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Taken from the November 2004 issue of Organic Style.

Too Much Information!

Bombarded by data? Tied to your computer? Feeling depressed? Research shows you may be suffering from a new syndrome.


Many of us know the routine: wake up, flip through two newspapers, check email, order a book online, listen to National Public Radio, and cruise the Web for two hours—all before breakfast. Welcome to the age of information overload. With the Web, TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, cell phones, e-mail, pagers, and PDAs constantly vying for our attention, there's way more information out there than we can possibly digest. According to University of California researchers, the world produced about five quintillion bytes of data in 2002—enough data to fill 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress' book collection.

"Recent studies suggest that the amount of information on the Internet doubles every three months," says Larry D. Rosen, PhD, a research psychologist at California State University and coauthor of the book Techno Stress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play. The dream of 24/7 technology has become a nightmare. We're drowning in data. And it's making us ill, literally.

Sick and tired After describing his own battle with information overload in the 2002 book Love Is the Killer App, Yahoo! executive Tim Sanders was deluged with thousands of e-mail messages from readers. "They said, 'I can't function. I can't sleep well at night. I'm dying of guilt because I can't keep up,' " he says. Intrigued, Sanders teamed with experts at HeartMath, a stress research institute in California, to investigate the problem.

In a survey of 1,500 men and women last year, HeartMath found that the more time people spent on a computer, the more likely they were to be depressed. Of those who logged more than 30 hours of weekly Internet usage, 45 percent said they felt exhausted often or most of the time, 37 percent reported sleep problems, and 17 percent said they felt less connected to friends and family than they had a year before.

"NEDS is a type of depression that is brought on by information overload, which leads to an erosion of close personal relationships," Sanders says. "The depression is triggered by a combination of guilt ['I can't absorb all this information'], stress ['I can't withstand all these interrupted demands'], and loneliness ['My life is me and my machine']."

Why is modern media so stressful? It's multisensory, addictive, and fast-paced. "All these forms of communication are now staring at you and saying, 'Deal with me first,'" says Rosen. "You walk by your computer and it says, 'Check your mail!' or it dings at you. It's designed to draw you in. You can't stop."

What's the solution? You have to pull the plug, switch off, turn away. "We need to set time limits on how long we search and how often we check our e-mail," Rosen says. "We need to set aside time for our families, for our friends, for work. Create a buffer between the technology and us."



Here are some more tips for coping with the glut:
Go on a data fast. Take a regular breaksay, one day or one weekfrom your computer. Spend that time socializing with family and friends.
Guard your cell phone number. Give it out only to family members and close friends.
Set a timer. Decide how long you want to spend answering e-mail or doing a Web search and limit yourself to that amount of time. Don't let yourself get sucked into hours of wanton cruising.
Ration your e-mail. Yahoo! executive Tim Sanders checks his three times a dayat 10 AM, 2 PM, and 4 PMjust often enough to catch important messages but not so much that he's consumed by it.
Turn off the information spigot. Cancel subscriptions to publications you rarely read. Take your name off e-mail news bulletins.
Talk instead of type. Don't let e-mail exchanges go back and forth indefinitely. "I have a rule," Sanders says. "If you and I e-mail twice, I pick up the phone."