The Secret to Staying Oriented and Avoiding Overwhelm

Why overwhelm rises so quickly in the digital age, the cognitive architecture behind it, and the practical steps that protect your mind in a time of accelerating political pressure.

Nov 23, 2025

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Dear friends

In my last piece, I outlined how overwhelm develops under authoritarian conditions — not as a personal shortcoming, but as the predictable result of sustained political pressure, uncertainty, and an information climate that no one is built to process. We looked at how constant shifts, mixed messages, disinformation, and administrative pressure combine to push our internal systems past what they can absorb. And we traced how, once that tipping point is reached, overwhelm becomes the bridge between chronic stress and burnout.

That brings us to the next part of the picture. If overwhelm is the turning point, then we need to understand what’s actually happening when the demands on us begin to exceed what our minds can reasonably handle. Overwhelm isn’t just a feeling — it’s the point at which the limits of our working memory, attention, and cognitive load start to shape our experience from the inside out.

So today I’ll take you through the mechanics of overload: what it is, how it arises, and why it’s becoming so common in the political environment we’re living through. Once I’ve gone through the architecture behind it, there are steps to help you begin to lighten the load in a way that will genuinely help — rather than treating the symptoms and hoping for the best.

And the clearest place to begin is with understanding the part of your mind that does the immediate work of holding and processing information.

Working memory

Working memory is the mental workbench you use to place information at the forefront of your mind for a short stretch while you’re doing something with it. It’s the space where you hold a phone number long enough to dial it, remember the point of a sentence while you’re finishing it, or keep track of steps in a task before we carry them out. It’s also the part of thinking that lets us combine new information with what we already know so we can reason things out, plan, or make decisions. Working memory is temporary, fragile, and easily knocked off course by distraction.

The common modern estimate is that working memory can hold roughly four ± 1 meaningful chunks of information at once. A chunk is simply a small unit we mentally group together so it feels like one item rather than many. (Earlier research suggested a limit of around seven items, but later work has shown that four is a more realistic figure for everyday thinking.) So when you’re juggling a phone number, a conversation, dinner plans, and trying to remember that the dog needs feeding, you’re pretty much at the limit. This tiny capacity is the foundation of why overload occurs so easily.

Dual-process theory

Dual-process theory helps explain why certain tasks can feel both effortless and mentally draining at the same time, depending on the situation. It proposes that the mind uses two different modes of thinking.

System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It handles your quick reactions like recognising a familiar face in a crowd, reaching to stop a falling glass, or reading simple words without consciously sounding them out.
System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful. It steps in when you need to compare information, evaluate claims, or make careful decisions, and it leans heavily on working memory because it must hold several ideas in mind at once.

In everyday life the two systems run side by side. Routine actions rely on the quick, automatic mode, but the moment a task becomes unfamiliar, confusing, or important, the deliberate mode takes over and immediately increases the load on working memory. Even a simple situation, such as navigating an unfamiliar route or resolving a misunderstanding in conversation, can feel surprisingly taxing because the slower mode is doing the hard work.

Attentional blink

Attentional blink adds another important piece to the puzzle.

When you process two meaningful pieces of information in quick succession, while your mind can fully register the first it temporarily loses the ability to register the second. This brief dip in awareness lasts only a fraction of a second, but it has real consequences.

If you are already using your working memory heavily — trying to follow a story, remember a detail, or reason through a problem — this blink becomes more pronounced. Because your brain is still finalising the processing of the first item, it leaves fewer resources available for you to catch the second. This is not forgetfulness; it’s a bottleneck created by the way your attention and working memory share limited resources. Both systems draw from the same narrow bandwidth, and when one is heavily engaged, the other has far less room to operate. Information overload creates repeated blinks, which leaves gaps in your awareness. The faster important information arrives, the more these tiny blind spots accumulate, leading to a sense of slipping behind even while focusing hard.

Cognitive load theory (CLT)

CLT brings all these threads together.

By dividing our mental effort into three distinct types, CLT helps us understand why certain tasks remain manageable while others quickly push us past what we can comfortably process.

