The Fine Line Between Knowing and Overwhelming
How do you define too much information?
I’m mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted. It takes a lot of energy to reclaim my balance these days.
Why? Because I care about the world I live in. It matters to me that our so-called leaders are doing so many hateful, unhinged, harmful things to people, places, and things. Reading about the latest injustice, the unnecessary cruelty, and the utter uncaring is a lot.
It’s all too easy to get dragged in deeper and deeper. Well-meaning friends share a lot of the terrible things in the interest of staying informed. The problem is that it takes very little to cross that fine line between knowing and overwhelming.
When you cross that line, you experience a lot of distress. Then, if your life is not directly impacted, or actually going well in the middle of all this, you feel guilty, maybe even ashamed. You might start to wonder if, unintentionally, you’re Nero fiddling as the world burns around you.
I’m struggling to walk the tightrope of that fine line between knowing and overwhelming. Since I know I’m not alone, I’d like to share some insight with you about this.
Information vs too much information
Mainstream media is hard to discern. Even the largely neutral sources are not without bias or consideration for their parent company and profit. Add to that the outright propaganda machines, sensationalism, clickbait, and an increasingly anti-intellectual movement, and identifying fake and true is incredibly difficult.
The instant connectivity of the internet has been both good and bad for us all. On the one hand, you can communicate with anyone anywhere around the globe instantly. On the other hand, you can share and spread a disproven opinion just as instantaneously.
True or false, real or fake, the line between information and too much information is difficult to see. Knowledge is power, and more than that, empowerment. But where’s the line between being in the know and being overwhelmed?
This line is different for different people. For me, the line is noticeable when I begin to feel hopeless and lost. When I start to feel like it’s all crashing down and I’m a bug in danger of being squashed, that’s how I can tell I’ve taken in too much information.
The danger of that is the impact that it has on my mental, emotional, spiritual, and ultimately physical health, wellness, and wellbeing.
Walking the fine line between knowing and overwhelming
When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I start to feel disempowered. If I allow that to dominate my psyche, it will lead to mental, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion, depression, and potentially worse.
The warning sign for me is that feeling of hopelessness, of being lost, of seeing no way out. It’s a nagging fear that everything is coming apart and there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it.
I suspect that this is what leads some people into suicidal thoughts and actions. I never go that way, but I do sink into depression, sadness, and a negative state that leads to me gaining weight, losing muscle tone, and a variety of other mental, emotional, and spiritual discomforts.
Walking the fine line between knowing and overwhelming is best done mindfully. When I practice active conscious awareness – mindfulness – I have clarity. That clarity is internal, and despite notions to the contrary, not selfish.
To engage with this, I must make active choices and decisions about my life.
Choosing the paths you walk
You, and you alone, are in your head, heart, and soul. Nobody else can live your life for you. And honestly, do you want them to?
Ultimately, you decide who, what, where, how, and why you are. Yes, sometimes some situations and circumstances have brought you to who, what, where, how, and why you are that you haven’t controlled. Odds are, that’s due to entirely external matters.
This is where mindfulness empowers you. Specifically, self-awareness. That begins by asking yourself questions like,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What are my intentions?
- Is my approach positive, negative, or neutral?
- What am I doing?
Every single one of the above questions can only be asked and answered by you, and only right here, right now. When you don’t ask them, you lose yourself. When you lose yourself, it’s easy for you to become overwhelmed.
This is why I’m exploring the fine line between knowing and overwhelming. Because crossing it does more harm than good.
Knowing and overwhelming and empowerment
It’s not at all selfish to practice self-care. Specifically, to use active conscious awareness to recognize the line between knowing and overwhelming.
This is why I am spending far less time browsing social media. It’s far too easy to go down this or that rabbit hole and become overwhelmed by it all.
When I get overwhelmed, I become disempowered. When I’m disempowered, my mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health, wellness, and wellbeing get neglected. That does me harm, which then means I can do even less for the world around me.
Recognizing the fine line between knowing and overwhelming is important. That’s because any change you desire to see in the world at large can only start within you. All change necessitates empowerment, and empowerment comes from within, not from without.
I share this because it helps me better cope and create my empowerment. And I hope that by sharing, you see that you’re not alone and how you can also choose the fine line between knowing and overwhelming for your overall health, wellness, and wellbeing.
When you recognize it, how do you manage that line?
This is the six-hundred-ninety-fifth (695) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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