It’s a Tuesday night and you’re scrolling. Again. The phone hums softly in your palm while the rest of the room remains quiet—quiet, but not peaceful. Your head is buzzing. You just saved your third recipe today. You’re not going to cook any of them.

If your brain has been feeling loud lately—noisy, restless, constantly reaching for something but never really holding onto anything—you’re not alone. Something fundamental is shifting. Quiet isn’t what it used to be. Not because it vanished, but because we stopped visiting it.

Let’s try to understand why.

The Noise We Carry Now

The average person today sees more information in a week than someone in the 1800s might have seen in their entire life. It’s not just news or education—it’s memes, ads, photos, texts, reels, recipes, life hacks, and someone else’s baby’s second birthday.

The result? Our mental processing doesn’t keep up.

Psychologists call this information overload. It’s a state of persistent overconsumption where our minds are bombarded with more input than they can handle. A 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry revealed that people who absorbed large volumes of distressing pandemic news were more prone to depression, “COVID-19 information overload is positively related to an individual’s anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Furthermore, COVID-19 information overload can indirectly affect an individual’s PTSD symptoms by increasing the feeling of depression”. But you don’t need a global crisis to feel it. Everyday scrolling is enough.

Doomscrolling: The Habit That Hides in Plain Sight

There’s a name for the endless downward pull of bad news, negativity, and overwhelming updates: doomscrolling. It’s when we can’t stop feeding ourselves distressing information, even though it’s visibly making us worse.

You probably already do it—at bedtime, on the toilet, between emails.

Researchers have found a strong link between doomscrolling and psychological decline. One 2024 study from The Guardian reported that people who doomscrolled regularly “had higher levels of distrust, fear, and existential anxiety.” Another survey in Australia showed that individuals engaging in habitual doomscrolling were 12 times more likely to suffer serious mental health issues, and 10 times more likely to experience fatigue, headaches, and stomach problems.

The loudness in your brain? It may not be stress. It may be accumulated digital noise.

The Information We Save but Never Use

There’s another strange consequence of overconsuming information: we save it, then forget it.

That banana bread recipe? Saved three weeks ago. That 10-minute arm workout? It’s buried in a playlist somewhere. Even practical, helpful content—like financial advice or mental health tips—gets pushed aside by the next better thing.

This endless loop—absorb, save, forget—builds clutter in the mind. You begin to feel less capable, even though you “know” more. Experts say “…the Internet could affect our brains’ structure, function, and cognitive development”. Firth, J., et al (2019) “The Online Brain”: how the internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry.  They further go to say how the “bulk” amount of research can be categorized “a)Attention…b)memory and knowledge…c)Social Cognition”. Attention, here speaks about how “notifications and prompts” causes people to lose concentration. Memory and knowledge, is the extent to which we rely solely on the internet for information, and this may cause how we process new information and creating new memories. Social Cognition, on how we basically lift physical interactions into digital interactions instead.

Not All Information Is Equal

What you consume matters as much as how much you consume.

“Nonetheless, this raises the possibility that various types of Internet usage could differentially affect the brain and cognitive processes”. Firth, J., et al (2019) “The Online Brain”: how the internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry. And it’s not just academic stress—social media content, celebrity drama, and even feel-good posts can build pressure when consumed passively or excessively.

Here’s the difference:

• Negative news tends to activate the brain’s threat response. “Negative information may be processed under high priority as a protection against the potential threat an allegedly dangerous person could pose.” Baum, J., Rahman, R.A (2021) Negative news dominates fast and slow brain responses and social judgments even after source credibility evaluation, Neuroimage
• Lifestyle content often triggers comparison or perfectionism. “Studies suggested that Internet addiction affects lifestyle, and the findings of the present study were in line with the literature” ¹
• Educational/Positive content without action leads to fatigue and avoidance.
  “findings reveal that information overload significantly contributes to social media fatigue, indicating that excessive use of information leads to mental exhaustion in students.” ²

It’s not about whether information is good or bad. It’s about how relentlessly it arrives, and how little space we have to process it.

How Loudness Feels in Real Life

For many, the symptoms show up slowly.

You feel mentally drained after what should be a restful weekend. You forget simple things—like what you opened your phone to check. You scroll past news of war and heartbreak with a numb expression. You find it hard to start, finish, or even want to do things that matter.

Your brain isn’t broken. It’s just exhausted.

And underneath that noise, you may still be craving something older, quieter, and deeply human: stillness.

Reclaiming Quiet Isn’t Just a Detox

This isn’t about going off-grid. It’s not about deleting every app or never watching another TikTok.

But it is about paying attention to what you’re paying attention to.

Quiet begins when we start noticing:

• How a certain type of content makes us feel.
• Why we’re reaching for the phone again.
• Whether we’re acting on what we consume—or just hoarding it.
• If the things we save are adding value or adding noise.

“For instance, research has shown that smartphone use affects health and well-being, performance, and social interactions. Regarding health-related problems, studies have found that smartphone use is related to higher depression rates and anxiety” quoted by ³ in their article from ⁴

One of the researchers behind the Australian doomscrolling study suggests a simple rule: stop scrolling the moment you feel worse than when you started. That sounds too simple—but it’s often the small boundaries that let peace in.

Some Final Quiet

You don’t need to escape the world to find stillness.

In an article by sarah Mitchell on Doomscrolling recommending a professionals advice “Setting time limits on apps, curating feeds to prioritise credible and positive sources, trying ground activities” says sarah Richardson CEO of someone.health. ⁵

Take a walk without your phone. Read one article slowly instead of thirty headlines. Cook one of the recipes you saved. Leave one group chat on mute. Start small. Stay gentle. Quiet isn’t loud. It will wait for you to arrive.

1. Kaya, A., DALGIÇ, A.I (2021) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0882596321000245[↩]
2. Wang, Zhao and Yu, 2025: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2530380525000036[↩]
3. Radtke et al., 2021: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20501579211028647[↩]
4. Lepp, Barkley and Karpinski, 2014: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563213003993[↩]
5. Sarah Mitchell 2025: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/lifestyle/doomscrolling-makes-you-12-times-more-likely-to-suffer-serious-mental-health-issues/news-story/521275d020a2a3ca1e4bf980fe4b9c14[↩]