how to become an intentional digital consumer

i used to think i had a healthy relationship with the internet. i wasn’t binging mindless content. i followed smart people. read long-form essays. saved educational reels. listened to psychology podcasts while cooking dinner. my screen time was high, sure, but it was purposeful. at least, that’s how i justified it — a diet of knowledge instead of junk. but knowledge is still consumption. and too much of anything, even the good stuff, leaves you bloated. i started noticing the signs quietly. the mental fog. the half-finished thoughts. the way i’d reach for my phone mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-life. not because i needed anything — just because my brain was fidgeting. i’d scroll through thoughtful, high-quality content and still end up feeling foggy, distracted, vaguely off. i wasn’t doomscrolling, but i was overfeeding my brain. and it was exhausted.

the tricky thing about overstimulation is that it rarely feels like overstimulation in the moment. it feels like productivity. it feels like keeping up. it feels like staying informed. until you realize you haven’t had an original thought in days — only echoes of things you read, saved, skimmed, intended to go back to. what’s even trickier is that intentional content can still be passively consumed. you can listen to five self-development podcasts, watch two TED Talks, and save twelve substack essays in an afternoon — and still feel lost. still feel mentally scattered. still feel like you’ve done something wrong. not because any of the content was harmful, but because you didn’t have space to absorb any of it. not really. we talk about digital burnout like it comes from staring at screens too long. but for me, it came from absorbing too many ideas i wasn’t ready to carry. too many voices that weren’t mine. too much context with no grounding. i knew what everyone else was doing, thinking, processing. i just couldn’t hear myself anymore.