In 1545, a 29-year-old physician in Zurich named Conrad Gessner published the first volume of a book that tried to catalog every learned book he could find. The Bibliotheca universalis gathered thousands of titles in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and in its preface Gessner complained about what the historian Ann Blair renders as a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” He asked kings, princes and scholars to do something about it.
The printing press was barely a century old. Gessner had no phone and no inbox, and he was already overwhelmed.
If you are trying to work out how to limit daily information intake, it helps to know you are in old company. Every generation that got cheaper words also got the same headache. What changed is the dose. A 2009 report from UC San Diego estimated that the average American took in about 100,000 words a day outside of work, and that was 2008, before most people carried a smartphone.
Why information overload is a problem of dose
Most advice treats overload as a phone problem with an abstinence cure. Delete the apps, go dark for a weekend, come back cleansed. We have looked at why that rarely holds, both in how to digital detox without deleting everything and in the story of why the dopamine detox doesn’t work. Those essays are about the device and the habit loop. This one is about the food.
Nobody solves bad eating by refusing to eat. A diet asks two plainer questions: how much, and what. Information deserves the same two questions, and the first one turns out to matter more than people expect.
In April 2013, two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Two to four weeks later, the psychologists E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver surveyed 4,675 American adults about their stress and their media habits. Their paper in PNAS found that people who spent six or more hours a day with bombing coverage in the week after the attack reported higher acute stress than people who had been at or near the bombings themselves.
Sit with that for a second. Watching the event, hour after hour, was associated with more distress than standing near it.
The study is a survey, so it can’t say the coverage caused the stress. Anxious people may have watched more. But the shape of the finding, more hours lining up with more symptoms, is the kind of pattern a nutritionist would recognize. The portion was doing something on its own, separate from what the news actually said.
The economist Herbert Simon saw this coming in 1971, in an essay titled “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” His line has been quoted for half a century because it keeps getting truer: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s point was that information is never free to the person on the receiving end. Most of its cost is paid in attention, by the reader.
Watching the event, hour after hour, was associated with more distress than standing near it.
The fear of missing out on information
Plenty of people have already started cutting portions on their own, a little guiltily. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 found that 40% of people across 48 markets sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% when the question was first asked in 2017. Many of them describe feeling worn out by the sheer amount.
The guilt has a name in the research. A 2024 study in SAGE Open surveyed 142 digital workers and looked at two separate pressures: information overload, and the fear of missing out on information, which the authors shorten to IFoMO. Both were linked to stress and exhaustion. So the worry about what you haven’t read is a load of its own, stacked on top of everything you have.
That is worth knowing when you try to cut back, because the first few days of a smaller diet feel like ignorance. They mostly aren’t. The essayist Rolf Dobelli, who gave up news altogether, put a challenge to readers in a 2013 piece for The Guardian: out of the roughly 10,000 news stories you read in the last year, name one that helped you make a better decision about something serious in your life. You don’t have to go as far as Dobelli did. Just try answering him honestly.
How to limit daily information intake with an information diet
A 2025 systematic review of 38 studies on managing overload sorted the strategies people use into a few families. The personal ones came down to filtering and withdrawal, and the authors concluded that personal habits hold better with tools and structure around them. Here is what that structure can look like on an ordinary weekday.
Write the menu before you’re hungry. Pick your sources in advance, while you are calm, and keep the list short enough to fit on a sticky note. One good newspaper and one newsletter you actually finish is a reasonable start. When a new source shows up, something has to come off the list to make room.
Eat at mealtimes. Grazing is where the hours go. The researcher Gloria Mark has measured how long people stay on one screen before switching, and in her recent studies the average has fallen to about 47 seconds. Checking the news at two set times a day, say with breakfast and after work, turns 30 small glances into two sittings you notice. Turn off breaking news alerts; almost nothing in them needs you within the hour.
Choose slow food. A useful test for any format is how long what it tells you stays true. A weekly magazine has already done the filtering that an hourly feed hands back to you. One long article about a story will usually leave you understanding it better than 20 headlines about the same thing, and a book better still.
Leave room to digest. Reading more is the easy part. Keeping anything is harder, and memory research suggests that remembering what you read depends more on what you do afterward than on how much went in. After a reading session, pick one thing and say it back to yourself in a sentence. The rest can go.
What a smaller portion gives back
The obvious payoff is quieter mornings. The less obvious one is that your attention starts working on what you’ve kept. When 100,000 words come in, each one gets a glance. When a few come in, one of them can stay long enough to meet another idea from somewhere else, and that meeting is most of what people mean by thinking. We wrote about the case for exactly that kind of small portion in one thought a day, and about why the minutes themselves are a misleading measure in attention vs screen time.
Ann Blair noticed something funny about the scholars who complained about too many books. Their cure was usually another book, often an enormous one: a reference work, or a catalog bigger than the last. Gessner himself answered the abundance with a volume that listed thousands of titles. We do the same thing now with apps that promise to sort the feed for us.
The quieter answer was always available, even in 1545. A reader at a desk in Zurich, one book open, the rest of the pile left where it is until tomorrow.