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The quietly catastrophic mental condition that probably affects you

And what you can do about it

Kristine Hadeed
7 min readJun 27, 2024
Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

Stress. Anxiety. Fear. Despair.

All of these conditions of the mind have made the news recently in some context: We know that Stress is a killer; that Gen Z is experiencing the most Anxiety of any generation ever; that Fear, along with its cousins Mistrust and Paranoia, are dividing our nation; and that deepening socioeconomic Despair is spiking suicide rates.

But there’s one unassumingly dangerous condition of the mind that doesn’t get talked about very much, though I would argue that it is the most catastrophic condition of all. That’s because it paralyzes our ability to do anything about the other conditions listed above.

That condition is Overwhelm.

Our brains weren’t made to process this much information

Contrary to popular metaphors, the human brain is not like a computer.

Generally speaking, we don’t have great memories, we can’t make complex math calculations super quickly, we suck at multitasking, and we have a hard time keeping a lot of ideas neatly sorted in our brain. Just think about how hard it is for most people to write an outline for an essay — even college students.

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Kristine Hadeed
Kristine Hadeed

Written by Kristine Hadeed

Critical thinker and non-partisan community organizer advocating for the liberation and dignity of all people.

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