Information Overload: Where’s Your Head At?

I’m busy.

I’m not here, nor there, or anywhere… but everywhere. (My three-year-old has me on Dr. Seuss. IYKYK.)

Physically, I’m parked in front of a screen. Whether it be that of my laptop, or that of my mobile. 

My mind is darting from A to B…

… to C… to D… to E… to no end.

There’s no pause to take a breath. There’s no Netflix and chill. Eating is a distraction I forget to factor in.

Forget self care. Forget friends. At this moment, I only see what I’m doing right here, right now.

“I’m busy”.

To distract from the busy, we busy our brains with social media. We watch video-after-video; videos layered by a stream of text captions, all our senses seemingly engaged at once. It’s 11pm; my eyes glaze over. I surrender to sleep. My phone is on charge, hidden under my pillow, mere centimeters from my head.

I talk to my husband, who’s also busy. I give him dates, instructions, ideas… ask for his advice. He repeats what I’ve said, but takes little in.

“We’re just so busy at the moment”.

In infancy, our brains work to create billions of new neural pathways daily. As adults, we’re enticed to store some information, but not others. They say from the age of 25, our brains solidify, allowing fewer neural pathways in.

I recently attended a wellness summit with a beautiful Australian skincare brand. I was captivated by the wisdom of Dr Libby Weaver - a nutritional biochemist and author. She spoke at length on the linkage between a woman’s hormones and her stress levels. Stress, it turns out, doesn’t just impact our heads, but various facets of our beings, from our fertility to how we experience menopause. And it all starts from the moment we get that first period.

We’re stuck in a state of consistently high adrenalin. Translation to the body: we’re not safe. Instead of running on high during instances of fight or flight, we float perched with our heads above water. We’re not quite stable, but merely hanging on by a thread.

Are we okay? I wonder how our bodies will cope with the busy as we age. I’ve grown up learning that stress impacts things like our skin, our waistlines, and ability to remember information. But it extends beyond that - to the gut, and how (and if) our hormones signal each other.

Even if we don’t associate our busyness with stress, are our bodies set to withstand being constantly ‘on’? It’s amazing how easily we excuse our busyness, and even glorify it.

In our twenties, being busy was rewarded with admiration and the assumption you had life ‘all figured out’. As a parent, busyness comes as a double-edged sword. If you’re busy at work, you feel shame from not assigning that adrenalin to your children, and visa versa. 

At my most hypocritical, I cancel a once-a-week yoga class to wallow in my busy; as though sitting in it is of greater benefit than seeking to calm it. Why? Because I’m too busy to find a solve.

So what do we do with the busy? Is it possible to simply “breathe it out”, or stretch it out, or sleep it off, or holiday it away? And if it leaves us, are we satisfied in the quiet? Would we thrive as a race without the coffee, or haste, or adrenalin? Will the human body ever reach an end point in the race to get it all done?

Place both feet on the ground.
Close your eyes.
Breathe in for four.
Hold for seven.
And out.
Breathe normally.
Then, repeat.

Here we go again.

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