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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're out there and you're trying to perfect your morning routine, I just created a simple workbook for you to download that shows you the step-by-step process to create an amazing morning routine based in science.
If you wanna download it for free, you can go to theperfectmorningroutine.com and get it now. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how overstimulation is ruining your life. Let's get real for a second.
If you feel like maybe you're a little bit drained recently, or maybe your brain's a little bit all over the place, you feel kind of scattered, or you feel tired and numb, or you just kind of feel like you're not really yourself, I want you to know that there's a chance that you're not broken. There's a chance that you're not lazy.
There's a chance that you're not unmotivated or that you're a loser. There's a chance that you could be extremely overstimulated with the current world that we live in. And it's quietly starting to wreck your ability to focus, to connect with other people, and a lot of times to even feel the feelings of joy.
And so today we're gonna take a deep dive into what overstimulation actually is when you look at it neurologically, how it's affecting you and your life, the psychology and the neuroscience behind being overstimulated, how it actually affects your brain, how it affects your body, how it affects your relationships and affects the way that you feel
And then most importantly, what the hell you can do about it so that you can get rid of that overstimulation so that you can go back to feeling yourself and having the vibrance and the energy that you actually truly have. It's just being kind of stolen away from you.
So when you look at overstimulation, I was really curious before we dive into it, like what is overstimulation based off what we're gonna be talking about today? Overstimulation is what happens when your brain and your nervous system, and your nervous system's a really key part of what we're gonna be talking about today,
are exposed to more sensory, emotional, and informational input than they can effectively process in one point in time and then be able to regulate. Because you have to understand your brain is processing everything that comes in and it's filtering what it needs to pay attention to, what it doesn't need to pay attention to. And so over time, your body needs to be able to regulate all of this.
And so it can leave you scattered. It can leave you exhausted because your brain's working a million miles a second behind everything. It can make you feel a little bit emotionally numb. It can make you feel irritable as well. Basically, overstimulation is what happens when your brain takes in more information that it can actually process. And
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Chapter 2: How does overstimulation affect our mental health?
It was just completely different. our brain has not caught up to adapt to all of the changes that have happened in the past 150 years. So you can think about your mind being like this old computer. You remember like the green screen computers that you used to have for those of you guys that are older, like the green screen ones that were very basic.
Think of your mind being like one of those, but it's got 150 tabs open, it's got music playing, it's got downloads running in the background, it's got pop-ups flashing, limited time offer. That's your brain basically what it's dealing with all of the time. And your brain can't process everything. It's trying to. There's no software update for your brain.
There's no hardware update for your brain. What you got is what you got. And so modern life feels like that. It feels like nonstop notifications, 24-7 news,
constant background noise, whether that's people talking or whether that's car sounds, whether that's the TV on in the background, whether that's music playing, whether that's people in the background, you're getting dopamine hits from social media, you're getting cortisol from all of the worries that you're thinking about in the future, and your brain's on high alert all day long, every single day.
It just was not designed for this. So if you're one of those people who feels like, man, I just have no energy, I'm exhausted all the time, I'm tired, I'm a little bit irritable, it might be that your brain needs a freaking break because your brain wasn't built for it. And over the thousands of years that it's evolved, our brain's more used to natural, gradual, slow changes in the environment.
not TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Slack, phone notifications, email inboxes, text messages and DMs and group chats from your friends and Instagram and podcasts and having a to-do list that will never be finished.
having unfinished tasks, worrying about things coming up in the future, your perfectionism, what people are thinking about you, what they're not thinking about you, your self-criticism, the voice that's going on in the back of your head all the time. And then you're in a meeting with your boss.
And then at the same time, you also see the TV has breaking news about some crazy thing that just happened in instant drama and constant urgency. It's way too much, man. And so there's tens of thousands of distractions every single day. And I'm not being sarcastic when I actually say tens of thousands.
