This is the question I keep coming back to, and I want to sit with it carefully because it matters. How similar are our brains’ responses to information and neurological overwhelm to the symptoms of ADHD?
It is important to clarify ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental condition with real genetic and neurological components. People have always had it, long before iPhones existed. There’s real harm in dismissing it as a cultural invention.
Here’s the question worth asking: are we, through our digital environment, creating conditions that make ADHD-like symptoms essentially universal? Are we then diagnosing the symptom while ignoring the condition we’ve collectively created that is provoking them?
Some researchers describe a neurologically altered state they call “attention deficit trait” — a condition characterized by difficulty sustaining focus on non-novel tasks, caused not by neurology but by the chronic fragmentation of attention through digital overstimulation. The brain, in other words, can be trained toward distractibility. We are training our brains relentlessly, every time we pick up a phone or open a screen.
There’s a meaningful difference between having a brain that is wired differently — which is what neurodivergence actually is — and having a brain that has been environmentally conditioned to struggle with focus, stillness, and depth. Both deserve care. But they’re not the same thing, and conflating them doesn’t serve either population.
The Numbers and Research
A 2009 study published by the University of California San Diego found that the average American was already consuming around 34 gigabytes of data daily, roughly 100,000 words, or the equivalent of two full books, every single day. And that was before TikTok, before Instagram reels, before the explosion of streaming, before the pandemic accelerated everything.
By current estimates, we’re consuming somewhere between 74 gigabytes and over 100 gigabytes of data per day when you factor in video, audio etc. Scientists now estimate we consume an average of 74 gigabytes a day, the equivalent of 16 movies.
To put that in perspective: before the digital age, a well-read person living a full life might have processed that volume of information in an entire lifetime. It used to take effort to find content, now it takes effort to avoid it.
The average American now spends close to eight hours a day consuming digital media — and that doesn’t count passive screen exposure. We are, by any measure, in genuinely uncharted neurological territory. There is no evolutionary precedent for what we’re asking our brains to do.
ADHD diagnoses have been rising for years, with a notable spike among adults during and after the pandemic. Research published in the American Psychiatric Association’s journal found a significant upward trend in ADHD incidence among adults from 2020 to 2023.
The research connecting screen time to ADHD symptoms is substantial and growing. A 2023 meta-analysis of more than 81,000 children found a positive correlation between screen time and potential ADHD symptoms— with children spending more than two hours per day on screens showing 51% higher odds of ADHD diagnosis compared to those with less screen exposure.
A 2023 study published in Scientific Reports tracking nearly 4,000 Canadian adolescents over five years found that increases in screen time in a given year were associated with an exacerbation of ADHD symptoms within that same year, over and above potential common vulnerability.
There is no doubt that content consumption of all kinds is work for our brain. When we stop consuming our brains can rest, but what about when we also consume as a our rest?
What Overstimulation Actually Does to the Brain
When the brain is flooded with more information than it can effectively process, excessive input hijacks our attention system. The prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for decision-making and focus, gets overwhelmed, making it harder to prioritize tasks and retain information.
The prefrontal cortex is the part of you that sets long-term goals, regulates emotion, makes nuanced judgments, and reflects on your own behavior. It’s also, not coincidentally, the part that makes you a good leader, a thoughtful parent, and a person capable of genuine self-awareness. It’s also getting pummeled by the information overload.
There’s a second mechanism at work that’s even more insidious: dopamine.
Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. Critically, the dopamine system doesn’t have satiety built in, which means you will never feel like you;ve had enough to stop seeking it. Our brain’s drive for dopamine is literally insatiable.
This is why you can scroll for 45 minutes and feel worse at the end than you did at the beginning. You were never actually going to feel full. The seeking was the point, not the content.
Scrolling (and other screen use) often begins as overstimulation relief, but becomes emotional buffering, a soft barrier between you and whatever feeling you don’t want to contact yet. People don’t scroll for information. They scroll for distance from themselves.
Overstimulation keeps the nervous system in a heightened state of arousal, leading to increased cortisol, racing thoughts, and difficulty relaxing, a feeling of being on edge even when nothing is wrong. This is functionally anxiety and often chronic anxiety can come to feel hopeless and stuck much like experiences of depression.
Have we normalized a state of low-grade nervous system dysregulation as high performance?
What This Means for High Performers Specifically
I work with executives and leaders who are, almost universally, high-information consumers. That’s part of how they got where they are, the relentless intake, the skilled pattern recognition, and staying informed. Many of them wonder why, despite their success, they feel so restless and dis-ease. Meaning and peace feel only fleeting.
Constant stimulation, a myriad choices, and immediate dopamine rewards often keep us busy, but busyness does not mean fulfillment. Fulfillment comes slowly, through nurturing relationships, progression toward meaningful outcomes, and opportunity for rest and reflection and integration. All of these things are functions of creativity, and rest. Creativity is the antithesis of consumption. First we consume, then we rest, then we create. IN, stop, OUT.
That sentence could be the thesis of half the coaching conversations I have.
The leaders I work with are not failing because they lack information, skill, or drive. They’re often struggling because their nervous systems are running a program that was never designed for this volume of input and nobody told them that regulating that system is part of the job. That it may be most of the job.
What gets called lack of focus is sometimes a depleted prefrontal cortex. What gets called emotional unavailability is sometimes a nervous system that has been in low-grade fight-or-flight for so long it’s lost its range. What gets called restlessness is sometimes a dopamine system that has been so chronically stimulated by low quality experiences it can no longer recognize satisfaction.
These are physiological consequences of the environment we’ve all agreed to live in without fully understanding the terms. No shade. There was no way to know but by first failing. Every leader knows about failing first. That’s where we are. Failing is always a gorgeous opportunity.
The Opportunity Here Is Really Beautiful
Humans are amazing. The brain is remarkably plastic. The nervous system can be recalibrated. Attention can be rebuilt.
The beautiful opportunity here is to shift from more is more to valuing less. That spending a day without a screen is a luxury to be sought after. Coming home to ourselves is the skill and habit that we will cherish as time goes on as we see how painful it is to ignore ourselves. Let’s be honest, pain and discomfort are the real motivators. I know I don’t eat better because it’s fun but because I get reflux or arthritis flair ups if I don’t, pain in this scenarios (as is generally the case) will be the gift that makes us be better.
We may over years or even a generation or two, come to deeply value the things we’ve systematically eliminated and that the brain needs to consolidate memory, generate creativity, and access the deeper layers of itself where meaning lives.
The most supportive thing you can do as a person, leader, person people love- might be to spend thirty minutes doing nothing. Not meditating with an app. Not listening to a podcast about mindfulness. Just nothing. Letting the nervous system find its own floor.
The screens are here. The information is here. The dopamine loops are here, and they are exquisitely engineered to keep us in them. So how will we rise? How will humanity eventually come to know its next major evolution?
Awareness is the beginning of choice. And choice — real, deliberate, values-aligned choice is about how you engage with all of it, the stimulation, your response and the quiet or not so quiet call from your soul for peace.
This is the work worth doing. Showing up to the inevitable with honesty and integrity enough to know when you’re over your head. That’s an act of love.
Gen Morley is an executive coach and licensed psychotherapist working with leaders in the middle chapters of their lives — people who have achieved enough to know that achievement alone isn’t the answer. If this resonated, you’re probably in the right place.
