How to Never Get Overstimulated Again`
The Overstimulation Protocol
Do you ever feel too tired to work but too wired to relax? Brain fog, scattered thoughts, inability to focus no matter how hard you try. Do you ruminate? Are noises distracting and overwhelming? When was the last time you felt joy? Do the things you used to love now feel like “meh”?
You, my friend, might be chronically overstimulated. Your fight or flight is stuck on ON mode. Total sympathetic nervous system dominance. In short, your central nervous system is shot.
You’re not alone. Its impossible to not be overstimulated in this day & age. We’ve normalized a state of constant neural bombardment that would have one-shotted a Victorian era child. Reels, feeds, screens, notifications, noises. You wake up, immediately grab your phone, scroll through 50 pages of content before your brain even knows its up, check emails while brushing your teeth, listen to a podcast at 1.5x speed during your commute, watch Youtube while housing your double steak slop bowl for lunch, and wonder why you can’t focus for more than 90 seconds.
This is overstimulation, and its destroying your quality of life. Productivity plummets, meaning evaporates, creativity disappears, presence is nonexistent. Your attention goes where the algorithm tells it to.
We Weren’t Built for This
For 99.9% of human history, daily life was brutally simple. Wake up, find some berries, hunt a squirrel, sit by the fire and weave some baskets.
Change was slow, stimuli were sparse, and it paid to be hyper-aware. Your brain evolved to process maybe 50-100 novel pieces of information per day. A rustle in the grass, the sound of a stream, some new animal tracks. Life was fickle back then, one bad hunt and you starve, one wrong move and you get eaten by a panther. So your nervous system learned to take every signal seriously. We developed a finely attuned sensory network. Real life spider senses which we seem to have forgotten.
This is what we call a maladaptive trait my friend. Qualities that used to be highly beneficial, but now cause more harm than good. But honestly what do you expect? Put a rat in a box and it starts doing cocaine, put a bird in a cage and it pulls out its hair, put an Orca in sea world and it gets so depressed it eats its handler for fun. Do you really think we’re any different? Does anybody think that living in isolated shoeboxes under artificial light with zero community, purpose or connection to nature is good for us? Give me a break.
Remember. Our original environment was scarce, incredibly scarce. It paid to put on fat easily, to be hyper-attuned to stimuli, and to want to have sex 24/7. But now, in our dystopian world of abundance, these are the exact hardwires manipulated to keep you hooked. Hooked on junk food, social media, porn. Your biology is being manipulated by the most deplorable companies on the planet.
What Is Overstimulation (And Why You’re Cooked)
Overstimulation is when your brain receives more sensory input than it can effectively process. Too much novel stimuli and it burns out. Like a kid coming off a sugar crash.
The mechanism is straightforward: Constant novelty spikes dopamine, which increases glutamate (primary excitatory neurotransmitter), which literally burns through your neurons when chronically elevated. Meanwhile your GABA (calming, inhibitory neurotransmitter) tanks, your brain loses its ability to hit the brakes, and you end up wired but tired. Too frazzled to relax, too exhausted to work. Just enough sentience to scroll Instagram reels and order door dash.
Once you reach this state, you’re already cooked. You can’t just snap out of it, you blew your dopaminergic load and are literally burning neurons. This is reqiring your brain to be incapable of:
Deep focus
Getting actual rest
Enjoying the small things
Emotional regulation
Entering flow states
Your baseline is brainrot. Anything less feels like torture. Your brain gravitates toward the most stimulating thing and disregards the rest. Why the fuck would your brain spend an hour reading ONE book when it could watch ONE THOUSAND TikTok videos. Why listen to birds chirping when it can listen to Call Her Daddy on 1.5x speed. Why watch a sport in person when you can watch 5 simultaneously while betting your mortgage on all of them? Booooring.
We have removed the meaning from stimuli much like we removed the nutrients from calories. All signal, no beneficial outcome. Not what we want.
If you’re reading this, you probably want to be cool, calm, and collected, relaxed but alert. You want control over your impulses, to derive pleasure from meaningful pursuits. You reject the overstimulated psychosis that keeps you in constant fight-or-flight. You refuse to have your attention pawned off to the highest algorithmic bidder. Kudos to you.
Overstimulation Abstinence Stack (AVOID)
These are the most common culprits for cucking your nervous system.
Stacked Stimuli
Eating in front of the TV. Watching YouTube while scrolling your phone. Talking to someone while checking messages. Driving, looking at phone, podcast on 1.5x speed. No. Double. Dipping. On Dopamine. No parallel processing, your brain cant’t handle it. This isn’t multitasking. There’s no such thing. You’re half-assing two things and frying your nervous system in the process. Every additional stimulus compounds the neural load exponentially, not linearly.
Morning Phone Grab
It really is the damn phone. You get 8 hours of dopamine reset every night. Don’t be a FOOL and ruin it by blasting digital crack hits within 60 seconds of consciousness. You’ve now set your baseline for the day at “brainrot, chaos, information overload”. Everything else feels boring by comparison and your focus is cooked before you even get out of bed. If you think you actually have something important to get to, you’re lying. If you have to get on your phone for work, wake up earlier. Morning time is sacred.
