Do you ever have so many thoughts swirling around in your mind that you can’t process them all?
Recently, I spent the evening on my laptop, jumping from one internet article to the next. So many choices. So many voices. How could I select the best and bypass the rest?
I went to bed feeling like my brain was a tangled mixture of random thoughts.
Just as overeating causes bodily distress, information overload brings about mental stress.. The internet is a veritable mansion of facts and opinions, where room after room offers a buffet of ideas, all there for the taking. As I sampled items from the smorgasbord of articles, blog posts, and teachings, I found inspiring quotes and useful knowledge. But I was consuming more than I could digest at once.
I know I’m not the only one feeling overwhelmed by too much information.
In 2011, Nicholas Carr published a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book catalogs the ways the internet has rewired our brains so that we have difficulty focusing. With so much information available at the touch of a screen, we suffer from information overload. We no longer have time for quiet reflection. We multitask and have a shallow understanding of many subjects.
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
True, there are advantages to having facts at our fingertips. Yet just as we make choices concerning the foods we put on our plates, we can become selective about the things we allow to enter our brains.
Scripture tells us, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Rom. 12:2-3 ESV)
Read the rest at The Glorious Table: https://theglorioustable.com/2022/08/cultivating-a-renewed-mind/
Photos thanks to Andras Vas and Tianyi Ma on Unsplash