In this episode of Lessons from a Quitter, we tackle the overwhelming flood of information that keeps so many of us feeling stuck, burnt out, and powerless. I share the powerful mindset framework I teach my clients to help regain control, quiet the noise, and stay grounded in an era of digital overload. We explore how our brains are wired to seek novelty and negativity, making it easy to spiral. But the good news? You can take back control. Learn how to shift your mindset, protect your energy, and break free from the cycle of overwhelm.
Ep. 342: The Cost of Information Overload (And How to Take Back Control)
Ep. 342
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Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I want to talk to you about how to stay sane in a world where we're on information overload. I just did a masterclass this last week about how to learn how to master your mind when you are completely overwhelmed with the world around you. As so many of us are in today's like digital age, with what's going on in the news, constantly being bombarded with information all the time.
It is more important than ever to learn how to master your mind. And I did a whole class that taught you the framework that I use with my clients that has changed my life, that helped me kind of make sense of what's going on in my brain and helps me to stay sane the last, you know, number of years. And I want to teach that to you. If you want access to that class, you can um, find it in the show notes and the links below. Or you can go to twitter club.com/nym, master your mind and get that class. You can learn that framework, but I figured that I would bring it to the podcast because I think so many of us who may not have time to take the class need to understand the importance. Even if you don't use this tool, whatever tool you wanna use, whatever tool you wanna find, it is so dire for you to figure out and spend time and invest in learning how to manage your mind.
Because otherwise it becomes very easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel despondent, to feel hopeless, to sort of give up. And we don't want that for you. So that's what I wanna talk to you about today. I think we're all very aware that we are in this kind of information overload, right? The world doesn't slow down, our phones are ping all the time. We are constantly bombarded with news and emails and work and all of the things all of the time, right? And I think that a lot of us think that there's something wrong with us that I just, you know, need to push through. And I want you to understand that there's nothing wrong with you. We weren't built to live this way. And so I want you to really understand that your sanity, your focus, your resilience, all of that is on the line if you don't really understand how to balance how you are being bombarded, um, in every direction in today's age.
Okay? So we're gonna talk about that. The first thing I want you to understand before we even go into like what you need to do, 'cause I want us to really understand that like we were not meant to get this much information ever, especially this much negative information, okay? I want us to think about it. Like I know people say this all the time and we talk about like, oh, when we had TVs, you know, when it was only TVs, you would get the nightly news for an hour a day. For sure. That's how you know, your brain was like we, you wouldn't know what was happening in every corner of the world. But if we even take a step further back, if we go even more macro, I want you to think about human existence. Like the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been alive.
And even if we don't go all the, let's say like from our iteration of our brain with our prefrontal cortex, they guess is around 40,000 years, 50,000 years around there, okay? I wanna say like, think about how many tens of thousands of years humans just were out in nature, you know, hunting and gathering. Like I want you to think about when you're in nature and how you feel and like how little input is coming in. Like there's sounds and there's things that you're gonna be paying attention to. And then when we've come into kind of the society that we have and we're in busy cities and there's noise all the time, and then there's like TV and now there's the phones. And I want you to think about like the, the hardware we're using, the brains we're using are the same brains that our hunter, gatherer, forefathers ancestors had, right?
And it isn't equipped for this level of novelty. And here's why I say novelty 'cause your brain was created to seek novelty, right? Because when you are, let's say a hunter gathering, like you have to like notice something moving in the bushes, you have to notice something that's new. In order to keep yourself safe. You have to like be really hyper aware where something new is coming into your world, into your line of vision. And so that, but when you know that was happening, it wasn't happening all the time, it wasn't like this. And so our brains are wired to seek novelty and we also are wired to seek sort of negativity or focus on negativity. We have a negativity bias and that also was evolutionarily to keep us alive, right? Where you have to look at like you can go to a hundred bushes that have sweet berries on 'em and that's great, but if there's one bush that is poisonous, you wanna remember that Like that's the thing that you're gonna wanna really like not gloss over.
