#183 This Isn't Worth Losing Your Mind Over

On why I’ve been talking like an idiot lately

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Dear reader,

Lately, I’ve noticed something unsettling: I’m struggling to speak with cohesion.

At a recent meeting with a course head from a prestigious college, I was asked to talk about myself. What came out was a messy, stuttering version of me, like someone learning to drive, releasing the clutch too early, again and again.

This isn’t a one-off. I’ve been finding it hard to talk: about my work, myself, even a book or a film. My mind either blanks out, or flashes too many thoughts at once. I can't gather and shape them in time, not even for a one-person audience.

Linking ideas feels harder than it used to. And it seems to be getting worse.

It reminded me of my niece’s report card. “Struggles with cohesion, finds it hard to converse.” At that time, I blamed this to the overload of broken information. I think the same thing’s happening to me. What irony!

We’re consuming fragments (reels, shorts, posts), nonstop. They don’t connect. And now, neither do our thoughts.

When we write, we dump our cluttered thoughts into a GPT and ask it to organize them. But when we speak, the organizing has to be done by the brain, and it’s too overloaded to keep up. It can’t stitch thoughts fast enough to stay ahead of the mouth that’s moving. That’s when you hear yourself say, “Sorry, what was I saying?”

It’s like digestion. If you’re constantly eating a little bit of everything, your system crashes. Why do we expect our central nervous system to handle an unending stream of inputs without consequence?

I remember preparing for my MA exams at Calcutta University, a place known for its love of the verbose and its famously rigorous marking. You’d study a thousand questions, knowing the paper would ask just sixteen. On test day, my brain would feel foggy. Concepts jumbled. Panic set in. My dad would say, “Read the question a few times. Then wait. Your brain will sort it out.”

And he was right. Once I began writing, things would fall into place. “You have to trust your brain,” he’d say. “It does so much for you.”

Today, I think I’m breaking that trust. This isn’t just info overload. It’s gluttony.

Just because something’s available doesn’t mean it needs to be consumed. Not everything is worth your attention. You wouldn’t eat weeds just because they’re nearby. Our information diet needs more discipline than our food diet.

In media, we’re afraid to miss out. But in trying to stay ahead, we’re stumbling.

So here’s what I’m trying this July, simple things I wrote in my morning pages:

• (Of course) Write morning pages. Jot down everything in your head. Like taking a dump in the morning, it clears out the junk.

• At night, bullet your day. Like our parents asking “What did you do in school?” Helps bring order.

• Restrict what you consume. Give your day a theme. Don’t scroll through randomness.

• Read slow. Don’t chase page counts. Read 40 pages, then write what you understood. Link it to what you already know.

• Watch your tabs. Both browser and brain. Notice how many times you check your phone. Awareness is step one.

These are my starting points. I’ll try them through July, and maybe share what shifts.

If you’ve faced something similar, and found your own fixes, drop them in the comments.

Here’s to not losing our minds.

Love,
Ree

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