Intrinsic cognitive load is the effort created by the complexity of a task itself. It depends on how many separate pieces of information you need to hold in your mind at once and how much they interact with each other. This type of load varies according to the nature of the material and how familiar you already are with it. Because it comes from the task itself, it is largely unavoidable.

Germane cognitive load is the effort invested in building understanding. It’s the mental work of creating and strengthening long-term frameworks to allow you to remember new knowledge and connect it with what you already know. This form of load is helpful, because it supports your ability to understand and remember.

Extraneous cognitive load is the effort you spend on anything that does not actually support learning or task completion. It’s mental effort that’s wasted on inefficient or unnecessary processing, and it comes from dealing with unclear explanations, irrelevant details, unnecessary steps, or disorganised material. This is the cost of managing fragmentation — stitching together information that’s been broken up, scattered, or presented out of sequence — working through confusion, or trying to make sense of information that is poorly presented. This type of load provides zero value to real understanding or effective action, but it consumes precious cognitive bandwidth all the same.

In our current political climate, the information ecosystem is perfectly engineered to maximise your extraneous load, forcing you to spend all of your limited cognitive energy on clearing the noise rather than absorbing the signal. This is what pushes us over the edge into overwhelm.

The Architecture of Overwhelm in the Modern Political Moment

Taken together, these ideas show that while our cognitive architecture is powerful, it’s also sharply limited. Our working memory offers only a small amount of space to hold things in mind. When we’re using the slower, effortful mode of thinking, it relies heavily on that limited space. If information arrives faster than it can be processed, our attention briefly misses what follows. At the same time, different demands are competing for the same narrow capacity. When that capacity is exceeded, the result is cognitive overload, overwhelm, and then, if no remedy is presented, burnout. Burnout is therefore a straightforward consequence of the limits built into our attention and working memory, not a sign of personal failure.

This is not just theory. Research into overwhelm in the workplace shows that when our processing capacity is exceeded by relentless input of data (cognitive overload), the result is the emotional and functional state we call overwhelm. Overwhelm is our felt experience of cognitive overload. And continued overwhelm leads to burnout.

This matters for any of us trying to stay politically engaged today. We need to stay informed in the midst of a fast-moving crisis, and to continue following events — because the stakes are high, and turning away feels irresponsible, even dangerous. Yet in our attempts to keep up, we are being met by a stream of information that is far larger and faster than anything our attention was built to absorb.

Staying politically aware now means keeping up with a speed of change that far exceeds our cognitive limits. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose — the force of it makes even the most basic act of staying informed feel punishing. News, commentary, analysis, rumours, outrage, rebuttals, corrections, and emotional reactions — they all appear together, and at the same time. Every piece asks us for our attention, our judgement, and an emotional response, so each one requires that we work using our slower, effortful mode of thinking. That mode burns through our cognitive resources.

The modern information landscape adds further pressure by mixing genuine public-interest information with distraction, performance, and deliberate manipulation. This increases fragmentation, making it harder to piece together a picture of what we’re trying to understand. Instead of dealing with one clear thread of information, our brains are pushed to juggle mismatched claims, half-truths, and contradictions, which forces our attention to keep switching direction rather than building clear understanding. We must decide what matters while also deciding what to ignore, so each false or distorted piece forces extra checking, comparing, and sorting just to work out what belongs together and what doesn’t.

That extra work doesn’t move our understanding forward; it simply drains our mental energy. Over time, the effort required to stay informed, sift competing claims, and maintain a stable understanding of events becomes too taxing for us to continue.

When this happens day after day, cognitive overload becomes the constant background condition rather than an occasional spike. And it’s not just an individual experience. Instead, it becomes a predictable background condition for most politically engaged citizens.

In a world that doesn’t pause, slow down, or make room for us to process what’s happening around us, we find ourselves trying to keep track of more stories, more analyses and more reactions than our working memory and attention can hold. The resulting strain is not a sign that we are inattentive or insufficiently dedicated. It is a predictable response to an information system that supplies data at a rate far beyond what human cognition evolved to manage.

This is why authoritarian movements — whether organised or emerging through broader social shifts — thrive in environments where citizens feel overwhelmed. When we feel overwhelmed, we become easier to sway with simple stories and confident voices, no matter how unreliable those voices may be.