I had to do research of like how many distractions and things are coming into our brain throughout the entire course of the day. And here's what I found, right? There's a lot of research on this. Research shows that modern humans are processing way more than we can, like trying to process way more than we can every single day.
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Chapter 3: What are the neurological impacts of overstimulation?
Because when you have so much overstimulation, your nervous system ends up having a lot of cortisol that runs through it, which is your body's primary stress hormone.
So when your brain's constantly taking in stimuli, there's your sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight, and there's your sympathetic, there's your nervous system, which is your sympathetic nervous system, and then your parasympathetic nervous system. Parasympathetic is the calm, cool, collected, rest, relaxation. That's parasympathetic. Sympathetic is fight or flight.
And so when you're constantly getting all of this stuff hitting you all the time, it's clicking on your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, and it stays on.
And there was a study that was done in 2013 that was published in the Psychoneuroendocrinology that showed that chronic exposure to even low-level stressors, like constant alerts, noise, notifications, all of that, can keep cortisol levels elevated throughout the entire day. And so what does that mess with?
Your immune system, your gut health, your memory, your mood, your focus, your hormone balance, all of that stuff. And so overstimulation affects your mind, but it also affects your ability to connect. It affects not being able to fully connect to the people around you, your children, your wife, not wanting to go out and hang out with people as much.
there's too much happening so if you ever find yourself avoiding phone calls or zoning out in conversations or needing a week to recover from a social event it might not be that you're an introvert it might just be that that's your brain trying to protect you from more input they can actually handle and so in kids we actually call this sensory overload like i've seen it in in my son because he's just so new to this world that if there's too much going on i can see him actually start to kind of
get frazzled and stressed sometimes like when the dogs are playing in front of him and there's you know music going on in the background he's like he'll start to like get a little bit stressed you can see sensory overload In adults, we just call it, oh, I'm just tired. I just need a little space. But we downplay it more than we should. It's the same neurological shutdown.
And so it's really interesting about the whole thing is that overstimulation, when you look at it, it actually mimics the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and ADHD. So there's so many people that are just self-diagnosing, oh, I have depression. Oh, I have anxiety. Oh, I have ADHD. But in reality, it could just be there's way more overstimulation than you realize.
And the overstimulation actually mimics the feelings and the looks of depression, anxiety, and ADHD. And so, you might be just a little bit overstimulated. Right? So that's really what I'm trying to get to you to understand here. So what do we want to do in this case? We want to be able to destimulate.
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Chapter 4: How does modern life contribute to cognitive overload?
And so try to get some deep focus time. And then last thing that I recommend is go out in nature more often, like Trade artificial stimulation for natural rhythms. Sunlight instead of screens and artificial light. Walking out in nature instead of scrolling. Silence instead of Spotify. Nature recalibrates your senses. There's many studies that have been done on this.
And I think it's Japan, they call it forest bathing, where you actually go out into the forest and just be there because it actually starts to regulate your nervous system, regulate your brain. It calms you down. There's a reason why forest bathing reduces your cortisol and boosts your moods. It's because we are from all of that. Stop thinking you're different than nature. You're from nature.
And so the thing I really just want you to understand, and hopefully I didn't scare the shit out of you as I was going through this episode, I just wanted to give you the real hard facts is you might not be lazy. You might not be unmotivated. You might just be, you might not be tired. You might just be overstimulated.
And so if you've been beating yourself up for being unfocused or tired or unmotivated or emotionally flat, what if it's not just you? What if it's all of the noise? You don't need to do more. You need to do less. for a little while. Let your brain and your nervous system relax. Let your soul catch up to it. Take a couple deep breaths, you know? Start to feel a little bit more grounded.
Feel a little bit more creative. Start to feel a little bit more like you. And so that's what I recommend. If you're overstimulated, just take a break. Give yourself a little bit of a rest and I promise you, it'll help you. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R.
Once again, if you wanna download my free workbook on how to create the perfect morning routine based by science, you can go to theperfectmorningroutine.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
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