I have been suffering from a lot of anxiety and feelings of overwhelm for the last few days after a rather long period of lightness and contentment.

Today, while writing my morning pages, I asked myself, “What’s changed?” The answer came to me quite easily:

Noise.

I’ve been receiving too much input from too many sources this week, something I severely limited over the past month or so. The difference has been astounding.

Too much reading of too many different books; too many audiobooks and podcasts filling my ears. It has truly been information overload. 

Then I started thinking back to a simpler time, long ago before Apple Music, the Podcast app, even before we had record players or phonographs.

How It Used to Be

For most of human history, music was a live occurrence. If you wanted to listen to something, you had to physically go somewhere––a salon, an opera house, a concert on the River Thames. And when you engaged with this music, it was the only thing you did (okay, maybe you shared the latest gossip with your friends in the opera box, but you get my point).

There was no music playing in your ears while you ate dinner––unless you were wealthy enough to afford a string quartet in your dining room. You simply ate dinner—one thing at a time. About the only time you can experience that sort of focused attention in the modern world is at a movie theater, and even then, a few people will still blind everyone with their cell phones. 

For most of human history, we’ve only ever done one thing at a time because that’s all we had the technological capability to do. There was nothing in your ears filling your mind with noise. 

Now with AirPods, Beats+, and the like, we can (and usually do) fill our heads with noise 10, 12, even 14 hours a day! With the podcast app, we have dozens of voices lecturing us each day on different subjects for hours on end, rather than a few people a week at the most as it was in college. 

Social Media as News

We are bombarded with breaking news on every single website we visit, Social Media being the greatest perpetrator. No longer are Facebook or Twitter places to connect and communicate with friends: they are places you go to be inundated and overwhelmed with information, most of it trivial and irrelevant to your life.

A headline reads “Couple dies in plane crash,” and as you read, you discover it happened 2,000 miles away. While tragic for that couple and those close to them, it is irrelevant to you and serves no purpose other than to capture your click and your attention.

At the same time, it makes you feel (perhaps only subconsciously) like planes and the world at large are becoming more dangerous, when in reality, all the data shows our world is becoming safer and more peaceful every year––with the notable exception of our lovely virus and the very justified civil unrest we are experiencing today. 

It’s no wonder we feel stressed out, anxious, and overwhelmed: we cannot possibly use or act on all the knowledge and information we are accumulating. 

Do Only One Thing

Yesterday evening, while continuing to overwhelm myself with information, I came across an article by Leo Babauta entitled “Let Each Task Fill Up Your World”. My takeaway from this article is simple: if we do one thing at a time, it may seem like we are getting less done, but in reality we are doing much more than we could while otherwise distracted by multiple tasks.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of feeling anxious and stressed out, and allowing myself to do only one thing at a time seems a pretty easy solution.

If you are listening to music, just listen to music. 

If you are reading a book, just read the book and only that book. (I might be telling myself that more than you.)

If you are eating a meal, only eat your meal! Don’t stream television, listen to a podcast, or blast music. Savor your food, and if you are with people, savor their company as well (after you finish your mouthful of food, of course). 

When was the last time you only did one thing at a time? Try it today.

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