Information overload? What to do about that mental exhaustion

From facts and figures about Covid-19 to coursework for education — whether for your own consumption or for your children, this season seems to be aggressive in its demands for your brain space. So how do you kick that feeling that you just can’t take any more (yet you really have to?) Caroline Njoroge delves into the matter.

The ‘information superhighway’ has been swirling with facts and figures over the past few months, what with the Covid-19 pandemic leading people to seek as much information as they can get to keep themselves safe?

And then came social distancing and self-quarantine guidelines that left many with little to do indoors but spend hours in front of a gadget accessing even more information. Driven by the prospect of job losses and imminent career overhauls, many heeded the call to come out stronger than they went in, riding on the wave of ‘reinvention’ by taking advantage of every free online course they could get (some even paying for them). For those who are working from home, this means juggling work and ‘night school’.

Parents were dealt an even tougher blow with schools jumping onto the homeschooling bandwagon and bombarding them with links to classroom portals and lists of projects and assignments for their children. Adults who were students themselves found their lecturers and supervisors renewing calls for assignments and final projects — just when they thought they could finally catch a break from burning the midnight oil in the quest for an extra feather in their academic caps.

For those who are working from home, they might be reeling from the surprise that remote work isn’t as laid back as they imagined. From exhausting video calls to dealing with network issues and system delays to carrying the weight of the lag that is brought about by the strained synergy of people working together virtually.  

Defining the feeling

The irony, however, comes in the fact that, with more hours to stay indoors (and skip hours of traffic and unproductive meetings), many still have to deal with a kind of exhaustion they don’t understand.

So could the exhaustion you are feeling be as a result of information overload? What is information overload anyway?

According to Wikipedia, information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue.

In other words, it is the feeling you get when, after hours of searching the Web, you realise there’s so much data in your head that you can no longer think clearly. ‘Not thinking clearly’ is but one of the effects of this phenomenon.

And it’s no wonder. According to, well, Google, there are 3.5 billion searches made on Google daily and half of those searches are made via mobile phones. And the amount of data we produce every day is even more mind-boggling — 2.5 quintillion bytes of data to be precise (just to help put things in perspective, a quintillion is 1 with 18 zeros after it).

And the pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). By 2018, 90 percent of the data in the world had been generated in just two years (forbes.com).

Facing reality

With all this information at our fingertips, how much can our brains take in daily? How do we regulate the same so that we remain mentally sound and productive?  And is the exposure to too much information affecting your mental well being? What is the best way of coping with this?

For Julin Muriuki, a resident of Nairobi, the idea of working from home was very alluring at first. For one, all the time wasted on traffic jams could now be put into better use — like spending more time with family (or so she thought). The reality on the ground, however, has been something quite different from what she had envisioned.

“Working from home has got me nursing constant headaches, dealing with increased forgetfulness, feeling edgy from time to time, and dealing with mild cases of insomnia,” Julin says. But why? “I spend too much time working online. It is so easy to overwork when I don’t have a bus to catch heading home. Sometimes work responsibilities spill over well into the night and, for a night owl like me, I at times barely notice how much time is spent as I sit in front of a computer,” she says.

The prolonged sessions spent staring at the screen, the online meetings, numerous phone calls that have now become her new normal have contributed to the headaches.

“Sometimes I crave for quiet space with no interruptions, but I have to work. I have to meet deadlines, I have to pick the calls and, lately, it’s been feeling a bit much,” Julin says. “I feel like it has also affected my social life. There are days I just don’t want to talk to anybody, especially after an intense day of handling endless phone calls. But I still have family and friends to check up on.”

In an effort to cope, Julin says, she resorted to being on auto-pilot. “Some days, I tried to force conversations just to keep the rhythm of life going, other days, I just blacked out or went mute. It took me a while to recognise the source of my frustration and exhaustion,” she says, adding that at times, she had to take sleeping pills to cope with the insomnia.

New normal

With her new found schedule, she noted that even finding time to read for leisure had become cumbersome. With all this, she had to come up with ways of managing this new lifestyle.

“I have had to develop some coping mechanisms to keep me functional; I take long walks when I can, go cycling, and also take a break after every 2 hours for about 5 minutes. In those 5 minutes, I don’t look at my computer screen or check my phone at all. I have found this to be quite helpful,” says Julin.

Connie Isika, a travel consultant says that it has not been easy, to say the least. “My kids are candidates, one in Class 8 and the other one in Form 4. I have to support them to some degree in their studies. This is on top of my office-related workload,” she says.

With deadlines to meet, online meetings to attend, phone calls, video chats, sometimes it all feels a bit too much for Connie. She has had to develop some kind of coping mechanism, “Sometimes I feel so cranky and mentally drained but I have to hold it together lest I snap at those around me. I have come to see that taking long walks when I can really helps,” she says.

For Rama M’Mbetsa, things are not so different, “Working from home has its advantages, but the actual ‘working’ is something I’m adapting to. Sometimes so much is said in phone calls and online meetings that I feel like I got such a small percentage of what was actually said. At times, my mind is trying to summarise and interpret, other times the same brain is struggling with forgetfulness. I guess sometimes I get brain freeze.”