You are working on your computer and have a little headache. You feel a little groggy. What will be your first course of action? Perhaps you will google your symptoms. You will click on one of the links and at least 50 different causes will be enlisted in no time, everything from simple flu to brain tumor. Experience tells you it is just your overstressed eyes. But once the seed of doubt has been planted (blood clot! aneurysm!!), it will cling like a leech, refusing to leave you in peace.
In this age of information, most of our problems emanate not from the paucity of information, but form its abundance—the surfeit of good, bad and terrible information. Instead of helping us better navigate the choppy waters, this information overload often sends us down a spiral of confusion and anxiety.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, writes, “There are lots of situations—particularly at times of high pressure and stress—when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.” The modern-day information industry, it appears, has been designed to systematically undercut this inborn human ability.[break]
Not just common folks are afflicted by the tendency to think too much. Sportswriter Ian Leslie writes of how over-thinking has robbed maybe the greatest tennis player of all time of success in recent times. He attributes Roger Federer’s marked decline in Grand Slam performance not so much to the Swiss player’s “physical decline” but “a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments [on the court]. In the jargon of sport, he has been “choking.” This, say experts, is caused by thinking too much.”
thevocalteacher.com
In a world where we are being urged to weigh our options all the time, we would be a lot happier if we simply relied on our snap judgment more often. You like strawberry jam? The worst thing you can do is go to the department store and browse 10 different varieties before making your choice. The availability of so many choices overwhelms your thinking power, and you will end up selecting something you never wanted. Thinking about how delicious the different jam varieties may be is a sure way to spoil the taste of your eventual pick. You would do much better to simply pick up a bottle of strawberry jam at random.
The issue of gun control in the US best illustrates the grave danger of misinformation and information overload (the two often amount to the same). The reason gun violence kills nearly 3,000 people in the US every year is that there are as many as 200 million loose firearms in the country; in other words, two-thirds of the US population is armed. If there were fewer guns, there would be fewer murders, as evidence from around the world suggests. But the gun lobby in the US wants to make Americans ‘think’: Isn’t deteriorating mental health of Americans, rather than guns, the main reason behind increased murder rates? Instead of taking way guns from those who own them, wouldn’t the society be safer if those without guns are armed too? These are disingenuous and very dangerous arguments. But repeat them often enough (as the strong gun lobby in the US does) and they start appearing true.
Closer home, the mushrooming healthcare industry would have us believe that no matter what our medical problems, they have it all covered. They are there to make us healthier and happier. But in reality all that the healthcare institutions do is treat the symptoms. The focus should be on promoting healthier lifestyle, not on building more hospitals. One way to promote healthy living would be through development of more bicycle lanes, instead of widening the roads to fit in more polluting vehicles. If people exercised more and ate healthier, we wouldn’t need all those hospitals.
For common complaints like fever, headache and body ache, simple over-the-counter drugs do the trick. These are so effective that Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, attributes part of her happiness to the effectiveness of these simple medications to keep her going whenever she feels under the weather. If you have a headache, it makes a lot more sense to pop an aspirin than worry yourself sick over all possible causes of your headache. Likewise, Rubin advises people to try to connect with other people whenever they find themselves in trouble. It is remarkable how often your best friend has the perfect (and simple) answer to something that has been long bugging you.
The last time I relied on internet to identify the cause of my chest pain a few years ago, I ended up spending a lot of money in doctor shopping and useless medical tests, not to mention the great anxiety provoked by my uninformed self-exploration.
This is not to suggest you should jump to hasty conclusions. But you would perhaps do a lot better in every area of your life if you learnt to rely on your gut instinct a little more.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.
biswas.baral@gmail.co
Related story
Social activist ‘Iih’ starts hunger strike with 11 demands