And so your brain hyper focuses on things that go wrong, on mistakes, on things that, um, could be harmful. And that has been evolutionarily very valuable to us 'cause it keeps us alive. But obviously in our day and age where we're not at risk of being eaten by tigers all the time and we're not at risk of dying, we are being bombarded by negativity. And you know, media companies know this. They know there's like stats that, um, headlines that are negative have like 30% more click rates. And so they purposely focus on negative news stories because that is what is gonna get the most clicks, right? Imagine if your news was just bombarded with all the beautiful things that people are doing in their communities all over the world. 'cause there are, there are way more people doing good and people trying to make change and people working together and people making community.
But we don't care about that. We're not gonna look at that. And so we are bombarded with all the things that could possibly go wrong. And again, in our brain it's like, well this is keeping me alive. I do need to stay abreast of everything that's happening in the political sphere in other countries. I need to make sure that I'm safe. And so we have our brain is like wired to seek that, to look like for that dopamine. So we keep doom scrolling, we keep looking at all this information. And the thing is, is that we are consuming five times more information daily than we did in the eighties. And that's probably was, you know, five, 10 times more than we did decades before that. And so we're overwhelmed this attention economy that is like 24 7 is profiting office keeping us outraged and overwhelmed constantly.
'cause we're then we're gonna seek more. Like, oh no, there's a threat happening and we were never meant to handle that. And so I just want you to understand that like it's not that you are bad at handling stress, it's not that like there's something wrong with you that you feel overwhelmed. You are being fire hosed with bad information, with bad news, right? It's like drinking out of a fire hydrant. Like you are gonna feel like you're choking. That's sort of by design, right? And I think that when they realize like how much they can overwhelm us, it also gets you to not act. It also gets you to be hopeless. It also gets you to kind of give up, which makes for a very easily dominated populace, right? It makes it for people that are in charge to be able to do what they want to do.
And so I say that because I want you to understand first like why it's not your fault and what is happening so that you can really understand the importance of you being able to like take back control of your own brain. Okay? And you've heard all this, obviously everybody can tell you like you should go on a, you know, information diet. You should try to limit your social media. That's all true. And I know it's easier to say, uh, harder to do because we are all addicted, right? We have these dopamine addictions to our phones and they've created these apps specifically like slot machines. They know that it creates this addiction. And so I'm not here to like lecture you into what you should do. I just want you to be aware of like what is happening is not natural and the amount of information you're getting is not natural and it is used intentionally to hijack certain aspects of your brain that are meant to react a certain way.
And that's terrible. But we do have some control, right? We do have some say in what we can do from this. The second thing I want you to understand is that that level of information is causing burnout and killing your problem solving skills, right? People think that we are overwhelmed by just what is happening, the amount that is happening. And to a certain extent that is true, but we are overwhelmed because we believe that we have a lack of control. And I think that that happens because there's no amount of quiet, right? There's no amount of silence for you to think about how you wanna act, what you want to do. And I want you to understand like people's ideas, the best ideas are not born in chaos. It is very difficult to think when you are in the midst of chaotic, you know, action.
I think you all, we've all experienced that. Like you make good decisions from stillness, from quiet. You make from understanding, like from having a moment to think and breathe. And unfortunately for a lot of us, we just don't have those moments anymore. And that becomes a problem because then we can't decide how we wanna act in a certain way. We can't decide how we wanna show up. We can't decide what we wanna do in this situation because we are constantly under like code red emergency. And I think all of us know like that's not the best place to strategize. That's not the best place to make a intentional decision about your life, right? And so I think that for all of us, like when we understand that like the reason that we are feeling this overwhelm is not simply that there's this inundation of information, there is, but it's simply because there's also no time to be able to assess and think about what you wanna do because you're constantly in reactive mode.