Constant Background Noise
Direct correlation between IQ and noise tolerance. Life was astonishingly quiet until industrialization. Now you’re marinating in auditory AIDS 24/7. HVAC systems, construction, music, cars, podcasts, conversations. Cut this out as much as possible. Embrace silence. Wear ear plugs. Just because constant noise is common doesn’t mean its normal. And why would you want to be normal anyway.
Speed Consumption
1.5x podcasts. 10 second tiktoks, 150 tweets a minute. Skipping, scrolling, browsing. You are training your brain to expect information at a pace that makes normal consumption feel geriatric. This is why you can’t sit through a movie anymore. Why meetings feel unbearable and reading feels like pulling teeth. You’ve taught your brain that if information isn’t coming at mach speed its not worth paying attention to. Cognitive goonery.
Constant Availability
You aren’t supposed to be easy to get ahold of. Men used to go on solo expeditions for months without contact with the outside world. Turn your notifications off. Remove the expectation that you’re available 24/7. Your brain is never able to truly disengage. You’re sympathetically activated, 24/7. Waiting for the next text, the next request, the next stimulus. Set the precedent that you respond when you respond. I’ve been doing this since the get-go and nobody’s had a problem with it. Its just how I operate.
THE OVERSTIMULATION PROTOCOL
I don’t want you to go full zen hippie on me, but I do want you to be a calm, cool, and collected member of society. I want you to regulate your nervous system so you can actually access peak performance when you need it. Is that too much to ask? This goes hand-in-hand with my Dopamine Detox Protocol and Analogue Hours framework. Its absolutely essential that you train your brain to operate in a parasympathetic nervous system state, then strategically activate when you need to accomplish tasks without burning out.
Ditch the ego. You don’t have to be “on 24/7”. The “you sleep I grind” hustle movement is categorically lame. Its for people that are deeply insecure and don’t have anything else going for them. They all end up hypogonadal and schizophrenic at 42 anyway.
Eliminate Stacked Stimuli
Non-negotiable. Single-stimulus should be your primary framework.
One screen at a time, maximum
No phone while talking to humans
No YouTube while eating
No scrolling while watching anything
Walk without earbuds at least 3x per week
Yes, you can listen to podcasts during walks. Yes, you can blast music while working out. But you need to prove to yourself you can do these things without auditory input. If you can’t, you’re more overstimulated than you think. Can you sit through an entire movie without checking your phone? Use this as your litmus, you gooner
Implement Analogue Hours
Minimum one hour daily. Zero technology. Not even “healthy” tech like Kindle or writing on your laptop. Become amish.
No phone
No computer
No screens of any kind
No digital devices
Not even writing on a digital device
What you can do:
Read physical books
Write in an actual notebook
Walk outside
Sit and think
Have in-person conversations
Literally just exist
This will be your most productive and restorative hour of the entire day. Schedule it religiously. Treat it as non-negotiable as sleep. Timing doesn’t matter as much as consistency.
Protect Morning & Evening Gates
You get 8 hours of dopamine reset every night. Don’t ruin it by doomscrolling within 60 seconds of consciousness. How stimulated you get in the AM sets the pace for the rest of the day. Get AM & PM right, and the rest of the day falls into place. Get those wrong, and you’re succumbing to whatever grips your attention (near-unanimously Instagram Reels).
Morning Protocol (First 60-90 minutes):
No phone for at least the first hour
No screens until after movement/sunlight
Slow, deliberate actions (making coffee, sitting outside, journaling)
Let your brain wake up naturally without artificial stimulation
Evening Protocol (Last 90 minutes before bed):
Hard screen cutoff 90 minutes before sleep
Dim lighting only
Slow-paced activities (reading, conversation, stretching)
Noise & light reduction (earplugs if needed)
Strategic Noise Elimination
This is massively underrated and the most underutilized tool in nervous system regulation. You are a finely tuned sensory machine. You’re designed to identify the most subtle of stimuli. Literal spider senses. Constant auditory stimulation keeps your nervous system on alert all day.
Invest in earplugs, foam or silicone. Use them during:
Deep work sessions
Evening wind-down
Any time you’re in loud environments
Whenever you need to drop into parasympathetic state
Create actual silence periods during your day. Notice how different your nervous system feels in genuine quiet. The difference is absurd.
Reducing Light Stimuli
All these lights are too damn bright. Headlights, store lights, street lights, flash lights, strobe lights. Kanye West spoke about this briefly at length. Lights are giga-stimulants, just ask the sun.
Avoid blue light as much as possible
Get incandescent light bulbs
Use blue light blockers
Biohacker’s Guide to Overstimulation
Now time for everybody’s favorite section: drugs. Tactical tools you can use to avoid overstimulation. We want to strategically manipulate specific neurochemical systems that govern your brains ability to chill out. I’m not a fan of blanket recommendations, but I’d be hard pressed to find anybody that isn’t suffering in the GABA department.
We have three primary objectives when combating overstimulation:
Balancing the GABA/Glutamate ratio
Glutamate is excitatory, GABA is inhibitory. In an ideal world these are balanced, but our GABA system can’t keep up with modern demands for inhibition. Hence, we must GABA max.