeing an art exhibition, or relaxing at a listening lounge.
Create friction
Slow your web surfing with Stanford’s HabitLab app, which allows you to implement up to 20 interventions that will have you second-guessing mindless scrolling. You determine your sore-spot apps and sites, and HabitLab sets to work, making your time there uncomfortable.
Commit to quality, not quantity
It’s good to be informed—but also to realize that the news cycle has reached an untenable speed. Check a trusted news source once or twice a day, but turn off notifications that keep you in a constant state of helpless hyper-vigilance. When it comes to personal interest or entertainment, consider committing to a lengthy essay on a topic you love instead of five quick takes.
I don’t wish to have a meager inner life, and I doubt you do either. Some amount of mental disarray is inevitable, and there are elements of mine that I would never want to purge. For instance, a heap of complex feelings jammed up against a sliver of trivial knowledge wedged alongside a lyric from a favorite song can lead to a really specific, never-to-be-replicated association that is mine alone. But that doesn’t mean I can’t clean things up. Yes, we love the world of ideas—let’s make room for our own.
