- Power Down
- Posts
- OF COURSE YOU'RE EXHAUSTED. LOOK AROUND.
OF COURSE YOU'RE EXHAUSTED. LOOK AROUND.
A quiet reminder that your burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a system problem.
SCROLLING THROUGH LIFE
Last Tuesday, I found myself scrolling through videos of strangers' morning routines at 11:47 p.m.
One had made fresh sourdough before sunrise. Another had read forty pages of a novel in perfect golden-hour lighting. A third was doing breathwork in a sunlit corner of her home that looked like it belonged in a wellness catalog.
Meanwhile, I was lying in bed, vaguely nauseous from too much screen time, trying to remember if I'd eaten a vegetable that day.
It hit me: I wasn't relaxing. I was self-soothing with surveillance. Watching other people live better so I could avoid how scrambled my own brain felt.
This is your reminder that the way you feel—scattered, tired, unable to focus, weirdly restless but somehow always drained—is not a personal failure.
It’s a totally natural response to a completely unnatural environment.
You are not supposed to keep up with 400 accounts. You are not supposed to know what everyone is doing, thinking, cooking, and outraged about at all times. You are not supposed to be reachable from the moment you wake up until the moment you pass out with your phone on your chest.
But here we are.
We live in a world designed to fry our attention, monetize our overstimulation, and make us feel like we're falling behind unless we're constantly consuming, replying, reacting, producing.
And when we finally crack under the weight of all that noise? We’re told to try harder. Breathe more. Buy another productivity tool.
Nah.
Here’s a different idea: What if the problem isn’t you?
What if the problem is the system?
Because if you feel like your brain is breaking—maybe it’s just trying to protect you from a world that won’t shut up.
And there's science to back that up.
A 2022 study published in Nature Communications found that our brains require "neural rest states" to process and store information—but modern tech environments interrupt those states constantly.
The result? Cognitive fatigue, decreased memory, and emotional dysregulation.
In other words, your brain is literally not getting the quiet it needs to be okay.
That’s why Power Down exists. Not to optimize you. Not to fix you. But to give you space. Space to remember what it feels like to be human. To do one thing at a time. To think a thought all the way through. To be where you are.
You're not broken. You're overstimulated. And you're allowed to do something about it.
This week’s ritual: Set a 15-minute timer. Put your phone in another room. Sit somewhere quiet and do nothing. No music, no multitasking, no optimizing. Just fifteen minutes of stillness. It might feel awkward. That’s okay. This is how your brain relearns calm. |  |
In health,
Power Down
