If you’ve ever thought “It’s all too much!” You’re right.
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with all the…
- Information that is being blasted at you?
- Opportunities that you have to learn, interact, serve, and engage?
- Decisions that need to be made (or left to make themselves by default)?
- People who want to connect with you?
Guess what…?
That’s because of the way our brains are wired and the increasing speed of information delivery.
When I first studied NLP, we were told that we were exposed to 11 million bits of information per second while our brains could only process 126 bits per second. Some more recent studies suggest that the differential could be even greater, but statistically the difference is already so infinitely enormous that slight changes in the actual numbers have little effect on the net result that:
We are forced to delete, distort, and generalise on an immense scale because we can process less than 0.00001% of the information our brains receive each second.
It’s little wonder that we sometimes feel overwhelmed and are tempted to accept over-simplifications or shut down our critical faculty just to cope with everything because, although most of this happens unconsciously, during times of stress we instinctively try to grasp more than our brains are capable of processing.