How much is too much? I’ve caught myself thinking about the consumption of information. We’re bombarded daily with so much data (words, sounds, and images). Often, the stimulation is so overwhelming that our brains can literally stop thinking efficiently. Instead of feeling prepared to make decisions, we feel paralyzed by so many options and directions.
The excess of information begins in childhood, as kids start to have contact with a world of data from a young age. Imagine a child researching a video on YouTube for a school project; they type in keywords, click on a video, an ad pops up, they click on the ad, and from there, they enter a mountain of distraction and noise. And we, as adults, aren’t exempt from this noise, as you may have already realized.
Infobesity
The term “information overload” was first used in 1962 and was later popularized by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock. It’s also known by quirky names like infobesity, infoxication, or information anxiety.
Symptoms include:
- Altered emotional state: high levels of stress and anxiety
- “Forgetfulness”: low retention of information
- FOMO: fear of missing out on the latest news or trends
- Insomnia or restless sleep
- Mental fatigue
- Muscle tension
According to studies cited by experts, our brain functions like a hard drive with a filtering system that decides what to store and what to discard. Psychologist George A. Miller found that humans can process about seven chunks of information at a time. Beyond that, we start to forget or get confused. Now, imagine a daily consumption of 6 hours and 38 minutes? This average was reported in the Digital 2025: Global Overview Report, published by DataReportal.
But this processing isn’t fixed; it can be affected by a person’s emotional state, especially by high levels of stress and anxiety. So, if we don’t put down our phones and continue to consume information randomly, there’s a high chance that the overload will disrupt our cognitive abilities.
When we’re overloaded with information and emotionally distressed, the brain can easily forget things that are important for our lives and goals, and instead retain irrelevant data, like that random news story you saw by accident that just stuck in your head.
Here are some tips to diagnose if you’re feeding an unhealthy environment that could cause you to develop “infobesity”:
- You stop to look at every notification that arrives: Emails, social media, news, text messages.
- Mindless scrolling: You spend all your free time on your phone, looking at trivialities, ads, and both shallow and deep content that get all mixed up.
- Reduced Productivity: You spend more time sorting through info than acting on it.
- Decision fatigue: A mountain of information you deem important accumulates into divergent opinions and various options, and you end up deciding nothing. In other words, you’re paralyzed.
If you feel it’s time to change, the mental model of Delayed Gratification can be helpful.
The Information Diet
The minimalist idea of having only what is necessary is deeply connected to the universe of mental models, extracting frameworks to think more clearly, orderly, and assertively. After all, in the whirlwind of data, we often can’t distinguish valuable information from misleading or even proselytizing information full of filler content.
This idea connects with the reflections of authors like Yuval Noah Harari, especially in his book Nexus, where he warns about the dangers of misinformation and digital manipulation. We can say that the idea of a digital detox or an “information diet” is a collective and emerging proposal, gaining traction among philosophers, journalists, and educators concerned with mental health and the quality of the information we consume.
To achieve this, we need to overcome our addiction to digital stimuli.
The Mental Model of Delayed Gratification
Our brain seeks immediate satisfaction, that dopaminergic pleasure of quick consumption: a 1-minute video, likes, a sensationalist headline about a celebrity, or that almost innocent curiosity to know if that interesting person replied to your text message or email.
The strategy to train, the mental model to practice, and the challenge I propose to you is called Delayed Gratification. The idea here is to replace our digital rewards with activities that offer a deeper sense of gratification and help us train ourselves to pause, ponder, and think for ourselves instead of just reacting to immediate stimuli, immediately coming to a conclusion or expecting immediate positive feedback. This category includes: creative writing, reading a previously selected book or article and reflecting on it, painting a picture, walking the dogs, meditating and any other activity that can be done without screens.
You could still stay active and creative through digital means, whether it’s exercising with interactive video games, painting on a screen, or engaging in reading and writing online. The internet has unlocked a vast landscape of possibilities, but it has also unleashed a constant stream of distractions. So, if you lack the discipline to take notes, save valuable content for later, carve out focused time for creation, or actively filter what you stumble upon for future use, then using screens may do more harm than good.
Conscious information consumption is a muscle to be exercised, even for the most active minds you consider to have high cognitive capacity.
If you want to exercise your ability to filter what you find digitally to stimulate you creatively, set a short period of time for random browsing and analyze your degree of discipline when:
- Browsing only for the established period of time
- Taking notes of longer ideas and references for future filtering
- Seeking out safe/confirmed sources.
We’re not exempt from infobesity, but now the need to filter and consume consciously has become more evident since access to information has become so widespread. We need to train this muscle and learn to extract mental models that are useful to us while leaving aside much of the noise.
If you’re interested in this kind of content, you might enjoy reading How to Think Smart, Vol. 1. Click here to get your copy.
Subscribe
Subscribe to get our the latest stories in your inbox.
