How Do You Focus on Useful Things in the Face of Information Overload?
Inundated with information overload, how do you shift your focus to what you can control?
Let’s face it – the world is mad.
Spend any time whatsoever on social media, watching or reading the news – and you’re bombarded by all the evidence of the madness – and then some. The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t make us collectively more informed. In truth, it makes us more scared, distressed, and unhappy. We don’t know the world around us and what’s happening better – we just get flooded with wave after wave of information.
What’s more – most of that information does you and I no good. None whatsoever. Zero. Why? Because it’s all about things that neither you nor I can do jack shit about.
Everything happening an ocean away is out of your control. Think about – what, if anything, can you do about things happening thousands of miles away? Nothing.
Likewise, everything happening outside of your locale is out of your control. Whether you voted or not – that’s the extent of your direct control.
Before I dig deeper, I am in no way, shape, or form, advocating for being ignorant. Voting exercises a fundamental right, as do protests, sending letters and emails to government and big business leaders, making calls, and the like. These are actions you can take to do something that feels important and right to and for you. However, apart from that – it’s all beyond your control.
Even as you get increasingly near your life experience, you still have very little control over anything. That’s because other people, random happenstances, the weather, and other such matters are beyond you.
What do you/can you control?
The dominant messages being beamed into your head, heart, and soul by the news and across social media are all the same. This, that, or the other thing will fix your problem and make your life everything you dream it can be.
Overweight? Join this gym, take this pill, download that app. Depressed? Read this book, get this pill, buy the big piece of cake. Feeling unattractive? Buy the car, drink the wine, wear that cologne or perfume. Financial issues? Take this class, use the gambling app, spend money to make money.
Every one of these is the same solution on the surface: Look outwards. Turn to the material, tangible things to be and feel better. Buy more, spend more, invest more, and seek more help out there from those better, wiser, more attractive, and richer than you.
To be fair – some people and things can help you and provide useful guidance. Therapists, doctors, dieticians, and numerous books, podcasts, and the like are helpful guides. But only guides and nothing more. They won’t have the solutions.
Why? Because you have the solutions.
That’s because you have the ultimate control of you, yourself. Who, what, where, how, and why you are is wholly under your control.
This isn’t entirely true of children – because they’re still developing the necessary tools to live on their own. But past about age 16 or so, give or take a year or two, you can get a real handle over yourself and take control.
And this is always true of your inner mindset/headspace/psyche self.
Focus on mindfulness
You are the only one in your head, heart, and soul. There’s nobody else in there. Thus, nobody else can control what’s happening within you.
This specifically applies to your conscious awareness. Your mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. They’re under your control.
It doesn’t always feel that way. And that’s because your subconscious mind and your ego do the driving when you aren’t practicing mindfulness.
What that means is that your subconscious mind is a sponge. It absorbs every bit of info it takes in with no filters – unless you apply the conscious mind to mindfully wring it out. And like a sponge, when you don’t, it’ll become oversaturated and potentially smelly.
Your subconscious is where you hold your beliefs, values, and habits. These can and do become outdated when you don’t focus on mindfulness to address them and change any that cease to serve you. It’s all too easy to let beliefs and habits drive you that you don’t truly hold anymore.
Your ego is the way you project to the world without and reflects back to yourself. At some point, when you were – in the past – practicing conscious awareness, your ego formed. That became who you presented to the world without and reflected to yourself.
But unchecked, your ego gets left behind and isn’t who you desire to be. But it was a construct of comfort – a comfort zone – at a past time.
The ego knows it’s artificial and fears and avoids change because that will destroy it. Hence, most resistance you encounter is from your ego holding onto something no longer serving you.
Focus on mindfulness, be here now, and be consciously aware of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your actions, and your intentions. That puts you in control.
Let’s address an important elephant in the room – marginalization
I’ve seen this brought up a time or two, and I’ve never addressed it. But it’s too important to remain unwritten.
Privilege isn’t some “woke” notion. Unless you are in any way part of a marginalized group, you don’t and can’t understand the struggles.
I’m about as not marginalized as you can get – with one exception.
Why do I write that? Because I’m a straight, white, middle-aged, able-bodied, cis-gendered male. By and large, the world is handed to me – and those like me – on a silver platter. That’s because I’m not gay, black, elderly, disabled, transgendered, or any other marginalized group.
I have no genuine experience with what struggles anyone not privileged as I have been undergoes.
The one exception I do have? I’m culturally Jewish. I don’t practice the religion – but I am still proud of my heritage. And though it’s been relatively little, I’ve had some experience with the marginalization of my people. But that is so minor compared to what many I care about do and have faced, that I consider it barely an exception for how not marginalized my life is.
I recognize and respect all who have that added struggle. When, how, and where I can stand with you and for you to de-marginalize your existence, you can bet your ass that I will.
But I think it’s important to recognize and acknowledge this. And how it will impact the individual approach to conscious awareness and the like.
You control what you focus on
When it comes to where you put your focus – you have all the control.
If you focus on the outside world and all that you can do nothing about – you’re not likely to feel good. Bad news sells, sensational headlines get readers, and rubbernecking is a thing. Maybe you don’t want to look – but then you find that you can’t look away, either.
You have a choice. Step back. Spend less time on social media. Put your focus on things you can and do control. Practice conscious awareness – mindfulness – here and how, and take the wheel to drive your life experience.
Know this – it is NOT selfish to give your life experience and inner being attention. Selfishness is much more specific than we make it out to be because of messages about people getting hurt by other people due to selfish acts.
Two things. One – you cannot control how anyone else will feel, act, or react to something YOU do. Period. If you set boundaries, get rest, and say no to things you don’t care to do and someone feels that’s selfish of you – that’s on them, not you. You can’t control that.
Two – unless you have actively done something with malice of forethought to cause another to go without, experience lack, and suffer hurt or harm from that – you are not selfish. What you do when it comes to self-care isn’t selfish. Unless you knowingly do something cruel, unkind, uncompassionate, and the like – you’re not being selfish. No matter how someone else feels due to that action.
When all is said and done, you can control your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. And in truth -they’re EVERYTHING when it comes to you. So why not mindfully put the focus on what you can control over what you can’t?
Recognizing you can choose what you focus on isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you see how bombarded you are with information, and how distracting and disturbing that can be, you can see with more clarity how that impacts you. Knowing that with mindfulness you can take control of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions, you choose where to put your focus and attention so that it best benefits you and your life experience.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.
To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the four hundred and seventy-third entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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