Blue Banana Bites #14: Why Fighting Overload Makes It Worse

Hello friend,

Your brain can carry quite a lot. Just not everything, everywhere, and the whole multiverse all at once.

Enter password here. Oh, a notification there. I need to reply. First, find the document. Check the calendar. Which tab matters? I need to decode the instructions. Don't forget the meeting at 3 pm. Ignore the other notification. Why did I open the first tab again? None of these microtasks are difficult or worth mentioning. Together, though, they add up before we realize it.

But if you're overwhelmed, you're not failing in this system. It's the system failing us. All our senses get bombarded with stimuli at once. We add up the expectations we and others have on ourselves to deal with them, without ever learning how.

The paradox? Fighting overload creates more resistance, which creates more mental load. The brain treats resistance as threat and our nervous system stays in alert mode even when there's no emergency. Overload becomes chronic when you're running two exhausting systems at once: doing the work and fighting the feeling.

Let's be gentle with ourselves at this moment. Inhale. Read. Exhale.

Weightless by Marconi Union has an almost mythical reputation for helping people relax. The science is less magical than the internet claims, but the experiment is simple: after an overloaded day, or in a full room or train, put your noise-cancelling headphones on, press play, do nothing, and see what happens. Maybe it’s even annoying at first. Maybe you need to click here for a different kind of calm. Or maybe it’s not for you.

Cognitive load is not automatically bad. Learning, thinking, and solving things all take effort. Overload starts when demand exceeds what's available right now. Same person, different day: very different bandwidth. Maybe you're trying harder to resist it today: "I should not stress about it." But did that ever work? Overwhelm is a clear signal. 

And Star Trek said it first: resistance is futile.

And neurodiverse or/and disabled folks are often held to, and hold themselves to, neurotypical standards of productivity. This mismatch quietly leads to overload. Feeling like you're always behind on what you "should" do, or that you need to keep proving yourself, wears you down just by being there.

Not everything should be simplified into beige mush. Some complexity gives you depth, choice, understanding. Remember when finding and installing the right driver for your hardware felt like a Sherlock Holmes quest? It had its perks, but just pressing a button now is nice too. If complexity teaches you something or deepens your engagement, it's worth the effort. If it exists just because the system didn't bother carrying that burden, it's waste.

We don't want to leave out Ada Lovelace Day. This awesome woman wrote the first computer program in 1843. She dreamed of machines creating art, not just numbers, long before anyone believed it possible. Celebrating her helps girls and women see they belong in tech from the beginning.

Now we know what doesn't work, so let's tackle the issue.

Remember the complexity and simplicity of old computers? You needed to know a lot to make them do what you need, but they only did that. Imagine inserting 12 discs into a Commodore 64, one after another, just to start a game. Meditative. We cannot be alone in wishing some technical things stayed hard enough to make us feel like heroes figuring it out. Today we just ask another machine.

Technology rarely makes complexity disappear; it just moves it. Good systems absorb the boring parts, automate, delegate, and allegedly "make our lives easier." Bad ones cost extra time: checking whether they work, fiddling with parameters, typing prompts, entering security codes over and over. If users still carry all of that, the system may be technically clever and practically annoying. Shouldn't the core question for any tool be: what can the software carry so we don't have to?

We've been busy making our apps carry a bit more of the work.
Pocket Jam now goes much deeper into songs, with analysis for key, tempo, and song structure, plus a metronome.
In Your Face is getting multiple alerts per event, because sometimes one reminder is too optimistic.

We at Blue Banana have all hit that wall where we're like "this is too much."
Teresa leans on plants, gets her hands dirty, and lets the soil ground her.
Simone zones out with repetitive rhythms and self-hypnosis to blank her brain.
Martin? Slaps on headphones, fires up the piano, game over.