You can listen to this episode here: Ep 16: The Exhaustion No One Talks About
If you feel tired all the time, even when you’re not doing anything particularly demanding — this episode names a kind of exhaustion most of us never talk about.
Modern life requires constant cognitive maintenance: remembering passwords, managing subscriptions, responding to notifications, staying alert to security risks, and making endless small decisions just to function. Over time, this low-grade vigilance drains our nervous systems and makes it harder to feel present, creative, or engaged in our real lives.
In this episode of Anchored & Alive, Blaze explores how digital overload and modern systems quietly contribute to burnout and how learning to reduce cognitive load can help you reclaim energy, attention, and a sense of ease without needing to abandon modern life entirely.
Hello friends. This week I want to talk about a kind of exhaustion that we don't usually name.
But it's the constant cognitive maintenance of our modern lives and trying to maintain it and how it's contributing to burnout and it makes it more difficult for us to even consider really engaging in our own lives in a more tangible way because we're just constantly busy and maintaining and exhausted.
So here is what I want to call out because it's something that I've been actively recognizing and wanting to disengage from personally and I'm realizing that we're in a bind because...
Here we are: we live in the modern world. We're not actually able to fully disengage from it because we need to live and we need to interact with life.
But this is something that we all deal with every day. You go to login to any of your online accounts. And you get a notification like, "Okay, you did your password," or it automatically kind of did because your browser saved it for you. But then it pops up another thing saying,
Please check your two-factor authentication or verify this for us or verify that for you or here's a text to your phone. Then you realize you don't have your phone to be able to verify it. And you realize that you're stressed out because...
You have this account, it's your information, it's your stuff, you need to access it, or it's your subscription.
But they've made it so redundantly difficult to get into, to even maintain your own stuff, that you can't really access it, or you're already angry and frustrated before you've even logged in for usually an unpleasant task, usually if I'm logging in, it's to check balances or to pay a bill or something. So you're just already frustrated with the whole thing.
Annoyed that you have to pay for something that used to be free, or that you already own anyway.
Your subscription fees are going up and then on top of that, there's this demand of give us more information, have more passwords, remember more passwords. Also remember your PIN for it and remember your phone number and also don't ever lose your phone or your phone number because then you'll be locked out of every account that you've ever made in your whole life.
Good luck ever getting it back. And it's so irritating, exhausting, slowly grinding you down and cruel.
It's like that with social media.
Where you've got your accounts and you go to login, but then prove that you're you and then prove that you're here. And then you know that you're in a machine that's like set up to keep you there and to keep you emotionally triggered and to keep feeding you stuff to keep you watching. So it's like if you make you happy, make you sad, make you stressed, make you whatever, and it's just...
Hours, minutes can go by before you realize that you've been in it and you want to leave. And then you leave and then you don't know what to do because it seems like everything that we interact with now is on a screen, online.
Or, if it's actually something physical, it's still locked behind a wall because to access it you have to log in somewhere, like even parks and rec for activities for my kid. There's still like an online portal with multiple authentication things that you have to go through and hoops to jump through to just register for basketball or summer camp or whatever it is.
Oh my goodness. So it feels like modern life is deliberately setting us up to be exhausted, to be so tired that we just conform and keep going, that we're all dealing with it and we're all frustrated and mad about it, but it feels like there's no opting out.
And what it does to us as humans and human bodies is it never gives us a chance to offload vigilance.
Or to stop thinking about all of these things that we have to maintain because they all feel really fundamental to our survival.
Bear with me because that sounds really dramatic. But to me, I have the stress of, "Oh my God, if I forget passwords or something to access my own bank account,"
I don't even know that if I showed up in person with all of my IDs, if it would be enough to access my own stuff.
That's so stressful. Oh my goodness, why has it gotten to that level where it's this difficult?
Why do I have so many apps that are asking for my credit card information or to save my stuff and I feel like I'm accessible everywhere?
Through every store I've ever interacted with. And also, oh, this is interesting. It's the subtle degradation and beating us down that makes us all go, Amazon is easier, any of these bigger corporations are easier to deal with because it's just one thing that has my password and all this stuff and has my credit card information rather than the alternative,
Which is going to every single store that you actually want to buy from and having to make an account there and putting your information there and wonder if their site has a bug and you're going to get your stuff stolen.
