Are we all suffering from over-stimulation?

Introducing the concept of screen switching psychosis

Please bear with me as I describe a typical day in my life to you. An ambitiously early alarm goes off at 7AM. Woken up from a stress dream where I’ve just encountered everyone I’ve ever had a crush on in my life, I snooze it. Or, more often than not, I simply turn it off. Then an hour to an hour and a half later, my boyfriend yells at me to get my lazy bones out of bed. I contest for as long as I can. The lure of coffee gets me out of bed. The dogs are jumping on me. I grab my phone. Emails, texts, and Instagram notifications flood my brain. The stimulation begins.

pov you wake up to this face

By 11:00 am, with two cold brews and an empty stomach later, I’m frantically doing something one might call the screen switching psychosis. I switch from browser screen to browser screen, desktop 1 to desktop 2. Open tabs. Close tabs. Start a task. Remember another task. Switch back to the other task because I didn’t finish the first task. Get a text. Ignore text. Swipe open Instagram. Scroll a little. Turn it off. Back to the desktop. Forget what I was supposed to do. An email comes in. I start to reply. I check the time. I’m late. I rush to leave the house. It’s a living hell. 

On the subway I maniacally switch between scrolling Instagram, refreshing my email, and running through my mental to-do list. My mom texts me “HELLO??”. A client sends me another email asking me to do something. Yes of course, I’ll get right to it. A friend asks me, “where do I go for a good massage”. My sister asks what color to dye her hair. Ian wants to know when I’ll be home so I can walk and feed the dogs. Charli XCX loops on repeat in my brain. 365 party girl. 365 party girl. I check Instagram stories and see hot people doing cool things. A friend posts another friend on IG stories. I’m not hot enough, I think. If I were cuter, people would take pictures of me and post them on their story. I am literally insane. But I cannot help how my brain thinks. Nauseous, the day flies by.

2pm rolls around and it’s time for therapy. Sometimes I grab lunch at Citarella and eat it while I pretend not to be bothered that my therapist seems to have completely forgotten what we discussed last week. The sushi I bought for 30$ sucks and I throw half of it out. “Do we have an eating disorder here, to worry about?” My therapist asks. I hate him. I leave the appointment agitated and paranoid. The West Village is a literal hell on an empty stomach. 

I get on the F Train at West Fourth and ride it all the way back to Brooklyn. Of course the train is skipping my stop. I get off at 7th Ave. Should I grab another cold brew, I wonder? No. I walk home. My tote bag gnaws at my right shoulder. Switch to the left shoulder. Switch back to the right. Rip the stuck hair out of the straps. I unconsciously check Instagram as I’m walking. 

At home again. I turn a podcast on. Probably a self-help one. A man tells me I should live my life like a professional. Professionals play hurt. Professionals get up at 4am. Professionals keep the promises they make to themselves. I feel both inspired and shameful at the same time. I start making dinner. I eat the same thing almost 4x a week. It’s a pretty sad meal. Farmers market sausage, broccoli rabe and gluten free pasta. I forget the pasta boiling on the stove and I’m back on the computer. Close some tabs. Pick up my phone. Put it down. Back to the computer. I’m still nauseous. I constantly feel behind and feel like I’m letting someone down. I walk in and out of rooms unable to decide if I should do some laundry, keep working, or pick up the water glasses scattered throughout the apartment. 

It must stop, I decide. I make a bath with epsom salts. I leave my phone in the other room. Or I don’t. I get in for a little bit. The slightest bit of calm washes over me. I get in bed and doom scroll TikTok until I fall asleep. 

In an alternate universe my day starts like this. I wake up at 5:30am. Gracefully, I glide out of bed and into the living room where I meditate for 20 minutes, do some breathwork, journal, practice gratitude and pray. Just in time for sunrise, I walk to the park and look at the sun while grounding my bare feet on the grass. I take all my morning vitamins, in the right order, which takes about an hour. I eat breakfast and drink lemon water. I don’t check my phone until 9am. I have a to-do list of tasks I need to accomplish and a schedule of when I will complete them. I work out. I look great and feel great. I have time to perfectly balance my personal self-care with a full and lively social life while also crushing it in my career. I’m respected and recognized for the work I do. I’m in bed, electronics free by 9:30pm. Mouth tape on, I dip into a restful sleep, totally at ease and excited for the next day to come. 

I’m not sure I’ve had a day like that, ever. Yet this is the standard my mind sets for myself every day. I don’t think I’m the only one suffering in this world of over-stimulation. It’s also not just a New York City problem for me. Right now I’m in an unseasonably warm Jackson Hole. I got up one morning and went to hot yoga then went and got a smoothie. The room felt too hot at hot yoga, the teacher’s voice too quiet, the mat too slippery, and the room was either too dark or jarringly bright when she flipped the overhead lights on. The smoothie/juice bar was really cute. They had a bunch of vitamins and my favorite living libations oils. I picked things up and put things down. Contemplated whether to buy or not to buy. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I noticed my eyes were bloodshot and slightly yellow. All of the sudden, the music got too loud, the light too bright, too many people, too much talking. I ran outside. Sent a voice note to Lizzy saying I wanted to write a letter about overstimulation.

things I wanted to buy but didn’t

I’m certainly not the only one battling endless stimulation. I’ve noticed friends and peers describe these acute moments of overstimulation a lot recently. Lizzy described a moment of intense overstimulation below during Paris Fashion Week:

I did some crowdsourcing on Instagram to see what triggers my friends the most and what helps combat it. Nobody answered the prompt about what they do to combat overstimulation except for one person who said, “I DON’T. I EMBRACE IT.”

I don’t think it’s just a Gen Z problem. I’m sitting in a room with four 60 year-old-ish adults. Cable news is barking. Everyone is on their phones. One is even doing a crossword puzzle while simultaneously scrolling on their phone. For me, I know the stimulation is related to my phone and computer use but the possibility of logging off seems impossible. The ability to self-regulate when Instagram is literally MY JOB feels even more impossible. I’ve been fantasizing of doing one of those 10-day silent meditation retreats at Vipassana. But I’m not sure when in the next 10 years that would be feasible. 

Every modality I study tells me presence is the key to contentment. My lifestyle makes it really hard to be present because there is always something fighting for my attention. There is always something I could be doing. Always another dopamine hit at my fingertips. Talk about champagne problems, but I can’t even enjoy a massage without worrying if I’m missing a work email. I feel like I’m constantly battling my desire to feel content and peaceful with my eagerness to be entertained and successful. I guess I still have a limiting belief that success has to be stressful and that peace is boring. 

Yesterday I went back to the hot yoga studio and took a 26-2 class (for those who don’t know that’s the Bikram series). The room was 118 degrees. Salty sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eyes. I attempted standing balancing pose after standing balancing pose. My feet wobbled. My legs shook. I stared into my eyes in the mirror in front of me as I reached my left arm forward and kicked my right leg up and back. Kick and reach. Kick and reach. For a split second my mind goes silent. Complete focus. Effortless effort. My right foot appears above my head in the mirror. Yes, I think. I have the best standing bow in the room. Suddenly, my left big toe betrays me. I roll onto the edge of my foot. I fall out of the pose.