You’ve heard it before: the key to peace isn’t in your surroundings or possessions, it’s in your mind. This isn’t a post about mindfulness though, rather a way to use your mind and time to encourage your own agency.  Activating that sense of agency in service of your own values, in a coherent and meaningful way, can provide a sense of calm and stability, and can be brought about relatively quickly, without requiring years of training in a Buddhist monastery. Your own personal thoughts about the events in your world hold the key to this peaceful existence.

It might not look like it yet, but this is actually a post about information overload. What it is and how to avoid it. We already know why it’s important to avoid: maintaining a realistic diet of information intake prevents burnout and helps us stay present and focused in reality.

Most of us feel some responsibility to stay informed of current events. We keep up through a diet of local and global news. On TV, news sites, and social media, we stay up-to-date on the happenings in our neighborhoods, friend and peer circles, alumni or school networks, cities, countries, and world. And we can spend hours every day doing this, to the detriment of our jobs and home duties, our families and our concentration.

Self-help sites suggest formulas or tools for maintaining a balance of information intake. But what it really comes down to is this: which information is actually going to change your behavior or perspective? Because that’s the information worth spending time and attention on.

If you vote in federal or state elections, that’s a good reason to stay up-to-date on national and world news. If you lobby your members of Congress or vote in local elections, that’s a good reason to stay current on more local news. If you travel abroad, donate to international charities, or like to discuss world events with your friends, those are good reasons to keep up with headlines and international news. If you have or desire a career in a particular field, it’s a good idea to keep up with the news related to your field and to any potential vendors or clients. But if all those stories just worry you and you’ve never done anything about them and never plan to, that’s not the most effective use of your time.

The same goes for social media – if you have real life relationships to maintain or a brand to sustain, or if you need to be aware of the online climate in your social network for some other reason, it makes sense to spend some time online to complement your real-life connections. But if you find yourself spending a lot of time staying up-to-date with people you never talk to in real life and will probably never see again in person, that’s another route to information overload.

One can argue that a minimal level of attention to these additional news sources is necessary to maintain an ambient awareness of your surroundings. I certainly subscribe to that view. So I don’t know what the best ratio is, as long as most of your information intake consist of news about people or things that you have some influence over or some passion about, some way to contribute.  And if you really must spend time consuming news or opinion pieces or community gossip for which you have no forseeable use, at least write about your own opinion of it in a personal journal occasionally. Better to be a motivated participant in the stories that receive so much of your attention than an ineffectual bystander.

Think about all the time you’ve spent reading or hearing stories that generate a lot of feelings. Now consider how you have acted on those feelings – did it give you confidence about how to vote, or inspire you to spend your time differently, or motivate you to communicate with someone? If you can increase the return on your investment of feelings and time by acting constructively on what you consume (and reduce the fruitless consumption of information), the better for your mental health and sense of peace. If the time you spend reading news is also directly preparing you to act in your life, there’s not so much burnout. You’ll feel more effective and valuable.

You’ll also be able to form your own opinions more readily. Rather than having a diffuse understanding of current events, you’ll have a multi-level appreciation of the stories you do know. The broader perspective can be combined with your own first-hand experience and analysis to generate a unique personal opinion that is yours to share and debate. You’ll be less likely to contribute to rumor mills and internet shaming, more likely to have spent time reading about a subject that’s actually worth your while. The extra time freed up by whittling down your news sources can be used to dive deep into the stories that really interest you.

This strategy can make you a better conversationalist and also a more valuable voice in the conversation. By owning your interests and opinions in current events, you’ll increase your credibility with others and your confidence with yourself. Here’s an exercise you can try to help make this shift in your own life. Over the course of a whole day, take note of the scope and quality of the information you take in, as well as what actions or other significant changes that information adds to your life or environment. If you find that you’re sinking a lot of time into an unrewarding source of information, find an alternative way to spend that time. You’ll probably feel better about yourself and your world.

This is my impression of my information pipeline. This is the simplified version, meant to show that information should be processed and kept on the move. There are any number of output pipes and branching systems. The key here is to keep content out of the holding tank at the bottom. Venting it is annoying if you’re not into exercise. The key is, don’t pay too much attention or thought to any given feeling unless you have something good to do about it. If information is causing a backup in the pipeline because it generates a lot of feelings or thoughts but there’s no output for it, either you have to reconfigure the pipeline if you plan for more of those type to come through, or you gotta prevent that sort of information from getting into your pipeline in the first place:

What does your information pipeline look like?