Lately, I keep feeling like, “I just don’t have anything to say.”
Which is not true. I have a lot to say. (Just ask my husband.)
There was a time when every week I’d be sending you a podcast episode and a thoughtful email about energy, Flow, life, inner power…all the things we love to explore as we powerfully grow and curate our lives.
But still, when I sit down to record a podcast or type an email to you, sometimes I feel as stubborn as a dog refusing to enter the vet doorway.
I just don’t want to add to the overload.
Our collective overload.
I am overwhelmed. You’re probably overwhelmed. It’s like a family dinner and all 8 billion of us are talking at once. Not only that, but we’ve trained our AI to spit out even more reams of information than we ourselves do.
It’s all just becoming noise now.
Case in point: When I began podcasting in 2005, there were perhaps 12,000 podcasts to choose from. Today, there are almost 3 million.
How many newsletters were you subscribed to in 2005? Maybe 4, and of those two were ones you got in your actual physical mailbox? Now how many are you email unsubscribing from each week? (I average 2-3, or around 120-150 per year.)
My point is that with so much information at my fingertips, I’m suffering from information paralysis.
Our US news cycle and whiplash politics are certainly not helping.
I heard recently that reading books is declining. Professors are studying why, and the result…you guessed it…it’s because we’re literally reading and scrolling all day long now, every day, on our devices. Sitting down to read a book for two additional hours in a day becomes a torturous exercise of attention.
* * *
Teaching about Flowdreaming, limiting beliefs, lack thinking, personal inner power, and intuition will always be in my blood.
But at the moment, I find myself gestating on these concepts instead, pulling them back like a mother hen carefully protecting her eggs.
Over the last twenty years, I poured so much that I’ve learned into my last three books (and two more are cooking), as well as 40+ courses, nearly 800 podcast episodes, thousands of hours of live classes, multiple live retreats and events, and almost 370 recorded Flowdreams.
I have certainly done my part in contributing to the personal wellness field.
Which again brings me to my point: If you’re feeling a strange kind of “life paralysis,” or an inability to make a decision about where to go next, what program to enroll in, where to move, what next career move to make, or even simply a stubbornness and strange irritability about everything just being too much…then you are not alone.
You have done a lot. And now, choosing the next thing to do is being collectively muddled and oppressed by a deluge of information streaming down on our heads like never-ending rain.
It’s not just you. We are sensitives and empaths—we feel everything before we have words to describe the shift in winds.
You are feeling our collective groan and sense of helplessness and confusion at the overflowing sewage of….choices.
Yes, choices.
Decisions used to be easier to make. We had far fewer choices. It was easier to pick one and land. The landmark study by Iyengar and Lepper in 2000 showed us that shoppers were more likely to purchase jam when presented with 6 options (30% purchased) compared to 24 options (only 3% purchased). They called it “decision paralysis.”
Now, there are so many daily choices that choosing anything feels precarious.
It feels like there’s more to lose if we’re wrong. Yes, we keep filtering the onslaught of information and making choices, but each choice is less steady, with more feelings of uncertainty and anxiety.
I noticed this when I was readying myself to adopt some new kitty friends. My very old gals passed away in 2023, so I’m shocked that it’s taken me more than a year to find some new furry babies. But then I realized what was going on: In the past, I’d just go to the Humane Society or local rescue and find a kitty who needed a home. Bingo. Done.
Today, I follow dozens of rescue organizations on Instagram. Every day, hundreds of cats are up for adoption not just in my town, but everywhere, with rescues even flying cats in from Dubai or Mexico. And I can find and see them all. An evening spent on petfinder.com leaves me listless and overwhelmed.
I don’t know who to pick. So maybe I should just keep looking?
Or, maybe you remember a time when you couldn’t endlessly swipe left. You only got to meet a new potential parter at a dinner party or bar—live, in the flesh, and there were only a couple of people to even choose from on any given occasion. Yet it was somehow easier. People still dated and got married, and it worked…even with far fewer choices and much less noise.
Again, my point is that society is currently hellbent on making it harder for us to make and put faith in concrete choices.
This is the result of the giant web (the world wide web!) of interconnectedness we’ve built these last twenty years.
This is the result of AI that are quintupling the output of information even as we speak.
This is why the choices we’re making feel less reliable, more fragile somehow. Our level of uncertainty stops us in our tracks.
Oh sure, I’m still making choices and getting sh*t done. But everything is tinged with uncertainty.
So hear me out: It’s not you. It’s that we’re all bathing in an ocean of contradictory, compelling, overwhelming noise. The noise of all 8 billion of us is so loud we can’t even hear each other anymore.
And the way out? It’s to pick up a butter knife and start cleaving our way through the thicket. On the one hand, unsubscribe. Toss out those social accounts or apps. Reduce the noise in your purse or pocket however you can.
On the other hand, dig in and start making choices. Commit. Then go deep with your choices. Go deep with the information that you do allow to access your life. Let guidance step in. Get ready to course correct as needed. Get back to real, concrete things and people you love.
And mostly, know we are all feeling it and struggling to keep up.
We are learning to swim in a new ocean, and in the beginning, it’s rough. But it will get better. We will learn.
And then one day, it’ll be like those “olden times” when we left voicemails on physical answering machines and had to wait a whole day before someone got home and checked the cassette tape to discover that we’d reached out.
