Overstimulation Quotes

“Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its longsuspended life.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“High stimulation is both exciting and confusing for people with ADHD, because they can get overwhelmed and overstimulated easily without realizing they are approaching that point.”
― Jenara Nerenberg, Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You

“I'm not making sense, and I'm so tired of having to make sense. I've even more tired of talking about how OK or not OK I am. I'm not. I've failed. That's it. People should stop going on about it.”
― Corinne Duyvis, On the Edge of Gone

“The author indicts "our culture's rush toward efficiency, speed, quantification, and distraction" and counters with the value of "the time and attention required to find the best words and images and then hold them together in ways that illuminate. This, she diagnoses, "is now wildly countercultural. It is inefficient. Its value is not readily quantifiable. Its utility is intangible.”
― Cherie Harder

“Modulation and processing of the range of sensory experiences allows for social engagement and attachment to others. A person who is easily overwhelmed by sounds, touch, movement, or visual stimulation may avoid interactions with
persons or situations that are highly stimulating. In contrast, the person who does not process sensory input unless it is very intense may develop a pattern of thrill seeking, high stimulation, and risky behavior.”
― Georgia A. Degangi, Dysregulated Adult: Integrated Treatment Approaches

“I know you're worried. I'm sorry. I'm just...very..." I can't think of the right word. How do I explain that mind is too slow and too jumbled all at once. That I'm out of gas? That I've failed, and the only way to keep from falling apart is to accept that? Or that maybe I've already fallen apart, and I don't know if I can sweep the pieces back together?
I settle on three words. "I am tired.”
― Corinne Duyvis, On the Edge of Gone

“For possibly the first time in three decades, I’m not weighed down by trying to read someone’s colors and their facial expression and their body language and their tone and their words and also look out for jokes and sarcasm and flirting and secret insults and what is implied and what is left unspoken and somehow simultaneously filter out the chatter around me and the milk frother and the sensation of the chair under my bum and the movement of my fingers and position of my own feet and the breeze on my face and the sound of the doorbell ringing and the sound of my own heart and breath and the muscles in my own face.

For just a few seconds of my life I get to just be present, and it is joyful.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“Our eyes are the portal into our brains for most of the information that we take in. Those who profit from our attention — including advertisers, media companies, and app designers — know this, and so there are a lot of forces vying for our eyeballs at all times.”
― Thatcher Wine, The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better

“But I find being around people so hard. Any people. There's all this noise and light and color and sensation, all the time, and I don't know how to read tone or emotions or jokes or sarcasm or flirting. It's like all the things that everyone else can do automatically, I have to do manually. And I get overwhelmed. Constantly. That's the face you're seeing. It's me, trying to process everything at once.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“In the 1970s, the average American was exposed to about five hundred ads a day between billboards, television, radio, and print. Today, digital marketing experts estimate that the number is closer to ten thousand ads per day — and those ads are increasingly “micro- targeted” to us based on a huge amount of data that companies possess about our habits and interests.

We can’t possibly see ten thousand ads a day and process them all. Advertisers have to get more creative about how to get our attention. Their goal is to create ads that we really do “see,” and ideally take action from. Once we get used to one type of ad, we might tune them out, so advertisers work to capture our eyeballs (and our wallets) in new and different ways.”
― Thatcher Wine, The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better

“There are currently 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world. Pretty much every one of those phones does something for its owner that they used to do for themselves. Before all the apps, algorithms, and websites we have today, we used our brains to do things like remembering and recalling (phone numbers, calendar events, and other facts). We also figured out how to get places without GPS and we made more of our own decisions about what to buy instead of clicking on ads and making impulse purchases. While there certainly are benefits to having tech- nology take care of many of our needs, we should be aware of what we might be losing. What types of thinking are we no longer doing on our own? Are there unintended consequences to letting computers (and the corporations behind them) do so much of our thinking?”
― Thatcher Wine, The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better

“We live in a time of overstimulation.
There's not a moment when we're not 'on something'--such as the TV, radio (cell phone, Facebook) CD player (Pandora) or cordless whatever.”
― Jim Brickman, Jim Brickman -- Simple Things: Piano/Vocal/Chords