Lately I have been feeling burned out and overwhelmed by my day to day life. Each day I have many periods where my brain feels, for lack of a better term, fried. I’m overstimulated and feel like I have way too many things to do that are competing for my attention.

My previous coping strategies have all been ineffective and have essentially been attempts to escape the feelings of overwhelm without actually addressing them. The issue is that I’m not even creating a good escape, I’m just piling on more information and fatigue for my mind. Escaping I think could be a healthy exercise if I was doing it in a meditative way and visualizing the destination I’m aiming towards.

Scrolling social media, playing video games, and constantly task switching to make sure I don’t need to sit with my feelings and confront what is bothering me and stressing me out is doing nothing to work through my backlog of things I need to do and process mentally.

Another strategy I’ve used in the past, unintentionally, is to shut down and stop doing whatever is overwhelming me. I think if done intentionally and with constraints, taking a break and thinking through things will be an effective strategy. It’s kind of like doing a removal diet and only keeping the activities in my life that I have tested and recognize as necessary or adding in a positive way.

My current life feels like I have a never ending list of tasks I have to complete. Much of this is self-imposed and some of them are just things I don’t want to do because they aren’t immediately gratifying. This creates a psychological phenomenon where I am creating a lot of subconscious work for my mind where my mind is acting like a browser window with 50 tabs open and no clear path to finish what’s going on to close those tabs.

I started out trying to brainstorm things to do but didn’t get much farther than declutter, sit with my boredom, and keep my sleep consistent. I began by cleaning my office and removing a lot of things that have been accumulating to take back some control of my space and not have it feel as crowded and cluttered as my mind.

The algorithm on YouTube must be picking up on my feelings because I was recommended a lot of videos about disconnecting and taking control of my mind again through the practice of Digital Minimalism. I started reading the book by the same name by Cal Newport as well and as someone who has recognized the benefits of minimalism through lived experience, I’m surprised I didn’t come to this on my own.

I’ve already basically gotten rid of social media from my life again and only have Facebook for marketplace, but I still feel as though my current consumption habits are creating strain and not adding to my life in a positive way. Also, either others are on the same wavelength as me or it’s just serendipity but I’ve even had newsletters discussing aspects of empowering yourself through intentional technology use appear this past week in my inbox.

You may be thinking “okay Ian, that’s great and all that you have the self-awareness to recognize the problem but what are you going to do about it?” Well let me tell you below what I have roughly come up with from the sources I have pulled from. Cal Newport recommends a 30 day reset where you declutter your digital life.

You have to decide what technology is optional in your life and what is essential and forego the optional tech for 30 days. The optional would be things like video games and the essential would be things like email. For the optional tech you create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the use of these optional technologies so that you have a plan in place for how to responsibly use them during this period.

You can’t just quit things cold turkey though without replacing these old habits with new habits. Otherwise when you get into the positions that caused you to abuse these technologies, you will just continue to do the old habits.

At the end of the 30 day period you can experiment with adding back optional tech into your life, but now you will be able to see what was missing and have a more informed choice over what these things add or subtract from your life.

A newsletter I read suggested doing a 30 day dopamine detox that is a little more extreme than that, but he suggested eliminating:

Then adding to your life:

Given the above inspiration, I have decided to do a mix of both for the next 30 days. My list of optional tech and my accepted use are as follows:

I have begun to declutter my apps on my phone and plan to begin decluttering my email inbox to make it less overwhelming and easier to find emails that actually matter when they come in. I plan to replace my previous bad habits with the following:

As far as health choices for the next 30 days:

I have a training plan for the Charlottesville 10 miler that I am going to follow and work through and follow in my free time. I am hoping this process will begin to bring me the mental clarity I was beginning to have my last year of college where I had basically eliminated all of these things and also had a good consistent gym habit. I know this isn’t going to fix everything immediately, but I am hoping to create the first action of setting off a chain reaction.

I want to begin to find what is essential in my life and what actions and habits are necessary to cultivate those essential aspects. I want to work smarter and spend less time with constant movement that doesn’t contribute to moving my life in the direction I want to go in. Ruthlessly exerting effort on the 20% of tasks that drive 80% of my results and doing as little of the other 80% that drive the final 20% as I can.

I’m planning to use this newsletter as a place to report back how I’m doing and hold myself accountable to whoever reads this. If you found this useful or were inspired by this, feel free to text or call me and tell me about it. I can provide the newsletter I was inspired by too if you would like to read that as well.

Until next week,

Ian