We once had a blessed sense of space, privacy, and the ability to focus on just one thing at a time.
We had space to breathe.
And we had more time to filter the fewer choices we had, and less much anxiety about picking wrong.
We can get there again. The first step is just waking up to our place in the deluge—and then calling it what it is: unimportant noise.
P.S. If my words struck you, please let me know. Am I on to something?
Please leave me your thoughts in the comments below.
Hey Summer,
Yes this deeply resonates!
The last of my much loved canines left me almost 17 years ago. Over the years, I thought about finding a new fur baby to love
but when looking at all the sad, abandoned faces – I’d become so overwhelmed. I wanted them all! How do you pick one over the other? I couldn’t choose, so I went without. I eventually decided a stray would just have to find me. I told the universe I would take anything that landed on my doorstep.
Last year, the universe sent me a tiny little black kitten. It was meowing at my back door. Well I know absolutely nothing about cats and didn’t know what to do with this one. My husband didn’t want her. But the thought of taking her to the animal shelter overflowing with unwanted and abandoned cats horrified me. I just couldn’t do it.
So here we are. A year later. Me and Cat. (and husband too! haha) and I couldn’t have imagined anything better.
When we can’t choose, the universe knows what we need and will deliver.
Love to you, all the best xx
Summer, thank you for this. It deeply resonates and even caught me at the perfect moment while I was lying in bed, still tired, struggling to get up, and having one of those “what’s it all about anyway” moments. Then I read your email. You’re absolutely right about the decision fatigue, overwhelm, and even questioning who we are now and whether what used to be important to us still applies. These are tough times with chaotic energies and it’s very hard to find a path, let alone stick to it. Thanks for all your help and great insights!
Ah yes, the space between. I have felt this for quite sometime. As a million and a half thoughts cross my mind to post- the next thing I know is that i am off to the next thing. I have felt this ” over scheduled” lifestyle for the past 7 years now and trying to push back. Pushing back is not the answer. It’s like that song goes ” stuck in the middle with you.” I have taken in so much and have the desire to share and yet paralyzed to do so because well I know I am not fully walking my talk. Preaching to the quire is not enough. Hypocracy is at its peak. However thru this message I gained one clear insight. Bottom line- how are we here to make decisions for ourselves. Simple. That sifts thru all the noise if you know what’s correct for you. I have expressed my life as a game of tetris and the blocks coming faster and faster until there are too many falling for me to shape into place and before you know it, I crashed- game over. I have been yearning to feel one thing lately and one thing only. And how can I express this one thing people need to hear that could help them. I believe that all this noise is nessessary to get us back on track. Now hear me out cause you may think I am contradicting myself. It’s in the state of overwhelm like objects spinning around us in a tornado that we get the opportunity to slow down. It’s what it must take for us to say- enough is enough. Whats this all for anyway. And then we can watch all these spinning objects that once floated around our heads drop to the ground or simply vanish. The air is clear. It’s through the contradiction we become grounded one way or another.
Yes! You are absolutely onto something!!! It is soooo overwhelming to exist today. I am shocked anyone gets anything done. I think you hit the nail on the head. “Decision paralysis” is very real and affecting everyone. I really think as a world wide family, we really need to dial it back. Dial back the expectations, the constant commitments, the over achieving mentality. The everyone has to be a “superhero” energy is so exhausting and unnecessary. It’s as if we are all just showing off for each other ALL the time. Everyone HAS to like us, agree with us, be secretly jealous of us and all we have achieved. But really we are left empty and scared and lonely with no true friendships and relationships. I wholeheartedly agree we need to be more concrete, have in person interactions, not get upset if someone doesn’t respond to a text in .2 seconds or like our social media posts. What are we teaching our children??? It’s so awful to me, but I feel we are at a precipice with our own spiritual growth and expansion, our societal structures, our family structures. What we are doing worldwide is NOT sustainable and the world is upgrading. That which can not be sustained will break apart and crumble and we will all come out from behind our computers, tablets, phones, iPads and see the light. Thank you for this post!!! Such a great reminder I am not alone in this thinking. Lots of love and light 💕💫🌈
You’re definitely onto something. It’s tiring. I’ve always been a news junky. Inherited I’d say. I now go to a few news sites. Not social media. More than I could have.
I enjoy google for information and checking details. A lot faster than the home encyclopedias which were out of date or going to the library.
I belong to a bookclub yet find I’m reading less. I do have a physical job but that’s no excuse. I was always a book worm. It’s just the last few months I’m not reading before bed but aimlessly scrolling instead.
Summer, You’re onto something! In order to choose we need to become aware that we’re overwhelmed first then deliberately sift and sort and discern in order to select where we invest out attention. I ran into the content creation paralysis with my “yoga adirondacks” mission for mindful yoga hikes in the woods. I kept coming across the contradiction of posting about disconnecting while I was in fact forcing myself to be connected (to tech). It’s a very real phenomenon and our wiring is evolving to try and keep up but is it in adaptive ways? So interesting. I do miss the 80s.
I hope this early morning off the top of my head reply contributes to the feedback that you’re looking for in some way.
Love, Mel
Thanks Mel, I love this! The irony of posting about disconnecting is real….😂