A few years ago, I realized that one of the reasons I felt tense and anxious and overwhelmed all the time was because I had a huge backlog of mental processing. It was like I had all of this sensory and information input coming in on a conveyor belt and not enough hands on the factory floor to go through, box up the useful stuff, and throw out the rest. So I just felt it all piling up in my head as this vague sense of "too much to do".
It finally clicked for me that the reason was because I was constantly running that conveyor belt. Every second I had some downtime, I got my phone out and read a bit more social media. Not only did I keep stuffing more in, but I never set any time aside to process.
So I decided to break my social media phone habit. Moved Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter off my home screen. Trained myself than when I had a few minutes of boredom to just let myself be bored.
Oh my God, I can't tell you what a difference it made. I finally felt like I could manage my own mental load. Instead of constantly having all of this news that I didn't know what to conclude about, I could just work through my thoughts, sort it out in my head, and put it away.
Being bored is amazing. We should all do a lot more of it.
As someone who has ADD, you just described my brain. For me, it's slightly better if I don't spend time on my phone, my brain does still get overloaded quickly though :)
It finally clicked for me that the reason was because I was constantly running that conveyor belt. Every second I had some downtime, I got my phone out and read a bit more social media. Not only did I keep stuffing more in, but I never set any time aside to process.
So I decided to break my social media phone habit. Moved Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter off my home screen. Trained myself than when I had a few minutes of boredom to just let myself be bored.
Oh my God, I can't tell you what a difference it made. I finally felt like I could manage my own mental load. Instead of constantly having all of this news that I didn't know what to conclude about, I could just work through my thoughts, sort it out in my head, and put it away.
Being bored is amazing. We should all do a lot more of it.