Welcome to Carnegie Mellon, population: Stress. You live right next to Stress. Stress is your next-door neighbor. You see Stress working in the yard sometimes, clipping the hedges. Stress sometimes comes over and asks to borrow your screwdriver. Unfortunately, your kids and Stress' kids go to the same grade school, which means every time they have a soccer practice, Stress is there. You may try to avoid Stress, but Carnegie Mellon is a small town, and you and Stress will eventually end up at the same boring cocktail party, sipping drinks while awkwardly discussing little Suzie Stress's ability to play the tambourine.

What I'm trying to say is that Stress is going to be a large part of your immediate future.

But does it have to be that way? Why does our school make it so easy for us to take on too much, too soon? What is it about Carnegie Mellon that makes us hide in our rooms for hours on end, staring at our computer screens or drawing tablets or notebooks, freaking out about how much we have to do, but never actually doing it?

One possibility is information overload. With our classes constantly generating work, our departments constantly informing us of upcoming events, deadlines, and opportunities, our clubs, Greek organizations, and outside projects throwing endless e-mails, flyers, and meetings at us, and the internet hooked into our veins, even the least ambitious among us can't help but be swarmed with information. It comes at us from all sides: our mail, our instant messages, our e-mail, our professors, our fellow students, even our friends bombard us with possibilities. We even do it to ourselves, spending countless hours procrastinating on the internet by reading web comics, scanning RSS feeds, browsing websites, looking up things on Wikipedia, updating our LiveJournals and reading others'.

A professor at the University of California at Irvine, Gloria Mark, found that the average office employee is interrupted every two minutes, and switches tasks every three. In students, these numbers are probably worse. Said John Ratey, a Harvard professor, "There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death."

As Kenette Winterson, a writer for the Guardian, said, "We eat too much, we drink too much, we have too much stuff, too many stresses, too many things to do. Ours is a society endlessly consuming without the energy to process what we consume."

We don't need any of this information; we just consume it to keep ourselves occupied. People speak of the "hustle and bustle" of the modern world, and on our campus this energy extends to mental activity as well. The information we soak in screams at us from the back of our brain, layering us with anxiety about tidbits of LiveJournal gossip we can't quite remember, news articles whose facts are easily forgettable but depress us anyway, and tasks that we could be doing but don't know who told us to do them, or even what they are. It is this "continuous partial attention," a phrase coined by multimedia expert Linda Stone, that gives us so much anxiety.

Our stress comes not from the many tasks we know we must do, but from the thousands more that we once processed but are no longer consciously aware of. Our subconscious has no sense of past and no sense of scale; the smoothie advertisement you saw in the University Center has just as much importance to your subconscious mind as the poverty in Africa you read about on Google News and the architecture assignment your professor alluded to in class but never actually specified. We die not from the big wounds of essays and projects and early morning crew practice, but from the thousands of tiny wounds of ignored e-mails, forgotten extracurricular activities, instant messages left without response, good ideas never documented, pizza money that went un-repaid, and interesting articles unparsed. A study at King's College in London even posits that constant e-mail users have a 10 point drop in IQ as compared to those who don't, a drop even more extreme than marijuana users in a similar study, who only fell by eight points. When Dr. Glenn Wilson, the man behind both studies, described his subjects as having doziness, lethargy, and an inability to focus, he was talking more about the e-mail users, not the druggies.

So how do we stop the madness? How do we calm the storm? How do we find clarity and focus?

Simple: we stop listening.

We unbookmark our webcomics. They aren't really that funny anyway. We turn off our music. We delete our LiveJournals, because no one really wants to hear us complain and we don't really want to read the toxic sarcasm of tired, bitter teenagers. We remove ourselves from d-lists. We stop reading the newspaper - if something important happens, we'll hear about it eventually. We throw out our cell phones; we start viciously filtering our e-mail accounts. We tell other people what we are doing – they will understand. And if they don't, don't worry about it – what you are doing is good for you. If they accuse you of fearing change, tell them you aren't trying to return to a simpler time, you are trying to live sanely in this one.

You fear doing this, don't you? You fear that if you shut it all off, you might be missing something. You fear that an important thing will happen and just pass you by. But if you did keep listening to the chaos, do you really think you would hear the signal through the noise? If you do this, if you stop listening to the words closing in around you, if you wall them off and shut them down, you might find something you truly fear: calmness, clarity, and focus.

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