My point here is that we need to recognise that our struggle to stay oriented has structural causes. Our brains are being asked to operate beyond their natural limits in a setting that rewards speed over clarity and volume over coherence. In the context of rising authoritarianism, this creates a genuine tension: we need to engage, but the conditions under which we engage are intrinsically overwhelming. Recognising this helps us understand why so many of us feel stretched before we have even begun to form a political view on the events we are trying to follow. This time asks us to stay informed, but the way information now reaches us makes the potential cost high.

But there is a solution — and it’s not what everyone else is telling us.

Why This Matters

When we turn to the internet for help with overwhelm, we’re met with an endless supply of advice on how to stay calm, push through, and cope better. There’s no shortage of tips on breathing, mindfulness, and building resilience. And yes, those strategies do help us manage chronic stress. But when we’ve reached the point of overwhelm — which comes from cognitive overload — they’re ineffective, because they simply don’t reach the root of the problem.

When we look at the research on managing overwhelm in the workplace — the environment where overwhelm and burnout have been studied most thoroughly — the message is clear: to ease cognitive overload, we have to reduce the amount and complexity of the information we take in. (In workplace settings, workload, role clarity, organisational culture, and time pressure also play a part, but the underlying principle remains the same.) Everything else sits on top of that.

This is where I can offer you something valuable.

My immune system reacts — with allergic symptoms and pain responses — to things that rarely register for other people: food, smells, light, touch, temperature changes, sound. Though it doesn’t feel like strain, my nervous system is constantly scanning for these ‘threats’, and the long term physiological response is the same as that of chronic stress. I’ve navigated this for decades, dancing round the edges of cognitive overload, overwhelm and burnout. It shapes every part of how I move through my day and requires that I micro-manage my environment down to the smallest sensory details. I spend the majority of my life at home, where it’s ‘safe’.

I find switching between tasks difficult and draining. When I’m writing, I can’t readily switch to reading. When I’m reading, I struggle to switch to responding. When I engage with other people for even a couple of hours in a day, I can’t do any of that, so I meet people rarely, one-to-one where possible, and in quiet, spacious locations. I always need a day or two to rest before writing again. And even with this level of care, I’ve slipped into overwhelm, then burnout, twice since I started writing here in March.

Even the simple act of responding to comments and messages here on Substack can push me into overload if I don’t pace myself. That’s why I’ve had to turn down interview requests, podcast invitations, and even your generous award nominations. It’s not because I’m not interested — far from it, I’d love to be involved — but simply because I don’t have the mental capacity those things require. (It’s also why, when the demands on my attention are high — say, when I have to navigate medical appointments or basic administrative tasks — my posts take longer for me to write than I’ve planned.)

There’s a reason this matters to you.

In a time of advancing authoritarianism in the United States, with so much at stake for the world at large, it’s vital we stay informed and engaged. Yet in the digital age, that comes at a cognitive cost few people have recognised. If you’re trying to follow events closely, then the research on workplace stress and burnout suggests it isn’t a question of if you slip into overwhelm, but when.

From overwhelm, it’s a short slope to burnout. It’s far easier to stay off that path than it is to navigate from within it. And as medical support becomes more inaccessible, it becomes even more important for you to understand your own nervous system response and know how to manage it. That’s why I’m so deeply committed to sharing what I’ve learned: staying active and resisting authoritarianism requires that we stay mentally intact, not exhausted.

And here’s how I can help you. Living like this has forced me to build a practical framework for managing cognitive load. I’ve had to work out how to stay informed without flooding my system, how I can take in what matters without tipping into collapse. And it turns out that the framework I’ve built out of necessity is useful far beyond my circumstances. In fact, it’s exactly what’s needed to help politically engaged citizens stay steady, instead of spiralling into overwhelm and burnout.

The principles that help me stay informed without collapsing under the weight of information are the same principles that will help you keep your footing in a world that demands more attention than any of us can reasonably give.

