Choosing Calm in an Overstimulated Culture

We live in a restless, overstimulated culture. We see evidence of this all around us.

And calm? We often long for it, but it has been crowded out.

Our minds are asked to hold too much. Stillness and silence have become unfamiliar.

In the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury explored this idea. The characters in his story lived surrounded by constant noise and visual stimulation. They were unable to sit quietly with their own thoughts.

Calm – and living with any type of depth – was avoided. They were more at home with distraction than stillness.

It’s almost prophetic in nature how this imagined world, written in 1953, so closely mirrors our own today. Bradbury knew, even then, our human tendency to replace depth with distraction and noise.

Sometimes we don’t even realize how overstimulated we are until something disrupts our patterns and forces us to see the contrast.

I experienced a version of this in 2021, when a major ice storm hit our city, and we were without power for five days. Even I, who naturally gravitates toward peace and quiet, felt unexpectedly restless and uneasy when all the background noise – that I didn’t even think about before – was no longer humming in the background of my life.

And in that absence, I realized how unaccustomed I was to complete silence and stillness.

It felt unfamiliar and slightly unsettling at first – until I slowly surrendered to it and felt its peace.

It is moments like this that remind us of how much we live on autopilot, rarely questioning the pace, the sound, or the shape of our lives.

The Loss of Margin

Calm requires margin. It requires intentionally choosing the pace of our lives. And it requires pockets of stillness and silence, however small.

Overstimulation results from the compression of time and mental space – when every pause in your day is filled, and when every thought is interrupted with notifications and more information. When this happens, there is no space for calm to land.

Many women over forty can feel this shift because we remember a time when life had a different rhythm. The margin that was once built in has now been replaced by constant visual and mental stimulation.

As stated in a previous post, I think technology has brought us much good—connection to our loved ones and conveniences in our day-to-day lives, just to name a few. But it has also reshaped our lives, both the pace and the texture.

Calm Begins With Choice

If calm is something you want more of in your life, it must be intentionally chosen, for in our culture, it does not happen by accident.

It is a decision first. And after that, it is a daily practice.

There are two considerations when it comes to choosing calm:

First, each of us is living with different levels of overstimulation (and possibly chaos) right now. Thus, our current life circumstances have to be kept in mind.

And second, we each have a different level of need for calm. What restores one woman may not feel enough for another. Thus, calm does not look the same for everyone.

It also does not require ideal conditions.

It only requires intention.

After assessing our current season of life and the level of calm we need to be our best selves, we ask the question:

At what pace do I want to live – mentally, emotionally, and practically?

We may not even realize the speed at which we’re absorbing information, or moving through our days, or allowing the rhythm of others to dictate our own.

And emotionally? We live in a 24/7 news cycle where we witness the struggles of the entire world daily. And while staying informed is important, our nervous systems were never designed to take in so much suffering and conflict without time to process. Choosing calm reminds us to create boundaries around what we take in, so our responses stay rooted rather than reactive.

When we consider all these things, sometimes it may feel as though we are on a speeding train we never consciously boarded. And so, choosing calm is the act of, metaphorically speaking, stepping off the train and slowing things down.

A Modern-Day Thoreau

I learned about deliberately choosing the pace of my life from my late father.

Being a literary person, I’ve always thought of him as a modern-day Henry David Thoreau.

He lived in a small cabin in the woods and chose a simple life: gardening, fishing, hunting, cooking for himself and neighbors, and visiting with family and friends on his porch.

His entire life, he did not allow himself to be rushed. He knew the pace he wanted to live, and no one could sway him from that.

From my childhood through my adult years, no matter where our family was going, he was always ready early – prepared and unhurried. He chose to arrange his days with calm long before the culture celebrated speed.

Here, I am reminded of one of Thoreau’s most famous quotes: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

I have always been someone who craves calm as well. Even in my busiest seasons, I created pockets of it where I could. Not because my days were like clockwork, unfolding perfectly, but because without those moments, I felt like a boat, tossed, without an anchor.

Becoming Anchored

Where in your life do you lack margin?

Are you practicing stillness and silence at some point in your day?

Have you intentionally considered and chosen the pace of your life?

Choosing calm does not mean rearranging your entire life overnight. It begins with noticing, pausing, and choosing one small moment in your day to practice calm.

While hustle culture teaches us that our worth is based on productivity and speed, calm resists that idea.

The level of your exhaustion does not equal your value.

For me, practicing calm looks like this:

• Music that steadies me. I love curating playlists like this one

• Journaling. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Writing brings clarity to my life – and with that, calm

• Realizing what is in my circle of control – and what isn’t

• Shutting everything down at night and going to bed at a healthy time

• Lighting a candle, taking some deep breaths, and saying a simple prayer when I feel anxious about something

• Sipping hot tea before bed

• Walking in nature

• Tidying my home, slowly – restoring visual quiet

• Creating small pockets of silence throughout my day

• Forgiving both myself and others when mistakes are made

• Being discerning about what input I allow into my mind

Practicing calm helps to sustain us through all the challenges we face. It is what allows us to return to our lives with clarity and grace.

So here’s how to begin:

Consider your season of life.
Assess your need for calm.
Choose your daily (or weekly) pockets of calm, and protect them.
With grace, let your loved ones know what you need and why.

I’ll end here with one of my favorite quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her book Gift from the Sea:

“I want first of all. . . to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact—to borrow from the language of the saints—to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible.”

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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