Dose anyone else ever fell overwhelmed by information?

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I know this sounds really silly, but when I try to research/study something I get overwhelmed by the amount of information there is on it. Infact it fells somewhat like the same kind of stimulus overload I would experience in say a warehouse store. Dose anyone else ever fell like this about information at all?

Yeah. I just absorb as much as I can in the way of generalities first and think about the details later.

More and more, as I realise that most of the simple explanations and depictions of situations are potentially dangerous approximations.

Simple generalisations are necessary, in order to get anything done.
But the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of those.


"It's not as simple as that".

Yes! Writing my dissertation for my degree was sheer hell because of this (and also because of other concentration/self-discipline problems). Having said that, I forced myself to do it and got a 2:1! (for the dissertation; for the degree as a whole I got a 3rd )

Auditory imformation can easily overload me. Even if I am speaking of the phone I have to have the TV completely turned down or it will distract me. I also cannot speak on cell phones on the street out in even just moderately heavy traffic.

I also cannot listen to people when there a lot of other people talking at once.
I usually only enjoy parties for the food, drinks and music and not the social life.

Gatherings of members of my husband's family drive me completely spare because EVERYBODY talks and NOBODY listens! I get soooooooooo wound up. you cannot talk to anyone without being interrupted/shouted over. There are small children in the family too which just makes it even worse. Thank God we're not doing Christmas with them this year!

I would like to enjoy the food at parties but I am always so on edge that I can't eat, and end up drinking far too much instead. Aaaaaargh!

What I hate about detailed research is that all the sources just repeat the same things over and over, and you have to sift through it all to get the "extra" stuff.

It's true, I did write that.....

I think he was saying he felt the same way.

I am always dealing with loads and loads of information at work and I often feel very anxious and stressed when there is so much of it.

I find that I just work with 1 at a time, and make a long list of all the important bits. I figured I can deal with 1 bit of info, then another 1, another 1 etc.....

I then look at all the info, have a little internal freak out, go down for a ciggie (I don't reccomend smoking though!) then come back and review. Put it down again, do something easier, come back and suddenly....... It is only 1 list, and I can deal with 1 thing at a time!

I suppose I have just leared to play tricks on myslef!

With approximately 100,000 books published every year in the UK, I'm not even playing catch up. If 99% of those were rubbish, that still leaves 1000 with value.

At university I had a postcard showing a brown bear reading a book. The caption read:
"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about."




Niche. The answer is niche. Much of the world has to be let go as not relevant, to me.

Yes, quite often. It's not a real problem as much as digging through it all to come up with a concept. I can come up with some odd and fairly disjointed concepts of things. I can connect ideas in ways that some people don't seem to connect them, coming up with notions and ideas that some find to be unusual, strange or paranoid. An English professor once told me that my writing style is well and good, but he couldn't always understand my thought processing. I can drift on tangents, and it is probably due to information overload. There is just so much information out there and making sense of it can be quite a workout.

- Ray M -

One of the odd habits I have (that drives my room-mates nuts, hehe) is that I listen to one song over and over again for days on end. When I see people with their 2000 song ipods I just can't handle it, so I get really engrossed in one song and really absorb it deeply. My room mates say that they do the same thing on occasion (that it's mostly normal), but that I do it 50x more than they do.

Also, I remember not too long ago I was in a university library, and I was just looking around and exploring. It was several stories, so naturally I went to the basement because I figured that's where all the really cool stuff is. So I went down there and I saw so many shelves just packed full, and I went randomnly from here to there and started reading the titles of the books. I remember the titles were things like "The Evolution of Culture" and whatnot--really meaningful stuff. But there were so many: thousands upon thousands, and as I read more and more of all these things that I wanted to know I had sort of a religious experience.

I felt the way people say they feel when they describe seeing the grand canyon for the first time. It was so overpowering and I just wanted to lay down and cry because there was so much and I didn't have millenia to study it.

One of the reasons I was always turning college papers in late was....to much information.....
I had difficulty "picking" the most relevant idea and sticking to it...there was always something else that branched off but related and I felt like I had to include it.....so off on another tangent.
Also,I might start with the idea of one topic but end up being more interested in a branch off and have to change the whole topic and start over....I learned a lot but it was difficult to fit everything in the topic.............When trying to learn about "herbalism"I was trying to self teach but the more I read the more over whelmed I became with how much there was to know(some of it contridicting),bit frustrating.

Yes, big stores overwhelm me utterly, too much to take in all at once, too many demands coming at me from the environment & so on. Having a plethora of choices/options is not a bad thing-yet sometimes "too much" really is too much (don't want to go off on a tangent about decision-making !).
According to book I read, some theorists categorize thusly:
"Overexcitability"-in one or more areas:
intellectual/imaginational/emotional/psychomotor/sensual.
My mind gets overfull often, like there's always more I need to learn & I can't cram/funnel enough of it into my brain. I get overfull of thoughts & feelings, then have to try to get the tension out. Hard to relax when the treadmill of new information continues eternally, while one lags behind. Not to mention "these modern times" overall, when there's more to know & more ways to know that you're missing out on something else.