Redefining the Edges

The first place this framework needs to be applied is on the devices that deliver most of the information you’re trying to process — your phone, tablet, and computer. These are where news, messages, crises, commentary, and social contact arrive, and they’re you’re biggest source of incoming cognitive load. So if you want to keep your working memory steady, this is where the practical work begins.

Identify the hours that are genuinely yours

Begin by highlighting the hours of your day that are not taken up by work or responsibilities. These are the hours when your attention is your own. Marking out this time matters — it’s the starting point for giving your working memory predictable periods of rest, rather than leaving it open to constant interruption.

Use your attention with intention

Within those hours, set two 15–30 minute windows for the news and social media, however you access them — whether on your phone, through apps, or through browser tabs on a larger screen. These activities require the slower, more effortful mode of thinking, so keeping them tightly managed prevents them from eating into your whole day. It also gives your nervous system a break from scanning for new information.

Just make sure neither window falls within 90 minutes of going to bed, because the combination of blue light, fast-moving content, and emotional charge delays the natural shift your brain needs to make to move toward sleep.

Set alarms or timers

Set a simple alarm or timer for the times you’ve chosen for news and social media. Phones handle this easily, while tablets and computers usually require a timer or calendar alert. The point is the same: turning to these high-load platforms becomes a deliberate choice, rather than a reflex, putting you back in control. When you know a window is coming, it becomes easier to ignore the pull to check what’s happening in the meantime.

Protect your time with focus or do-not-disturb settings

Outside these chosen windows, use the focus or do-not-disturb settings built into your devices — or their closest equivalents — so that only specific people can reach you, and only on the platforms they normally use to contact you. This gives your attention a clear boundary. Instead of being pulled away every few minutes, your working memory can stay with what you’re actually doing.

Most people reach me on Substack, WhatsApp, or Signal. None of these are installed as apps on my laptop, or sitting open in tabs while I’m working. On my phone, I use focus settings so that only the people who genuinely need to reach me can do so during those hours. When I’m meditating or resting everything is off. If I didn’t have these boundaries in place, I’d struggle to function.

Reduce the load from apps and tabs

Every app, program, and browser tab adds to your mental load, even when you’re not using it. Phones, tablets, and computers differ in how this shows up — on a phone it’s the grid of apps, on a tablet it’s the same combined with multitasking panes, and on a computer it’s usually open programs, tabs, and persistent notifications.

Look through what you keep on each device and ask yourself whether the value each one gives you outweighs the demand it places on your attention. If an app or program doesn’t earn its place, delete it. Most of us are surprised by how quickly we stop missing the things we initially hesitate to remove.

Turn off all non-essential notifications

Notifications are one of the fastest ways to overload your working memory because they force your attention to switch before you’ve finished processing what you were already doing. And when you’re being deliberate about how you use your devices, you don’t need them — you decide when to check things, rather than letting your screen decide for you. Keeping notifications only for what is genuinely essential cuts out the background noise and protects your ability to think clearly.

On my own devices, the only notifications I allow are voice calls, texts, and messages from specific people — nothing else. Even these are switched off when I’m meditating, resting, or within the 90-minute pre-bedtime window. My engagement with everything else is intentional, taking place only during my scheduled windows.

And even though all of my work and conversation with readers happens here on Substack, I don’t keep Substack notifications switched on. My engagement here has to be as deliberate and contained as it is everywhere else online. Although we’re often told that “going viral” is something to aim for, I’ve learned the hard way that a post or note that draws hundreds of comments is — for anyone with fragile working memory — a direct route to cognitive overload and overwhelm.

Make screens less visually demanding

Digital interfaces are deliberately designed to be visually demanding. This is true across devices. Phone and tablet home screens use colour, badges, and movement to draw your eye; computers do something similar with bright icons, notification badges, and tabs that highlight when something updates. None of this is accidental — each element adds to the mental load your attention has to manage. To reduce that load, consider adjusting the accessibility or display settings on whichever device you use most. Greyscale or reduced colour saturation lowers the visual demand of the screen, which lightens the cognitive load it places on you. This small change removes another layer of strain on your working memory.

I’d love to know which of these steps you think will make the biggest difference for you — and where you expect the hardest part to be.