And we have that fear all the time now because it's been proven to us multiple times that even with Amazon and any of these stores, identities get stolen.
There's bugs. Someone takes your credit card number and you find that someone in Canada has like charged your card, but you live in Florida, like it's just crazy. And I've been through this so many times as a business owner, as a person in my life, even 10 years ago, and it's so much worse now, where I now have to think, how can I extricate myself from this machine? Do I need all of this stuff?
And I'm really thinking about it because in some ways my answer is yes. I do still need to buy things. I do still need to interact. I'm watching that the local mall is gone. You can't go shopping in person for anything anymore.
If I want to go get a winter coat, I'm talking about like a pilgrimage to... halfway across the state to find the store that has winter clothing. And that's reality.
It didn't used to be. And maybe it's because I'm older that I feel like, gosh, things used to be easier, they felt a whole lot easier. And I know that it's very frustrating and it was frustrating for me as a younger person to have older people say stuff like that, and be like, "Oh, you're just romanticizing, "Ah, the good old days, the good old days, whatever. "It's a bunch of bullshit."
I agree with you, it is. And I can also say that the demands that we place on ourselves now have crept up very slowly, but also incredibly quickly. The world that we're living in right now is not the world that our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents existed in, and it's certainly not the world that people lived in 100 or 200 years ago.
We are not physically constructed to deal with this level of cognitive maintenance constantly because we're cyclical beings. We're meant to have times of production and times of rest. We're meant to have times of big thoughts and times of you know, turning the brain off and relaxing and doing other things.
The way that modern society seems to be set up right now keeps us constantly having to sit in front of a screen and output stuff. And everything that we're taking in, we're almost using it to soothe ourselves so that we can just keep going doing the same stuff.
And then when we're having a power outage, we're worried about like, oh no.
What if the power goes out? One of our concerns recently with the power going out is one, it's going to be really cold. How do we keep our home warm? That's a very valid concern. And the next one was, do we have all of our devices charged so that we can entertain ourselves while it's cold and dark?
And I'm like, "Whoa, we've lost our ability to even come up with something to do for like a day in the cold."
And I laugh about it because that's not entirely true, but it's also true that it's so much easier to have a TV to watch or to have a game to play or to have something made for us, ready for us, that we didn't have to create or input into. Ugh, man, it's a lot.
Oh my goodness. So what happens here is that for me anyway, there's a part of my brain that's always on. It is always urgency-driven.
It's always wondering about where did I store that information? What do I need to maintain? What do I need to get ahead of so that something bad doesn't happen?
I don't know if you feel this way also, but certainly I have a low-grade panic that's always there, and I'm going to say it's like five layers down, but it just exists under the soil of my life, which is:
When do bills come up and are they going to get paid? How much money is in the account? Do I have access to it? Do I remember those passwords? Have I updated that recently and is the balance still true?
It's just always there. I'm always thinking about it. And I think this has replaced what used to be in our brain five layers down or probably much more surface level was:
How much food do I have? Where can I get some more? Is it in my house already, or have I planted it, and how am I going to get it? So I think we've replaced that survival stuff of like where's my shelter, where am I sleeping, where's my food, where's water with:
Where are my passwords? How am I going to log in? And if someone steals this or co-ops it from me is my identity ruined and how will I survive? And that's actually a valid concern now, and it's kind of terrifying because it seems like...
I don't know. I'm not going to romanticize like having to live a subsistence level where I need to go hunt and gather my own food. That's not easier. I don't think in any way that would be an easier life. But I also think that the answers to those questions might seem a little bit more accessible and more shareable with other humans.
Whereas having all these passwords and identity survival feels like it's very isolating and that every individual is responsible for their own online identity and all this stuff and all of their passwords.
And it's gotten very stressful. So I don't know that I'm the only one feeling that, but I did want to record this episode to just say it's a real feeling, it's a real fear, and it's frustrating. And it's difficult when you realize that you want to kind of opt out of being so online and so in that world that we're not really even sure how to do it.
