Feeling tired, numb, or unfocused lately? You're probably not broken—you're just overstimulated. In this episode, I break down how constant noise, notifications, and distractions are draining your energy and numbing your emotions. I’ll show you what’s happening and exactly what to do about it. Looking for daily motivation? Get free inspirational messages straight to your phone, plus exclusive podcast recommendations and updates on my free workshops so you never miss out. It’s simple: just send "Quotes by Rob" to this link here 👉 https://my.community.com/robdial Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube
Chapter 1: What is overstimulation and how is it ruining your life?
Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how overstimulation is ruining your life. Let's get real for a second. If you feel like maybe you're a little bit drained recently, or maybe your brain's a little bit all over the place, you feel kind of scattered, or you just kind of feel like you're not really yourself, I want you to know that that there's a chance that you're not broken.
There's a chance that you're not lazy. There's a chance that you're not unmotivated or that you're a loser. There's a chance that you could be extremely overstimulated with the current world that we live in. And it's quietly starting to wreck your ability to focus, to connect with other people, and a lot of times to even feel the feelings of joy.
And so today we're going to take a deep dive into what overstimulation actually is when you look at it neurologically, how it's affecting you and your life, the psychology and the neuroscience behind being overstimulated, how it actually affects your brain, how it affects your body, how it affects your relationships and affects the way that you feel.
Chapter 2: How is your brain affected by modern overstimulation?
And then most importantly, what the hell you can do about it so that you can get rid of that overstimulation so that you can go back to feeling yourself and having the vibrance and the energy that you actually truly have. It's just being kind of stolen away from you.
So when you look at overstimulation, I was really curious before we dive into it, like what is overstimulation based off what we're gonna be talking about today? Overstimulation is what happens when your brain
and your nervous system, and your nervous system's a really key part of what we're gonna be talking about today, are exposed to more sensory, emotional, and informational input than they can effectively process in one point in time and then be able to regulate.
Because you have to understand, your brain is processing everything that comes in, and it's filtering what it needs to pay attention to, what it doesn't need to pay attention to. And so over time, your body needs to be able to regulate all of this. And so it can leave you scattered. It can leave you exhausted because your brain's working a million miles a second behind everything.
It can make you feel a little bit emotionally numb. It can make you feel irritable as well. Basically, overstimulation is what happens when your brain takes in more information that it can actually process. And... You've heard me say this before, but just really think about this.
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Chapter 3: Why hasn't your brain adapted to modern life changes?
If you think back to your great, great, great, great grandparents, what, 150 years ago maybe, life was completely different. They didn't have phones. They didn't have TVs. They didn't have radios. They didn't have cars running or going all over the place. They didn't have airplanes. It was just completely different.
our brain has not caught up to adapt to all of the changes that have happened in the past 150 years.
can think about your mind being like this old old computer you remember like the the green screen computers that you know that you used to have for those of you guys that are older like the green screen ones that were very basic think of your mind being like one of those but it's got 150 tabs open it's got music playing it's got downloads running in the background it's got pop-ups flashing limited time offer
That's your brain basically what it's dealing with all of the time. And your brain can't process everything. It's trying to. There's no software update for your brain. There's no hardware update for your brain. What you got is what you got. You know, modern life feels like that. It feels like nonstop notifications, 24-7 news.
Chapter 4: What are the common distractions in modern life?
constant background noise, whether that's people talking, whether that's car sounds, whether that's the TV on in the background, whether that's music playing, whether that's people in the background, you're getting dopamine hits from social media, you're getting cortisol from all of the worries that you're thinking about in the future, and your brain's on high alert all day long, every single day.
It just was not designed for this. So if you're one of those people who feels like, man, I just have no energy, I'm exhausted all the time, I'm tired, I'm a little bit irritable, it might be that your brain needs a freaking break because your brain wasn't built for it.
And over the thousands of years that it's evolved, our brain's more used to natural, gradual, slow changes in the environment, not TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Slack, phone notifications, email inboxes, text messages, and DMs, and
group chats from your friends and Instagram and podcasts and having a to-do list that will never be finished, having unfinished tasks, worrying about things coming up in the future, your perfectionism, what people are thinking about you, what they're not thinking about you, your self-criticism, the voice that's going on in the back of your head all the time.
And then you're in a meeting with your boss. And then at the same time, you also see the TV that has breaking news about some crazy thing that just happened and instant drama and constant urgency. It's way too much, man. And so there's tens of thousands of distractions every single day. And I'm not being sarcastic when I actually say tens of thousands.
