Overstimulation As The New Norm.

Phone in your hand. Music in your ears. Three conversations open. Reddit posts waiting. And mom is calling.

No idea when it happened, but I can assume I was 16 years old when this slowly started to feel normal thing to do. Everyone else was doing it, so I needed to as well. I became so used to juggling five different streams of information at once, that silence started to feel painful and uncomfortable. I remember sitting on my bed one day and thinking why I can’t just sit in silence and do nothing, like I was used to when I was little. Just playing with my toys, no TV on, no music in the backround.

Standing in line without reaching my phone felt weird. Sitting on a bus without headphones made me feel bored and tired. My attention was constantly divided, yet somehow I was okay with it on a daily basis. I knew that it is probably very bad, but no matter how hard I knew and tried, nothing changed for years on end.

I thought at the time that this was just what schoolkids did. Now being nearly 30 and seeing people scroll while driving, watching videos at traffic lights, replying to messages with one hand on the steering wheel, risking not only their own lives but everyone else’s around them. I see entire families sitting together in restaurants while everyone is looking at a different screen. I see commuters who cannot sit through ten-minute bus ride without opening an app.

We have become so uncomfortable with stillness that our brains immediately look for something to fill every empty second.

When I was in middle school, gaming wasn’t just a hobby for me. It was everything at one point. Playing for 36h straight didn’t sound schoking back then. I could spend days in front of my computer, barely noticing my empty stomach and postponing sleep, because there was always one more game and one more achievement to get. It was just overstimulation on top of overstimulation and pure dopamine hits constantly. But I was a teenager. My brain was still developing, my priorities were different and honestly, it felt normal for someone my age.

What I did not expect was to grow up and see adults doing the exact same thing.

That scares me.

For a long time, I wasn’t even part of this world. I didn’t have a smartphone until relatively late and I didn’t have social media as a young child. And I am so so grateful for that. My childhood happened mostly outside.

When COVID hit, like many people, I suddenly found myself spending far more time indoors. I was finishing my Bachelor’s, so I wasn’t exactly bored, but somehow TikTok still found its way to me into every spare moment. The thing about overstimulation is that you rarely notice it while you are doing it. You adapt and that constant noise becomes your baseline. Endless scrolling is a routine on its own. My attention span shrinked, patience dissapeared and my nervous system started to expect another hit after every few seconds.

Today I use social media very mindfully. Everything is built around improving my life. Over the last three years, I have intentionally trained my algorithms to work for me instead of against me. I follow topics that genuinely make me healthier, calmer and more informed about topics that matter to me. I use Pinterest for inspiration, because it leaves me feeling creative and excited. And that is basically all social media I have at this moment.

You don’t owe any platform your attention. You don’t have to stay somewhere that constantly makes you feel worse about yourself. There are countless communities, apps and spaces online - if one environment leaves you feeling drained every single time you close it, you are allowed to walk away or change it.

FOMO is a big thing and it kept me stuck for much longer than I’d like to admit. I thought that if I wasn’t constantly checking what everyone else was doing, I would fall behind. Behind on what, exactly? Watching influencers I have never met? Following the daily lives of people who have no idea who I am? I had invested so much emotional energy into people online that I barely noticed how much attention I had taken away from the people sitting right beside me.

Parasocial relationships are fascinating because they do feel real. You still celebrate someone’s achievements and feel sad when they are struggling. You know their routines, their pets, favourite coffee order and the layout of their kitchen. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying someone’s content, but do not replace it with your own. You are not living their lives and you are not them.

Right now my average phone screen time is around three hours a day. For someone who once spent 36h gaming, atleast 8h on TikTok and Instagram, that is a victory on its own. The relationship I had once with social media and tech devices has changed majorly for good. I choose when and why I reach for my phone and why I feel the need to use it.

The goal is not to quit everything. I work on my laptop every day and this is the way I can do what I love. Internet has taught me skills and helped me build opportunities that, I feel like, wouldn’t have existed otherwise. So it’s not entirely ohh so bad and you have to run as far away as possible.

Instead of:

“How many hours did I spend on my phone today?”

Think:

“What did those hours actually give me? How do I feel?”

You are allowed to protect your attention and wellbeing. You need to do it! Every platform is designed to keep you there as long as possible. Being intentional where you spend your time, isn’t being antisocial.

-Payton