You're constantly in like distracted mode. You're constantly in information overload, right? So what do we do about this? This is all great. I think you all, we all already know this and we all already get a bunch of information about this, right? We already get all these tiktoks and news stories about how we have too much news. The irony in that, and even this, like you're watching or listening to this podcast or watching on YouTube, and it's like, again, taking information, I understand the irony, but really there's no way around that. So what do you do? The thing that I can help you with, the thing that I want, the people that listen to this to understand the thing that I think has saved me from not being burned out over the last four or five years, where I think a lot of people through the pandemic and kind of the political turmoil in the United States, if you're in the United States or you know really anywhere in the world at this point have felt that I don't think I have gotten to that level of burnout, is simply because I know how to manage my mind.
Your mindset determines whether you will spiral or whether you will stay grounded. The circumstances of the world are not gonna change because you want them to change. They're not gonna slow down. The information overload is not gonna stop. These media companies are not going to give you a break. They're not going to, it's up to you to take back that control. It's up to you to take back the control of your brain. Other people around you aren't going to. That's the other thing is I think a lot of us, you know, are waiting for some kind of collective for people to do this, to put, you know, restrictions on maybe bad news or whatever, whatever it might be. Like on phones. We kind of wanna be a part of a movement, which being a part of a community is really important. But I think that we all have to really start taking responsibility that like they're not gonna do it for me.
And it is really hard to do it. And I am being inundated and that is not my fault, but it is within my control to try to figure out what I want to do with my own brain and how I want to react to what is happening in this world. Because it's a lot and it's not gonna slow down, which that's the bad news. The good news is that you do have a lot of control, right? I think that for a lot of us, we believe that we are just reacting to circumstances, right? So something is happening in the world and I am just reacting to it. And there's, I have no power in how I react because this is the thing that is happening in the world. And so I have to react this way. And I understand how it can seem that way, and I understand how we have been led to believe that that is the way that it is, but it isn't.
And actually a really good example of this is looking at politics or looking at the, the negative news cycle. Whatever is happening in the world, people have vastly different thoughts about it. Some people are for it and they're happy that certain things are happening. They don't feel a lot of stress. They feel excited. If there's somebody in office that you agree with, you feel a certain way and other people are angry and enraged and despondent about the same exact thing, it's not the thing that is making you feel this way. It is your thoughts about it, right? There's a sliver of control that you have between what is happening and what you think and how you feel. Right? Something happens in the world, a world event happens, I have certain thoughts about it, whether they're subconscious or conscious, and then I feel a certain way, okay?
And that sliver in that middle is where all of your control lies. Now, as a caveat, I'm not saying that you need to change all of those thoughts to be happy. That you need to like be like, you know what? Everything in the world's great and I'm just gonna feel great about it and there's nothing I can do. No, I'm not doing toxic positivity. And the point of this is not to say that you need to wish everything away or like think positively. That's not what I'm saying. But you do wanna get really clear on what is it that I'm thinking, right? Because it is very different to think, you know, I can be enraged or I can be angry and think, I don't want this to happen in in the country, in the world. This is terrible. And I can have other thoughts that are like, you know what?
I may not be able to save the world, but I can do one thing, I can try, I can try to help. I'm gonna do my part that is gonna create a much different feeling. Then there's no way to stop this. It's not gonna make a difference anyway. It's hopeless at this point. It's too big for any of us to stop. Like, I want you to think about how different you feel. It's the same circumstance. Something terrible is happening in the world and you have valid feelings of anger and frustration and whatever else you have to feel. But if you then feel it's always been like this or it's never been this bad, it's terrible, now it's, we're too far gone, it's too late. Imagine how you feel. You feel helpless and resigned and defeated and overwhelmed and you give up and you don't do anything and you doom scroll and you keep searching for new information about it, hoping that someone's doing something.
As opposed to if you feel I'm not alone, there's a community of people that have always been fighting this. A small group of people have always changed the world. I have work to do. I guess I'm gonna find out what I'm made of now, right? It may not change anything, but I'm not gonna go down without a fight. Think about how different that feels to think that and how you would feel and act from those thoughts as opposed to the original thoughts that I was saying. Like it's never, it's gotten too big, it's never gonna change. That's where your control comes in, right? That's where you get to say, no, I refuse to allow this circumstance to get me to this place where I've just given up. Or even if we talk about overwhelm, right? I think a lot of us, when we feel really overwhelmed, we have certain thoughts that keep us on these apps that keeps us on the news, that has us thinking like, well, I need to know what's going on.
