Welcome to the tedious and distracting overload provided by technology. Some refer to it as the “Attention Crisis”.
Technology has provided us with some awesome things – a plethora of websites to get information from, emails, blogs, YouTube videos, music, current news (past news too), the weather, and a never-ending line of opinions, photos, movies and games. This is NOT a complete list.
You may be literally fatigued from it all. You may find your nerves are shredded by all the stimuli, and the things you feel you must check out in a day’s time.
For all the wonderful things available you may find you are squandering your time and lower your productivity. Keep in mind many of the above mentioned things should be done in your “free” time – excluding, of course, the family, school, your workload, aging parents, and the myriad of other demands in this twenty-first century living.
All Americans are vulnerable to finding themselves more stressed out than ever and really overwhelmed with it all. You may be facing the limit of your human ability to cope with all the stimuli in your environment.
With this entire happening, what may be worse is you find your coping mechanisms are becoming less effective, and your stress level increasing. No matter how you multitask, your list just seems to grow.
By the end of each day you may emerge with eyestrain and having accomplished nothing much at all. You have been distracted by all the “input”, and we haven’t even mentioned continuous advertisements on television, the radio, newspapers and magazines – along with non-stop “hearing distractions, no matter where you are!
SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?
First thing you can do right now is take a minute. It won’t kill any project you have begun. You need mindful oxygen. Stress makes you take shallow breaths…withholding your oxygen. In turn, you are depleted of what you need to manage your life and make good decisions. Take a breath in slowly through the nose. Now exhale through the mouth. Do this several times.
Next you need to really pay attention to the “overall picture”. It will help to prioritize. Build a list (doesn’t have to be fancy), but make it honest. What do you really need to do? . Ask yourself whether you really are focusing on the right things.
Study your habits. Do not be an accepting and passive consumer of everything that is put in front of you. Tame your appetite. LIMIT YOUR INPUT! Open-ended cruising of all that is offered WILL cause you ultimately to lose track of your goals, and your time, which is your life!
If you sleep eight hours a night you still have three hundred and fifty thousand waking minutes of each you. Now compute how many minutes a week you truly spend passively reading and hearing “stuff”? You can waste so much time following fluff. How much time do you spend healing you? How many minutes with the family and loved ones? How many minutes to breathe and relax?
You want to take down your stress level? Tame your wild stallion and pick and choose the most wonderful ways to spend your minutes and hours. Laugh with someone, pray with someone, walk alone to the top of a hill and sing. Hug like it feels inside; shake hands with a hearty and warm grasp. Fly a kite. Splash around in the small puppy pool with the puppy.
Or if you are actually not supposed to be taking time to read this, then bravo. You took a minute or two to change your life.
Now take in a deep breath and think: I feel better. Turn your hands up and exhale through the mouth and SEE your negativity, and any unresolved issues, fly from your head to your arms and out the fingertips.
Tags: 21St century demands, attention crisis, breathing, eyestrain, fatigue, free time, graduation stress, how to help manage stress, input, multitask, overload, priority, projects, ready to loose it, relaxation, sleep, technology, time squandered, websites, wedding stress
Relax, it's just Life! 
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