I had to do research of like how many distractions and things are coming into our brain throughout the entire course of the day. And here's what I found, right? There's a lot of research on this. Research shows that modern humans are processing way more than we can, like trying to process way more than we can every single day.
You know, when you look at notifications that somebody receives in a day, at least 65 to around 150 every single day. How many times the average person pick up their phone every single day? Between 96 to 144 times a day. Social media check-ins, on average, 27 times per day.
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Chapter 5: How does overstimulation affect your mental health?
Time spent on screens, whether that's your phone, your computer, your TV, on average, seven to 10 hours a day for most adults. Email sent and received, around 121 per day. Text messages, around 40 per day.
So that's hundreds of micro hits of input before you even factor in the environmental noise and the sounds that are happening in the background that your brain's constantly paying attention to and filtering. The background chatter, the traffic sounds, the kids that you have, pets that you have to pay attention to, notifications, reminders, alerts, pop-ups, clickbait.
On average, the average adult gets around 6,000 to 10,000 ads per day alone. So your brain is just constantly dealing with all this stuff. So I want you just to take a step back and take a deep breath and realize there is a lot that your brain is trying to process. And so what I like to do is I like to look at what everybody else in the world is doing.
most of the time and I like to do the exact opposite. And so when I look at people, most people are on their phones and they're distracted all the time and they're constantly, constantly, constantly being distracted with more and more stimuli. So what I've been doing over the past couple years is removing myself from all of that as much as I possibly can.
Deleting a lot of stuff, getting rid of notifications, getting rid of social media, if I'm not getting any sort of benefit from it, or at least unfollowing people who I'm not getting benefit from, and only following people that are good for my mindset and good for my brain. And so what does all of this do? Well, it becomes cognitive overload if we don't.
So your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain which is responsible for decision-making and for your focus and impulse control, actually just gets exhausted through all of this. And so sensory overload does that to your prefrontal cortex. It also causes amygdala activation. Amygdala is where fear and anxiety comes from. It's that part of your brain.
So it increases your anxiety, it increases your irritability, it increases your emotional reactivity. Neuroimaging studies actually show that constant digital stimulation reduces the gray matter in your brain which is areas responsible for self-regulation and how to regulate the way that you feel and empathy for other people. And the average worker switches tasks over 300 times a day.
And so when you look at it, it's kind of like modern life is a full-on attention war zone. And so you need to take a step back from a lot of these things because your brain wasn't designed for all of this stimuli. It's meant for meaningful, natural stimuli. not processing a thousand microsignals and dopamine loops and cortisol and task switches every single day.
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Chapter 6: What can you do to combat overstimulation?
So if you feel fried or foggy or any of that, you're not broken, you're just over-processed. And so really that's what I want to talk about today. And I wanted to spend nine minutes telling you this to actually hopefully like... If you remember in Billy Madison, where he takes the little kid that's like, I can't wait to get to high school.
And he takes his little chunky cheeks and he shakes his face. And he's like, you know, if you guys are older, remember this, he shakes his face. He's like, don't say that. Don't ever say that.
Hopefully this past nine minutes is shaking you to be like, get rid of all of the shit that's constantly distracting yourself all the time because it's making you emotionally numb and giving you decision fatigue and making you irritable and it's reducing your productivity and it's screwing with your sleep and your rest and it's making you dull and just overstimulated all of the time.
It's making you into just more of a zombie than you need to be. And then it screws with your nervous system. So I'm not trying to scare the shit out of you. I promise I'm going to give you some tips today. But I am trying to get you to wake up to understand we need to take a step back from all this stuff.
Because when you have so much overstimulation, your nervous system ends up having a lot of cortisol that runs through it, which is your body's primary stress hormone. So when your brain's constantly taking in stimuli, there's your nervous system, which is your sympathetic nervous system, and then your parasympathetic nervous system. Parasympathetic is the calm, cool, collected, rest, relaxation.
That's parasympathetic. Sympathetic is fight or flight. And so when you're constantly getting all of this stuff hitting you all the time, it's clicking on your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, and it stays on.
And there was a study that was done in 2013 that was published in the, I'm gonna try this out, Psychoneuroendocrinology, pretty good, I think I got it there, that showed that chronic exposure to even low-level stressors, like constant alerts, noise, notifications, all of that, can keep cortisol levels elevated throughout the entire day. And so what does that mess with?
Your immune system, your gut health, your memory, your mood, your focus, your hormone balance, all of that stuff. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so overstimulation affects your mind, but also affects your ability to connect.
It affects you not being able to fully connect to the people around you, your children, your wife, not wanting to go out and hang out with people as much because there's too much happening.
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