From the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to bed, we’re confronted with a barrage of decisions. Which suit should I wear? What’s the likeliest place to park?  What should I tell my boss about missing my latest deadline to figure out a certain problem? What should I make for dinner?

Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re inundated by facts, pseudo facts, and rumour.  Most times it is exhausting to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore.  In the meantime, we are all doing more. Three decades ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves.

When the 10-year-old son of neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the Pain Genetics lab at McGill University) was asked what his father does for a living, he answered, “He answers emails.” Jeff admitted after some thought that it’s not so far from the truth. Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.

We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.

Brain overload

Our minds are often full of a continuous stream of tasks, and it takes a toll on our mental well-being. Here’s so much information coming from different sources —from news to social media outlets to our own family in the background — that our brains can feel completely overwhelmed.

But brain overload isn’t guaranteed to happen because of an excess of information.  According to a Pew Research Center survey titled ‘Information Overload’, 79% of respondents found that access to many kinds of information gave them a sense of control over their lives.

The survey also found, though, that certain circumstances — and even certain institutions — can be what trigger the effects of overload.  Fifty-six percent of respondents reported higher levels of stress caused by governmental agencies, schools, and banks because of the information gathering processes associated with them.

While it seems natural that we would want access to updated and continuous information through our devices — smartphones, personal computers, and tablets — it’s also unsurprising that most respondents associated stress with the different kinds of information they receive. What’s more, a near majority of these respondents reported trouble with keeping up with the information they had access to.

Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago.

And we use them all the time, part of a mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re crossing the street, catch up on email while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to an informative podcast about X-Factor.

Multi-tasking

Daniel J. Levitin, a neuroscientist whose research focuses on the interaction between technology, addiction, and productivity, attributes information overload to the amount of multi-tasking we do in today’s digital age.  He says that information excess springs from the human indecision to prioritise tasks and activities. This uncertainty distracts the brain, causes stress, and leads to decision overload.

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multi-tasking causes new information to go to the wrong part of the brain.  When students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum ─ a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.

Because multi-tasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, the human brain is simultaneously overloaded and overstimulated. In addition to the neurological consequences of overload, the psychological effects are just as severe. Levitin says that multi-tasking to the point of brain fatigue leads to “a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important.”

I believe a mind weighed down by endless tasks kills creativity. According to Psychology Today contributor Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D., creativity runs on passion: “Individuals passionate for their work — whether they are scientists, poets, entrepreneurs, operations managers, or something else — are able to use the energy afforded by their passion as a motivator of their work.”

So is there anything we can do to fix this? 

There certainly is.  It’s called a “brain dump” — the dumping of all the contents of your mind onto a blank page, as one might dump the contents of a purse onto a table. You spill out stressors, your nagging thoughts, your pesky annoyances. Simply open up a valve in your mind and let all those thoughts flow out of your hand and onto your planner.

Write until you feel like the pressure inside of you has dissipated and you can take a big breath. Then you will have achieved a brain dump. This exercise, which only requires 10 minutes and should ideally be done during the first hour of your day, can help you empty your mind of negative thoughts and streamline your focus on what matters most.

Another solution is to take up Albert Einstein’s advice and look deep into nature. The genius believed that nature is a healing and restorative balm.  On days when your mind is overloaded with tasks, pop into a garden or into your small yard full of plants if you have one, or spend a few minutes looking at the sea, and simply take in the beauty of nature.

In fact, studies have shown that spending time in nature relieves attention fatigue and increases our creativity. “If you’ve been using your brain to multi-task and then you set that aside and go on a walk, without all of the gadgets, you’ve let the prefrontal cortex recover,” says researcher David Strayer of the University of Utah in Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine. “And that’s when we see these bursts in creativity, problem-solving, and feelings of well-being.”

Main photo: SHVETS Production