Well, if I turn it off, then I may miss something. Well, I wanna see if someone else is doing something. I wanna sort of feel validated and see if other people feel the same way I do. Or we even have thoughts of like, well, other people can't turn it off. They don't have the privilege of turn of just walking away. So like, who am I? Like And then we feel guilty. And what does that do? It just keeps us perpetuating in this cycle of information overload as opposed to thinking like, taking all this information is not gonna keep me more informed. It's just gonna defeat me. I'm like, yes, some people don't have the privileges I have. I'm gonna use it, take advantage of it. I'm gonna make sure to take care of my mental health so I can show up for that, right? Or like, I need space to think, in order to figure out how I wanna act.
I wanna actually be a participant. I deserve to take a break. My brain deserves to have some quiet time. My brain cannot handle this. When you have those thoughts, then you act in a different way. These are just some examples, but I, what I want you to understand is that you will not control what's happening outside of you. You will not control how fast technology is gonna move. We're not gonna control like, you know, I mean we can take steps, we can take actions to try to like control as a collective and pass laws and do all those things, but you as a person is not, are not gonna like stop things from happening in the world, but you can stop how you react to it. You can change that. You can learn how to get to a place where you might be feel more empowered, you might feel more committed.
I'm not saying you're gonna feel happy. Wait, we don't wanna like just take off all this stuff again and kind of create this toxic positivity of like, I'm just great all the time. Everything is wonderful. Nobody needs that. But you can decide, you know what? I don't wanna feel helpless and resigned. I don't wanna feel defeated. I will not let them make me feel like this. I wanna feel determined. I wanna feel angry, right? I wanna feel motivated. What am I gonna think in order to feel that? What do I have to think? How do I have to take care of myself? That is where all of your power lies. And it is more important than ever for you to understand that, that your resilience is going to come from the thoughts that you think. And it's like a muscle like anything else, right? Like you, you don't go to the gym one time and expect to have a six pack.
Nobody's saying that you're gonna like just change your thoughts and then tomorrow you're gonna be super human and put down your phone. Nobody needs that. But you can start practicing it. You can start figuring out ways of like, can I find thoughts that empower me to do the things that I wanna do? Can I practice it one time today? Can I learn to like step away from my phone for 10 minutes? Can I increase that time, you know, every day until I can start creating like a ritual for myself? Or I can start putting some more boundaries that are gonna help me. This is a process and you don't have to do it alone. If you want to learn more about how to manage your mind, like I said, you can take that free masterclass. I'll give you a tool on like how you can become aware of your thoughts and then how you can change them, how you can like figure out exactly what you're thinking and then try to find thoughts that you want to think.
Um, it's a framework that I teach all my clients. You can go to quitterclub.com/mym and get that class. I highly recommend you taking that class. I know this is kind of an overview of why you need it, but that will get more into like the nitty gritty of exactly what you should be doing. So you can sign up there. Um, and if you want more help with this, I have a membership called the Quitter Club that you can join where we do this kind of mindset work and you get coaching every week, and you can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub to check that out. And if you don't do it with me, that's fine too. There's a million other tools that you can use to learn how to manage your thoughts. I just want you to start becoming proactive in understanding how valuable of a tool this is gonna be for you as you move forward in this age of information overload.
It is up to you to kind of protect your mental health and not in the way of just like, I think there's a lot of beauty in, in meditation and doing all that stuff and finding stillness and that is really important. But part of what we need to do is combat like all of the thoughts that we're having every single day as we're moving through the world. And you need to find a way to be able to do that. So hopefully this helps you find some thoughts to get you started on this journey and get you seeing the importance of why your mindset matters so much. In this day of information overload, I hope that you, uh, find some tools that can help you take care of yourself because we need you. We need you to come back day after day. We need you to be a part of the collective.
