I have decided to stop playing music in the background, something which I used to constantly do to fill my head with sounds, and in a way, spend less time with myself. This is not healthy, not only is there the physical consequence of blasting your ears with heavy music which leads to tinnitus, there is the much more pressing concern that our attention is modulated by our environment, and a constant background filled with stimulus is in many ways one of chaos, which makes it difficult to completely relax.
I think the connection between overstimulation and anxiety is not particularly hard to see, yet I think it has some aspects which aren't too obvious, which I would like to explore here.
First off, people who are constantly stimulated, whether auditorily or visually, have a harder time being in silence, for obvious reasons. But what this means is that it prevents them from accessing the space which is most conducive for deep relaxation, in the form of doing nothings.
This is particularly evident with sleep, which our culture of constant consumption is rather bad at. A lot of advice with regards to sleep problems point to a lack of physical exercise, which is a key problem as well, but few people take the problem of attention and what one fills their mind with, probably because it is hard to see how those change, because they require the very same thing which is being changed to perceive them. In other words, it's hard to tell what the effects of being overstimulated are, because the mind doing the observing is becoming habituated to those changes.
A second rather obvious consequence is that busy minds tend to be really poor at focusing for long stretches of time. Even very intelligent people can have little ability to sit down in a room and read a book in silence, because of all of the constant stimulation they might have in their life. Reading in particular requires a certain steadiness in attention, down to the ability to keeping your gaze steady, which overstimulation tends to erode.
What this means is that it creates people who are bad at meeting the demands of their life, preferring to procrastinate on tasks because they require them to focus and thus feel uncomfortable, and over time this builds up a baseline of background anxiety because they keep putting off tasks in the future, and have less and less confidence in their ability to simply get things done.
There is this constant game of excuses being played on the internet where people have readily-made justifications for having poor focus, blaming their ADHD or whatever. Personally, I am not very interested in that, because I have seen over and over again how much I can stay focused given the right circumstances, and on the contrary, how my willingness to do difficult things can drop if I stay in environments filled with low-effort dopamine rewards for longer periods of time.
It's not that ADHD doesn't exist, it's that too often, people do not even try to develop their focus and use it as a get out of jail for free card. No one is born with an ability to focus for very long, it is something which requires time and intention to develop, something which seems rather taboo to suggest in some parts of the internet.
Not only can you develop your ability to focus, but your environment has a massive impact on it as well. It's unlikely that someone surrounded by movies, video games and pornography will turn to reading books, but when they have no access to any device whatsoever, suddenly books become more appealing, because they're better than being bored with nothing to do whatsoever, and they even start to become enjoyable. Humans make decisions based on their salience landscape, which we can design ourselves.
Moreover, people notice over and over again how much easier it is for them to focus on the things which matter to them if they feel surrounded by others who equally prioritize those, whether it is health, relaxation, creativity, friendships, and others. This suggests that, like many modern problems, the easiest way to start addressing them is to have others in your life who are moving in the same direction, 1 instead of viewing one's life in isolation.
A third direct consequence of being overly stimulated is that your reward systems get hijacked by activities which are unfulfilling. Again, this is obvious, but because we do not notice ourselves becoming desensitized to the world around us, it doesn't register how much harm that overstimulation is doing to us. A person zombified by pornography doesn't notice the gradual decline in their love of life, until they realize that the only thing which makes them feel something is a completely distorted version of sexual intimacy, all happening on a screen.
Which I think points to a rather simple heuristic for what constitutes an addiction or not: whether someone can stop and still feel good in their life. I do think substances such as alcohol or drugs have unique physiological aspects which make them tougher to deal with than others, such as pornography, video games, scrolling and buying things, but I also think it is more useful to view addictions as general loops of behaviors we can't control, and which end up sapping our interest in other things, rather than artificially constraining those problems to substances.
Having spent more time in silence, I have seen some discomfort arise in response to the silence and lack of activity, as well as some mental and emotional patterns I prefered to keep in the background. It's not clear right now what exactly is uncomfortable about silence, and what those patterns revolve around, but generally, I notice a constant need to do or listen to things so as to feel safe, an ambient sense of shame which I try to hide from myself and others, and how much I hate feeling helpless because I do not want to ask for help or rely on people, probably because historically I have never really felt supported in my life.
I have also not pushed the process of introspection too far, because I suspect that it can turn into a form of navelgazing, and ironically, a form of avoidance, as in avoiding life while convincing yourself that you are "examining your patterns". If the unexamined life is not worth living, then equally, the unlived life is not worth examining.
In conclusion, having less stimulation in my life has made it easier for me to be more focused and at peace, but I am not trying to rush through uncovering all my patterns because it feels like it's not a very sensible thing to do. I notice that people on the internet can be very all or nothing when it comes to making changes. They start out not knowing anything about X, which could be meditation, astrology, tai chi, yoga, Qabalah or whatever, and then they stumble upon it and become utterly obsessed with that thing, to the point that it swallows most of their life. Then they find some new shiny, and the cycle repeats.
That relationship to change doesn't strike me as healthy, and not even effective, it just feels like an addiction to novelty instead of an earnest desire to live a more conscious life. So I think temperance is a big takeway for me, both in terms of stimulation, but also in how I want to change my life. You can be neurotic about everything, including, funnily enough, not being neurotic.
1 Even though it has its limits of course, but as mentioned in the essay on better slop, making the baseline slightly better is often better in the long term than trying to become the "best" version of yourself and failing over and over
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Simplifying Stimulation Health Distraction
2025-08-05