How do you deal with overwhelm in a noisy world?

Seeking out some peace to get creative, in a world that won’t shut up.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Twenty-four hour news cycle; infinite scroll; forever online; riveted to the screen, never switched off, just set to airplane mode from time to time. On average, we humans generate 402.74 million terabytes of data each day. A quote:

The average global consumer spends 82 hours per week consuming information. Assuming an average of seven hours of sleep per night, this means that 69% of our waking hours are engaged in consuming information… As a result, we consume almost 90x more information in terms of bits today than we did in 1940 and 4x more than we did less than twenty years ago (from Deep Water Management).

I hardly need to point out the nature of all this information, which skews towards negativity — death, destruction, hatred, uncertainty. We’ve made the world so noisy, and so present in every corner of our lives, that it shouldn’t be all that surprising if you feel overwhelmed. I certainly do.

Image by me :)

It’s not just the internet. Every facet of our lives is dominated by sales messaging, calls to action…