We need you to, um, help make this world a better place. You don't have to save it on your own, but you can be a part of it. You can be one person that does one part in this collective of people that are constantly trying to do good and make the world a better place. And if you need help with it, I would love to help you. Again, I would start with the class at quitterclub.com/mym. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life, and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I want to talk to you about how to stay sane in a world where we're on information overload. I just did a masterclass this last week about how to learn how to master your mind when you are completely overwhelmed with the world around you. As so many of us are in today's like digital age, with what's going on in the news, constantly being bombarded with information all the time.
It is more important than ever to learn how to master your mind. And I did a whole class that taught you the framework that I use with my clients that has changed my life, that helped me kind of make sense of what's going on in my brain and helps me to stay sane the last, you know, number of years. And I want to teach that to you. If you want access to that class, you can um, find it in the show notes and the links below. Or you can go to twitter club.com/nym, master your mind and get that class. You can learn that framework, but I figured that I would bring it to the podcast because I think so many of us who may not have time to take the class need to understand the importance. Even if you don't use this tool, whatever tool you wanna use, whatever tool you wanna find, it is so dire for you to figure out and spend time and invest in learning how to manage your mind.
Because otherwise it becomes very easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel despondent, to feel hopeless, to sort of give up. And we don't want that for you. So that's what I wanna talk to you about today. I think we're all very aware that we are in this kind of information overload, right? The world doesn't slow down, our phones are ping all the time. We are constantly bombarded with news and emails and work and all of the things all of the time, right? And I think that a lot of us think that there's something wrong with us that I just, you know, need to push through. And I want you to understand that there's nothing wrong with you. We weren't built to live this way. And so I want you to really understand that your sanity, your focus, your resilience, all of that is on the line if you don't really understand how to balance how you are being bombarded, um, in every direction in today's age.
Okay? So we're gonna talk about that. The first thing I want you to understand before we even go into like what you need to do, 'cause I want us to really understand that like we were not meant to get this much information ever, especially this much negative information, okay? I want us to think about it. Like I know people say this all the time and we talk about like, oh, when we had TVs, you know, when it was only TVs, you would get the nightly news for an hour a day. For sure. That's how you know, your brain was like we, you wouldn't know what was happening in every corner of the world. But if we even take a step further back, if we go even more macro, I want you to think about human existence. Like the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been alive.
And even if we don't go all the, let's say like from our iteration of our brain with our prefrontal cortex, they guess is around 40,000 years, 50,000 years around there, okay? I wanna say like, think about how many tens of thousands of years humans just were out in nature, you know, hunting and gathering. Like I want you to think about when you're in nature and how you feel and like how little input is coming in. Like there's sounds and there's things that you're gonna be paying attention to. And then when we've come into kind of the society that we have and we're in busy cities and there's noise all the time, and then there's like TV and now there's the phones. And I want you to think about like the, the hardware we're using, the brains we're using are the same brains that our hunter, gatherer, forefathers ancestors had, right?
And it isn't equipped for this level of novelty. And here's why I say novelty 'cause your brain was created to seek novelty, right? Because when you are, let's say a hunter gathering, like you have to like notice something moving in the bushes, you have to notice something that's new. In order to keep yourself safe. You have to like be really hyper aware where something new is coming into your world, into your line of vision. And so that, but when you know that was happening, it wasn't happening all the time, it wasn't like this. And so our brains are wired to seek novelty and we also are wired to seek sort of negativity or focus on negativity. We have a negativity bias and that also was evolutionarily to keep us alive, right? Where you have to look at like you can go to a hundred bushes that have sweet berries on 'em and that's great, but if there's one bush that is poisonous, you wanna remember that Like that's the thing that you're gonna wanna really like not gloss over.
