Pollution. When you hear that word what do you think of? Perhaps dangerous gases are being emitted into our atmosphere. Garbage floating around the ocean. Sick animals due to toxic food. But there's another pollutant lurking in our society. An invisible one that we encounter every single day. Information. It's in our phones, televisions, text chains, and email threads. It's packed into devices we wear on our wrists and in the checkout lines at the grocery store.

In our modern society, escaping the barrage of information is impossible. But are we equipped to handle it? In a 2024 letter published in Nature Human Behavior, scientists argued that we should treat this information overload like environmental pollution. It may not affect our drinking water, but it affects our brains at every turn.

The brain is the most complex organ in the body. But the brain can only process a certain amount of information. When we exceed that peak level, it can almost feel like our brain is filled to the brink and totally frozen, incapable of performing its most basic duties that help us get through our days.

When we reach that point of paralysis, we can't process and act on the information we consume. If this is feeling familiar, you're not alone. According to the Real Time Statistics Project, as of January 2023, there were nearly 2 billion websites on the internet. 175 million tweets were sent every day, and 30 billion pieces of content were shared monthly on Facebook. How was it possible to not get distracted by all that information?

Of course, technology is useful. We can look up healthy recipes or determine if a headache is just a headache or something more problematic. But because of modern technology, we're all slaves to the amount of information we can consume. The American Psychological Association defines information overload as the state when the intensity of information exceeds an individual's processing capacity, leading to anxiety, poor decision-making, and other undesirable consequences.