So when I've been working with one-to-one clients and I was doing more of that work versus the Anchored & Alive coursework, what would come up is how do you meet people or how do you like build a life outside of being on an app for it? How do you meet people to date? How do you meet people to just be friends?
And part of this, I think, has become a problem because we've gotten so...
I don't know, focused. In my mind, I'm picturing like we're just like our heads are down, we're in our phones, and we're looking at our phone constantly and we're using that to connect to people and to connect to our friends in the past to send text messages and to get emails.
And then our work started surfacing in that too, so you can't even like go home and leave work. Now you've got work coming home with you on your phone.
But guess what? Your phone can also stream all of your entertainment and your TV shows and...
TV shows aren't just on when they're on. You can get them anytime, but you have
Oh my gosh, like 15 subscription services to be able to access each different one and you have to think even if you, okay, you either have all of them and you're paying for all of them.
Or you're thinking about which one do I pay for, how long do I keep it, when do I offload it, and then when do I switch to another one?
And that becomes another cognitive load, so it becomes overwhelming.
I think of it the same way as like going shopping and getting over-inundated with stuff and options and choices where you're like, "I just want some toothpaste, but there's 50 toothpastes. Which one is the right choice for me?"
And there is a built-in human feeling of fearing missing out, right? FOMO. And we're like, what if I chose the wrong one and the other one is better for me? And then we just get stuck and we're frozen and we can't make a choice.
I see it in myself a lot. I see it in clients and other people. And I just want to give us all a hug and say, it's okay. It's not us. We're not broken. I think it's the system that we're in is not optimized for humans, it's optimized for consumers.
"Ehh, yuck." But I think that's the truth of it. And we are kind of stuck in that system.
So what I would like to do is talk about ways of disengaging intelligently with choice because you want to if you want to. Not because you have to, not because it makes you a better person if you decide to opt out. But if you're overwhelmed by it and you're not enjoying living like that,
How can you make it easier for yourself and have a life that you're just enjoying a little bit more or that you're offloading some of this stress that comes with just having to exist in this modern reality?
So one of the things that I try to do is kind of stop trying to win the system. Like I'm never going to win against all of consumerism and all of capitalism and all of everything.
What I can do is say, for me, this amount of input and demand is not sustainable and it's genuinely too much for me to do forever.
It's why I feel at this stage that I've put a good effort in for like decades and I've tried to keep up with every new technology, but it's genuinely designed to change constantly and always give you a new flashier experience, which is what keeps us hooked and afraid. And because of that, we keep trying to modify and catch up and come up with new ways to do it.
For me, I'm realizing, you know, that's just exhausting and I can see how people are starting to go, "I just want a dumb phone. I don't want to have a TV." Or, "I'll have one service. I don't need 50."
And part of that is simplifying it down so that we don't have to mentally keep track of so many things, and we're not. just putting ourselves through that ringer. So one of the things that I started doing years ago was trying to just contain this chaos instead of eliminating it because I don't want to not have TV and I don't want to not have shopping accounts and I don't want to not be able to, you know, access my bank or my friends or social media or whatever, when I want to.
But I wanted to have one trusted place that I know where my stuff is.
So that also is really human. And if you don't already, I would say...
Find yourself a password keeper, find yourself a physical notebook, and know exactly where you always put it or have some combination of the two.
What matters isn't how you do it. It's not about being perfect or beautiful. It's about knowing where it is and trusting that and not having to stress about it.
Because there's nothing worse than losing a password or not knowing how to log into your own stuff.
So getting rid of that fear for me was like, okay, I know where I put my things. I know where the backup is. I can find it. And occasionally I go through and clean it up around, unsubscribe from stuff.
And that's fine because I know where it is and I can throw things out or shred it. It's wonderful.
Something else that I do as well is recognize that there are some things that aren't worth it for me online.
So there's good enough security standards and then there's like super security standards for online things. So for newsletters and hobby sites and forums or places that I don't really go much or I've never had to put in payment information.