And so your brain hyper focuses on things that go wrong, on mistakes, on things that, um, could be harmful. And that has been evolutionarily very valuable to us 'cause it keeps us alive. But obviously in our day and age where we're not at risk of being eaten by tigers all the time and we're not at risk of dying, we are being bombarded by negativity. And you know, media companies know this. They know there's like stats that, um, headlines that are negative have like 30% more click rates. And so they purposely focus on negative news stories because that is what is gonna get the most clicks, right? Imagine if your news was just bombarded with all the beautiful things that people are doing in their communities all over the world. 'cause there are, there are way more people doing good and people trying to make change and people working together and people making community.
But we don't care about that. We're not gonna look at that. And so we are bombarded with all the things that could possibly go wrong. And again, in our brain it's like, well this is keeping me alive. I do need to stay abreast of everything that's happening in the political sphere in other countries. I need to make sure that I'm safe. And so we have our brain is like wired to seek that, to look like for that dopamine. So we keep doom scrolling, we keep looking at all this information. And the thing is, is that we are consuming five times more information daily than we did in the eighties. And that's probably was, you know, five, 10 times more than we did decades before that. And so we're overwhelmed this attention economy that is like 24 7 is profiting office keeping us outraged and overwhelmed constantly.
'cause we're then we're gonna seek more. Like, oh no, there's a threat happening and we were never meant to handle that. And so I just want you to understand that like it's not that you are bad at handling stress, it's not that like there's something wrong with you that you feel overwhelmed. You are being fire hosed with bad information, with bad news, right? It's like drinking out of a fire hydrant. Like you are gonna feel like you're choking. That's sort of by design, right? And I think that when they realize like how much they can overwhelm us, it also gets you to not act. It also gets you to be hopeless. It also gets you to kind of give up, which makes for a very easily dominated populace, right? It makes it for people that are in charge to be able to do what they want to do.
And so I say that because I want you to understand first like why it's not your fault and what is happening so that you can really understand the importance of you being able to like take back control of your own brain. Okay? And you've heard all this, obviously everybody can tell you like you should go on a, you know, information diet. You should try to limit your social media. That's all true. And I know it's easier to say, uh, harder to do because we are all addicted, right? We have these dopamine addictions to our phones and they've created these apps specifically like slot machines. They know that it creates this addiction. And so I'm not here to like lecture you into what you should do. I just want you to be aware of like what is happening is not natural and the amount of information you're getting is not natural and it is used intentionally to hijack certain aspects of your brain that are meant to react a certain way.
And that's terrible. But we do have some control, right? We do have some say in what we can do from this. The second thing I want you to understand is that that level of information is causing burnout and killing your problem solving skills, right? People think that we are overwhelmed by just what is happening, the amount that is happening. And to a certain extent that is true, but we are overwhelmed because we believe that we have a lack of control. And I think that that happens because there's no amount of quiet, right? There's no amount of silence for you to think about how you wanna act, what you want to do. And I want you to understand like people's ideas, the best ideas are not born in chaos. It is very difficult to think when you are in the midst of chaotic, you know, action.
I think you all, we've all experienced that. Like you make good decisions from stillness, from quiet. You make from understanding, like from having a moment to think and breathe. And unfortunately for a lot of us, we just don't have those moments anymore. And that becomes a problem because then we can't decide how we wanna act in a certain way. We can't decide how we wanna show up. We can't decide what we wanna do in this situation because we are constantly under like code red emergency. And I think all of us know like that's not the best place to strategize. That's not the best place to make a intentional decision about your life, right? And so I think that for all of us, like when we understand that like the reason that we are feeling this overwhelm is not simply that there's this inundation of information, there is, but it's simply because there's also no time to be able to assess and think about what you wanna do because you're constantly in reactive mode.
You're constantly in like distracted mode. You're constantly in information overload, right? So what do we do about this? This is all great. I think you all, we all already know this and we all already get a bunch of information about this, right? We already get all these tiktoks and news stories about how we have too much news. The irony in that, and even this, like you're watching or listening to this podcast or watching on YouTube, and it's like, again, taking information, I understand the irony, but really there's no way around that. So what do you do? The thing that I can help you with, the thing that I want, the people that listen to this to understand the thing that I think has saved me from not being burned out over the last four or five years, where I think a lot of people through the pandemic and kind of the political turmoil in the United States, if you're in the United States or you know really anywhere in the world at this point have felt that I don't think I have gotten to that level of burnout, is simply because I know how to manage my mind.
