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This is the hyper-connectivity era.
We are coming to the epicenter in our lifetime where we have to deal with billions of bits of information every day; potentially much more than our brain can really afford to process. This has a huge impact in the quality of life we are having nowadays.
Do you have the sensation that your anxiety level is increasing?
Do you feel bored with your daily routine?
Are you waking up tired and in bad mood more often?
According to the New York Times, a study made in the University of California about data consumption in America revealed that, an average person consumes 34 Gigabytes of information per day. That is according to their study, 350% more than three decades ago!
This is not surprising, considering that in 2020 alone, we have created 2.5 quintillion data bytes per day!
It seems that the amounts are increasing by the millions every second. At the time of writing, there are 4.6 billion internet users worldwide according to Statista; that’s basically 60% of the total world population.
With these overwhelming amounts of data, our brains are struggling to catch up with the new demands, leaving us often exhausted and stressed.
Augusto Cury, a Brazilian psychologist, psychiatrist and author, describes that the most prominent indications of SPA (Accelerated Thinking Symptom) are the following:
An hyper occupied and agitated mind;
Anticipated fear and frustration;
Low resilience levels;
Feeling of tiredness after waking up;
Headaches and muscular pain;
Difficulty to deal with “slow people”;
Lack of concentration and memory.
If you have at least one of this symptoms, you are officially in: You are part of the over stressed, over stimulated, data-obese population.
This fact should alarm us and it should be like a wake up call, to think if this is where we really want to go.
Since the introduction of mass consumption technology, it seems like we have just gone into an endless spiral where the more we consume data, the more we depend on it for everything in our lives. This sets the perfect scenario to bring the so called Internet of Things (IoT) to life.
In a world where is impossible to get “disconnected”, we are creating an overdependence of data, that seems unable to get controlled by itself. Inevitably, we are landing in another sickness, the DIS (Digital Intoxication Syndrome).
When you have crossed the red line, you probably feel familiar with the following:
You feel an aversion to be “bored”. You feel the excessive need to occupy your time; every single minute needs to be spent doing “something”;
No surprising, those times of “doing nothing” end up being invested in checking your emails, mobile, social apps, netflix etc.;
You have a strong dependence on your phone; you cannot stay without it for more than 15 minutes, and you feel a strong desire to wander around in the social media or other pages for one or two hours;
You have a sensation that there is nothing of value outside the “internet”;
You over demand yourself to be always online and available;
Trouble to go to sleep; spend the last minutes of the night “online”;
Feeling of tiredness when you wake up.
What can we do about it?
Consciously or unconsciously, we have accepted this behavior as a new way of living, but it doesn’t have to be like this.
We can decide to disconnect from devices, and connect again to the real world: To go out and have long walks in the parks; to eat an ice cream on a hot sunny day and really enjoy it, without taking out your phone to take a selfie; to spend real quality time with your family and friends where all are looking to each other directly and not with their hands glued to a device.
Like Augusto Cury says in one of his recent books “The Unforgettable Master”: “Is better to be a simple human being that is happy and alive than a hero that is super efficient, but dead”.
We should not let ourselves fall in the contest of the data master. Do you prefer to be the king of the media, who needs to create and consume excessive data to survive, or do you prefer to take life slow, without hurry and appreciate all the beauty and vastness of it?
If a human life is just a very brief moment in time, why not to use this time actually admiring the real world?
Do not let yourself get trap in the false illusion of the online world. Life is here, is running… is now.