I have a password, but I'm not going to do two factor. I'm not going to try and get a pin for it. I'm not going to do all of these weird things where it's like, do you want to set up a pass key?
No, I don't need five million different ways to access content that I'm literally just trying to look at once or that I don't care about that much.
So I would offer the same to you and go, if you're stressed about it, you don't have to be. You could just decide which things are good enough.
And if it's something that's never asked for more than just an email address, that's great. If you want to, you can create your own email address to kind of have all of those subscriptions on one thing so it's not pestering you all the time and it's never going to come to you or steal your identity because there's no real defining thing about you on that account.
I have also started actively shrinking all of the different things that I'm maintaining, so I call it like subscription triage.
Which is where if I recognize that I'm getting spammed, like obviously, flag things to spam.
But I also will pick a season where I go anything that's irritating and I don't want to have any more. I decide is it worth having a filter so I can access it later?
So for a while I was subscribing to a bunch of knitting and sewing forums and newsletters and actual news. And none of that feels like I want to be inundated with it right now. So I can put an automatic filter and be like, hey, if it's related to like the knitting project that I was doing, just, you know, put it in its own folder, mark it as already read. So I never have to deal with it.
And I'll check it again next year and see if I even still want these subscriptions. But don't clutter my inbox with it.
Same thing with the news. For me, there's this very real overwhelm coming from like, I can't keep hearing and seeing and living in trauma that's happening in the world right now. Watching videos and hearing news captions, repeating the same stuff constantly, is not helping my peace. It's not helping me live well and it's not helping me proactively engage in my life, it's shutting me down.
So I'm like, okay, what can I do with that?
And my solution is I don't want to be completely uninformed. So again, it's a filter that says if it's from these sources, if it has these key words, it gets filtered into news updates for later, marked as read so I never have to see it and it's in that folder and I will decide later if I want to read them purge them on subscribe.
But it's a way for me to not have it be the first thing that I see or interact with on a daily basis because much like everybody I know in my life, one of the first things I do when I wake up is pick up my phone.
It is my alarm clock now. Like all of the things that I used to do when I was living an analog life growing up don't seem to exist or they're harder to deal with now. And it seems easier to just use my phone as my alarm.
But what happens when I use my phone as my alarm clock is that the phone alarm goes off. I had to pick it up or swipe it to turn it off and now my phone is in my hand. And what's also on my phone is my email.
And my other email and my messages and all of the social media and all that stuff.
So I've also decided to put some things into folders and move them off of the homepage of my phone so that I'm like, "Okay, it's there, but I have to actively choose to go to it rather than see it all the time."
So all of these things that I'm describing, the thing that they have in common is it's helping me reduce my emotional and cognitive load.
It's reducing how much I'm needing to interact with it and it's giving me time to decide whether I want to actually cancel something or not.
It's making everything just easier. And I'm also looking at building, like almost like a ritual of maintenance hours. Is it once a week or is it once a month that I go in and I have time to go through and look at all this stuff and purge it or not because I don't want that to be something that I have to do every day or that seems like it's taking energy from me on a regular basis.
And I guess that's a lot of what I've been thinking about is in our modern lives, It seems like almost everything is so demanding that it takes away my capacity for imagination and interaction in my actual physical lived spaces in life.
Like when do I have time to actually, you know, cook a meal or spend time with my friends or go for a walk or set up a garden and plan all of that? It feels like that takes so much more effort than it might have if I didn't have 50 million things pulling at my attention all the time and alarms constantly going off and telling me what to do.
Here's what I want to say is our lives are busy and full and that's great, but why not have it be busy and full with the things that you want it to be full of and not what's just noise?
So that's really what I think I'm getting out here is giving myself permission to be present, and to be present for the things that I really care about and to stop giving away energy and time and attention to stuff that really is attention grabbing but doesn't give me anything in return.
So I really have asked, like, okay, if I'm on social media, if I log in there, does it give me anything in return really?
Did it give me a dopamine spike because I thought I saw a bunch of stuff and it was kind of cool or did it actually just sell me some stuff that I didn't want and didn't need, and now I'm upset. Or I just realized I wasted an hour and I didn't hang out with my kid and I didn't really make a nice dinner and all the things that I had.