Your mindset determines whether you will spiral or whether you will stay grounded. The circumstances of the world are not gonna change because you want them to change. They're not gonna slow down. The information overload is not gonna stop. These media companies are not going to give you a break. They're not going to, it's up to you to take back that control. It's up to you to take back the control of your brain. Other people around you aren't going to. That's the other thing is I think a lot of us, you know, are waiting for some kind of collective for people to do this, to put, you know, restrictions on maybe bad news or whatever, whatever it might be. Like on phones. We kind of wanna be a part of a movement, which being a part of a community is really important. But I think that we all have to really start taking responsibility that like they're not gonna do it for me.
And it is really hard to do it. And I am being inundated and that is not my fault, but it is within my control to try to figure out what I want to do with my own brain and how I want to react to what is happening in this world. Because it's a lot and it's not gonna slow down, which that's the bad news. The good news is that you do have a lot of control, right? I think that for a lot of us, we believe that we are just reacting to circumstances, right? So something is happening in the world and I am just reacting to it. And there's, I have no power in how I react because this is the thing that is happening in the world. And so I have to react this way. And I understand how it can seem that way, and I understand how we have been led to believe that that is the way that it is, but it isn't.
And actually a really good example of this is looking at politics or looking at the, the negative news cycle. Whatever is happening in the world, people have vastly different thoughts about it. Some people are for it and they're happy that certain things are happening. They don't feel a lot of stress. They feel excited. If there's somebody in office that you agree with, you feel a certain way and other people are angry and enraged and despondent about the same exact thing, it's not the thing that is making you feel this way. It is your thoughts about it, right? There's a sliver of control that you have between what is happening and what you think and how you feel. Right? Something happens in the world, a world event happens, I have certain thoughts about it, whether they're subconscious or conscious, and then I feel a certain way, okay?
And that sliver in that middle is where all of your control lies. Now, as a caveat, I'm not saying that you need to change all of those thoughts to be happy. That you need to like be like, you know what? Everything in the world's great and I'm just gonna feel great about it and there's nothing I can do. No, I'm not doing toxic positivity. And the point of this is not to say that you need to wish everything away or like think positively. That's not what I'm saying. But you do wanna get really clear on what is it that I'm thinking, right? Because it is very different to think, you know, I can be enraged or I can be angry and think, I don't want this to happen in in the country, in the world. This is terrible. And I can have other thoughts that are like, you know what?
I may not be able to save the world, but I can do one thing, I can try, I can try to help. I'm gonna do my part that is gonna create a much different feeling. Then there's no way to stop this. It's not gonna make a difference anyway. It's hopeless at this point. It's too big for any of us to stop. Like, I want you to think about how different you feel. It's the same circumstance. Something terrible is happening in the world and you have valid feelings of anger and frustration and whatever else you have to feel. But if you then feel it's always been like this or it's never been this bad, it's terrible, now it's, we're too far gone, it's too late. Imagine how you feel. You feel helpless and resigned and defeated and overwhelmed and you give up and you don't do anything and you doom scroll and you keep searching for new information about it, hoping that someone's doing something.
As opposed to if you feel I'm not alone, there's a community of people that have always been fighting this. A small group of people have always changed the world. I have work to do. I guess I'm gonna find out what I'm made of now, right? It may not change anything, but I'm not gonna go down without a fight. Think about how different that feels to think that and how you would feel and act from those thoughts as opposed to the original thoughts that I was saying. Like it's never, it's gotten too big, it's never gonna change. That's where your control comes in, right? That's where you get to say, no, I refuse to allow this circumstance to get me to this place where I've just given up. Or even if we talk about overwhelm, right? I think a lot of us, when we feel really overwhelmed, we have certain thoughts that keep us on these apps that keeps us on the news, that has us thinking like, well, I need to know what's going on.
