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.

Christina Care

May 10, 2025

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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.1 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.2

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.

How are you supposed to deal with feeling overwhelmed? How do you make enough space to focus, and create?

It’s not just about the internet. Every facet of our lives is dominated by sales messaging, calls to action, and information sharing. Information is power, yes, but how much input can our brains really take? We have to make so many more choices in a day, and we spend so much more time absorbing the firehose of information coming at us, it doesn’t actually leave much space for quiet thinking - or, god forbid, boredom. We need that silence. We need that boredom. As creatives, it’s vital time in which ideas are formed. So what can we do about it?

Here’s what I’m trying…

Deliberately taking more time to do the very same thing.

When I was learning to drive, I had an instructor who told me to slow down when I noticed someone getting too close behind me - in other words, if they were trying to hurry me. I’m not sure if this is always the best advice for driving, but as a metaphor, I like it a lot. When people hurry me, I have started trying to ask: Why do I feel hurried? And then I try to consciously slow down. I think people rush around, particularly in cities, with no real cause. It’s hard to separate myself and not get caught up in this. But I am trying to rethink it: if you’re in a rush, that’s a you problem. I don’t have to go twice as fast if there’s no emergency at stake.

This also is true for what I read and watch more broadly in the arts. I know short, snappy novels are all the rage right now. And while I enjoy them, I also want immersion, sometimes. I want to go deep into that world, and relish in the time it takes to appreciate it. Recently, my book club read The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk. It is not an especially long book, but it is a novel that takes its time to expand upon philosophical paradigms through the characters. It does take time to unpack thoughts on certain topics, and these topics were definitely big ones. I was down for this. Not everything is a hook. Not everything needs to be immediate. I think that’s okay. If time is always “running out”, I think this skews us against doing things deeply and carefully. And when it comes to time - and the having enough of it - I think there are decisions we can make. Like…

Doing the easy things simply, and choosing the hard things wisely.

I really value a challenging conversation. But I am also a very sensitive and reactive person, who is willing to get into vulnerable territory - sometimes without realising this might be a bad idea. In other words, I vacillate between being an over-sharer and completely shutting down, depending where the anxiety is sitting. As a result, social media is a complete minefield. It triggers reactivity without actually presenting the opportunity for a real or deeper conversation. So, I have to choose more wisely.

The simple things don’t require too much deliberation. For instance: My phone no longer lives on my bedside table at night. I lived alone for a long time, and this meant I clung to my phone like a security blanket. This felt justified the one time a fox somehow nudged my home alarm system into life at 3am and gave me the absolute shock of a lifetime. But this isn’t the norm.

While I’m still too anxious to do away with the phone completely, I have a compromise: I have placed a charger on the other side of my bedroom. A simple change with a big impact. There is no greater gift than waking up and not looking at a phone first thing. My cheap ocean-noises alarm clock serves me just fine. It’s all in the spirit of this quote, from Patricia Lockwood:

If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless… If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there.

(She was referring to Trump the first time round - and not much has changed, evidently! But I digress…)

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I do make full use of the iPhone’s many helpful deterrents. Setting focus times, sleep hours, app use limits and switching all apps to a monochromatic spectrum. These have all helped. I also signed myself out of all social media on my main computer.

All of this sounds like obvious stuff. Often we don’t do what’s simple, because we think the fact it is simple makes it easy to handle. But what starts with this simple peeling back of a habit, reveals how insidious the more important battles become. In particular, many of us think nothing of picking up a phone while out with people in real life. I honestly didn’t even notice this, and never thought to comment, until fairly recently. Being direct is hard - when someone is having a catch up with me and stops to use their phone for a long time, I am learning to stop talking and wait. This might be a tougher social battle, but it’s worth doing, if I can keep up the stomach for it. After all, if we are meeting in person, why am I spending time watching you on your phone?

Engaging in strategic shutdown mode (a.k.a. it’s not you, it’s them)

So much advice about avoiding the noise and accompanying overwhelm focuses on your willpower as the primary issue (and indeed, my point about screens also kinda falls under this category). Of course, there is some element of willpower involved. But I do think there is an element of this issue which is nothing to do with your will and everything to do with the uncontrollable environment around us.

I happen to live right by a busy mechanics garage in central London, which attracts activity at all hours. So there isn’t much time in a week where the world feels quiet and calm in my direct environment. No amount of meditation or yoga is going to undo a faulty car alarm going off continuously for hours at a time, or a broken down vehicle being backed up onto a tow truck right outside my front door. So when all else fails, I literally block all sound as much as I possibly can.

I like to think of this as a strategic shutdown (rather than me disappearing into the numbness of overwhelm). This strategy has required a fairly modest investment: noise cancelling headphones (for the last 4 years I’ve used soundcore by Anker Q35 headphones, which were under £50) and binaural beats audio tracks. Luckily, the LoFi community online is enormous and so I plug out all other noise by playing either a long LoFi video or something more like this. It doesn’t always work, but it helps. Sometimes, you do just have to create your own bubble of curated sound and nestle inside it. And this also means…

Working with a rhythm, not against it.

When are you at your most vulnerable? I notice that my most vulnerable hours are always first thing in the morning.

That’s the time when I am most subject to feeling anxious, depressed and unmotivated - if I am not careful. Protecting my mornings has meant being really careful about what I let into my orbit at that hour. I thought that being a person who had done some therapy and seemed vaguely self aware would mean that I could recognise this pattern for what it was, and simply deal with it. But that’s just not how this shit works. You can know something a thousand times over, and still fall victim to the pattern in motion. In other words, knowing that I tend to be more anxious or depressive in the morning is a good thing to know, but it’s not worth much if I am not taking any action on it.

Protecting mornings for me means limiting screen time, yes, but also, doing things that feel good right out the gate. I always thought that giving myself something to look forward to would mean that I would get all my duties done efficiently, then reward myself later in the day. But if I don’t do things that feel right for my rhythm, I don’t tend to reach the reward anyway. Obviously, this has to be personal and thoughtful - I’m not rewarding myself with a mid-morning nap, because then I definitely won’t get anything done. But journalling, for instance, is a practice that always helps me out. It doesn’t take that long - I can slot it into my morning easily. It also means that I start writing earlier in the day. The momentum begins in a more positive direction.

A few final thoughts…

Feeling overwhelmed is so connected to stress and burnout, and I am thinking a lot about how to manage this lately. Short of leaving my home and running off into the woods, finding ways to manage the warning signs remains one of my biggest obstacles in my creative life. I could place myself in a 24/7 deprivation tank of my own making, but that’s not practical - I will have to keep coming up with ways to push back (gently, strategically) against the tide. It’s an overwhelming world out there. And as much as I want to be a part of it, and find plenty to love and feel inspired by in all the beauty and chaos it contains, I am a limited being. Sometimes, practical, dull suggestions like turning off your phone really are the best ones. There’s no point retaining a weird pride about being able to “handle it” and take more, just because others do so. Instead, I remind myself that I will not miss out on much. In fact, I’ll be just fine.

How are you finding space to focus, these days?

Living the Questions