In my head is like nice things to do and instead I just did nothing. I'm so tired of that and I think a lot of people are really tired of that and we're looking for ways to re-engage with reality and re-engage with each other in our lives.
Some of that is taking an honest look at like, what is the system that I'm living in? And what if I didn't think it was me that was the problem? And that's what I really want you to hear is when you look at your life and you see how things are going and what's going on and what isn't going on.
Please look at yourself a compassion and recognize what if I am not the problem?
What if the system that I'm in isn't conducive to me being the person that I want to be or doing the things that I want to do?
Because that is a solvable problem.
It's the work that I do every day and that I do with people. It's important and it's quiet work and it's not flashy.
But it's so nourishing. So, if you're looking out at the digital landscape and realizing, "Oh my God, yeah, there's like a lot going on there that's mentally and emotionally and honestly like financially exhausting." It's okay to see it and it's okay to go okay I'm ready to take a small step in the direction of disengagement. And it is hard because it's everywhere.
And it's possible. And it doesn't need to be that dramatic. And if you find yourself doing it, you might find that you're actually surprisingly pleasantly bored with what happens as you start to peel away some of these layers and get some more of your time and space back.
So that's the last thing I'll say about it is when you start creating that space for yourself and you're giving your whole system space to breathe.
What you might feel is not immediate relief, although there is some of that. It might also be kind of an exhaustion, a delayed feeling and a confusion about what the heck to do with yourself...
When you're not using technology and all of these instant gratification things that are around us asking for passwords and all that as a distraction or even as a regulation tool because honestly.
I think we're built to do that and that's why they're so addictive is we regulate ourselves by going in and clicking things and going this is how I'm going to calm myself down or this is how I'll turn my brain off.
We have to relearn how to do that and what is an actual real human piece for you as an individual.
But you do that through experience and not through thinking about it or hoping about it or wondering about it. It starts there.
But it's the doing of it that lets you have the full arc of the emotions and the thoughts and the feelings and then suddenly the lived capacity to live at a slower pace and to decide that you don't necessarily want what everyone else is having.
I guess maybe that's where I'm at, is I'm like, yeah, I just don't really want that anymore for myself.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting it either, but I'm pretty good and I would like to live a real life with lot less passwords and a lot less crap. So that is what I had to say this week.
Thank you for bearing with me. I know this one seemed more like a rant than... than usual.
But I think it's important to call out the frustration (that) exists there. It definitely is a system that is so vast and we're so in, like we live in it, we're swimming in it, we're drowning in it, that it's almost hard to perceive.
But I did want to just point out, like, there's nothing wrong with you if you're exhausted and overwhelmed and finding it hard to start on anything.
Ever look around at all of the things that are taking your attention and all of the small items that are just constantly peeling away little bits of your thoughts and your memory and taking up space in your brain. Maybe we're not meant for that. Maybe that's not really necessary. It's really hard to think about that when you're in it.
I promise it can be done. And if you're inspired and you feel like going on a binge of just clearing out your email or unsubscribing from things I am cheering on from here because heck yeah, let's all chill out!
Have a wonderful week and I will see you next time where we will talk about creativity and finding ways to really engage our passion and our ideas and why that's kind of difficult right now, and what can make it easier and more fun for us.
So I think that's going to be really fun and I will see you next week.
Related Episodes
If this episode resonated, you may also want to listen to:
• What If You’re Not Broken — Just Tired?
A compassionate reframe for chronic exhaustion, nervous system overload, and the belief that something is wrong with you.
• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
An exploration of why deep rest is necessary, and why forcing productivity during depleted seasons only increases burnout.
• When You Don’t Want Anything Yet: How to Be in January Without Forcing It
A reflection on low desire, recovery phases, and why motivation often returns naturally once pressure is removed.
• Mapping the Emotional Weather of Your Year
For readers who want a big-picture lens on capacity and systems.
✨ Feeling mentally overloaded or stretched thin?
If you’d like a steady place to begin this work for yourself, Living in Rhythm is a gentle starting point.
Begin Living in Rhythm → Download the Guide
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