Well, if I turn it off, then I may miss something. Well, I wanna see if someone else is doing something. I wanna sort of feel validated and see if other people feel the same way I do. Or we even have thoughts of like, well, other people can't turn it off. They don't have the privilege of turn of just walking away. So like, who am I? Like And then we feel guilty. And what does that do? It just keeps us perpetuating in this cycle of information overload as opposed to thinking like, taking all this information is not gonna keep me more informed. It's just gonna defeat me. I'm like, yes, some people don't have the privileges I have. I'm gonna use it, take advantage of it. I'm gonna make sure to take care of my mental health so I can show up for that, right? Or like, I need space to think, in order to figure out how I wanna act.
I wanna actually be a participant. I deserve to take a break. My brain deserves to have some quiet time. My brain cannot handle this. When you have those thoughts, then you act in a different way. These are just some examples, but I, what I want you to understand is that you will not control what's happening outside of you. You will not control how fast technology is gonna move. We're not gonna control like, you know, I mean we can take steps, we can take actions to try to like control as a collective and pass laws and do all those things, but you as a person is not, are not gonna like stop things from happening in the world, but you can stop how you react to it. You can change that. You can learn how to get to a place where you might be feel more empowered, you might feel more committed.
I'm not saying you're gonna feel happy. Wait, we don't wanna like just take off all this stuff again and kind of create this toxic positivity of like, I'm just great all the time. Everything is wonderful. Nobody needs that. But you can decide, you know what? I don't wanna feel helpless and resigned. I don't wanna feel defeated. I will not let them make me feel like this. I wanna feel determined. I wanna feel angry, right? I wanna feel motivated. What am I gonna think in order to feel that? What do I have to think? How do I have to take care of myself? That is where all of your power lies. And it is more important than ever for you to understand that, that your resilience is going to come from the thoughts that you think. And it's like a muscle like anything else, right? Like you, you don't go to the gym one time and expect to have a six pack.
Nobody's saying that you're gonna like just change your thoughts and then tomorrow you're gonna be super human and put down your phone. Nobody needs that. But you can start practicing it. You can start figuring out ways of like, can I find thoughts that empower me to do the things that I wanna do? Can I practice it one time today? Can I learn to like step away from my phone for 10 minutes? Can I increase that time, you know, every day until I can start creating like a ritual for myself? Or I can start putting some more boundaries that are gonna help me. This is a process and you don't have to do it alone. If you want to learn more about how to manage your mind, like I said, you can take that free masterclass. I'll give you a tool on like how you can become aware of your thoughts and then how you can change them, how you can like figure out exactly what you're thinking and then try to find thoughts that you want to think.
Um, it's a framework that I teach all my clients. You can go to quitterclub.com/mym and get that class. I highly recommend you taking that class. I know this is kind of an overview of why you need it, but that will get more into like the nitty gritty of exactly what you should be doing. So you can sign up there. Um, and if you want more help with this, I have a membership called the Quitter Club that you can join where we do this kind of mindset work and you get coaching every week, and you can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub to check that out. And if you don't do it with me, that's fine too. There's a million other tools that you can use to learn how to manage your thoughts. I just want you to start becoming proactive in understanding how valuable of a tool this is gonna be for you as you move forward in this age of information overload.
It is up to you to kind of protect your mental health and not in the way of just like, I think there's a lot of beauty in, in meditation and doing all that stuff and finding stillness and that is really important. But part of what we need to do is combat like all of the thoughts that we're having every single day as we're moving through the world. And you need to find a way to be able to do that. So hopefully this helps you find some thoughts to get you started on this journey and get you seeing the importance of why your mindset matters so much. In this day of information overload, I hope that you, uh, find some tools that can help you take care of yourself because we need you. We need you to come back day after day. We need you to be a part of the collective.
We need you to, um, help make this world a better place. You don't have to save it on your own, but you can be a part of it. You can be one person that does one part in this collective of people that are constantly trying to do good and make the world a better place. And if you need help with it, I would love to help you. Again, I would start with the class at quitterclub.com/mym. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life, and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.
