There’s a moment you’ve probably lived through:
You open your laptop to send one email. Forty minutes later, you’ve answered two WhatsApps, Googled a skin rash, checked the weather, and can’t remember what you were doing.

This isn’t stress.
This is overstimulation.

And it isn’t something your mindset can out-muscle.

We’ve built a world that’s high on input and low on pause. A world where your phone wakes you, your inbox waits before breakfast, and your brain is processing more in a day than your ancestors did in a year. And it’s not just annoying—it’s rewiring your nervous system.

Chronic overstimulation hits you differently than acute stress. Acute stress, the kind your body was designed for has a beginning and an end. It spikes, it resolves. Overstimulation lingers. It piles on quietly, disguised as productivity, or even leisure. But your brain doesn’t distinguish between pressure from a deadline and pressure from five tabs open and a playlist in the background. Input is input. The system still floods.

The amygdala, your internal alarm bell, stays switched on. You become hypervigilant. Background noise feels louder. Small decisions feel heavier. You scroll, but none of it sticks. Sleep doesn’t land. You’re not recharging at night because your brain never powered down in the first place.

In this state, your prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking, planning, and decision-making gets sluggish. That’s why everything feels harder than it should. Not because you’re falling apart. Because you’re full.

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s metabolic.

A study by Gloria Mark and her team at UC Irvine found it takes over 20 minutes to return to a task after a single digital interruption. Now multiply that by the number of times you pick up your phone. Then add the ambient noise, the newsfeed, the low-grade urgency of everything all the time. The human brain wasn’t built for this. We’re still running Stone Age hardware on 5G bandwidth.

And yet the advice we keep hearing is: shift your mindset. Think positively. Try harder. The wellness industry would have us believe that burnout is a personal failure, not the natural consequence of a culture that monetizes your attention and rewards overstimulation.

The uncomfortable truth is that your nervous system isn’t designed for non-stop engagement. It needs friction. Edges. Limits. Boundaries. More space.

The fix isn’t another productivity hack. It’s doing less. It’s letting silence be part of your day. It’s recognising when you’re not actually tired, but you’re just fried.

So the next time you wake up exhausted, or find yourself irrationally angry at a notification, or can’t decide what to eat, pause. Not to meditate. Not to do the breathwork. Just to stop the signal.

It’s not a mindset problem.
It’s a spacing problem.

There’s no pause between things. No buffer. You go from app to task to conversation without catching your breath.

And the nervous system doesn’t recover in that.
It recovers in the in-between.
In the gaps.

That’s what’s missing. A gap. A pause.
And no one’s going to hand it to you.
You have to claim it.

Resources:

Gloria Mark, Attention Span

dscout, Phone Touches Study