742: Punching Through the Noise (Why We Empaths Are Feeling Overwhelmed Right Now)

Hey, it's not just you. You, like me, are probably a sensitive and empath and we feel everything before we have words to describe the shift in the winds. Right now you're feeling our collective groan and sense of helplessness and confusion at the overflowing sewage of choices out there right now. But once you see what's going on, you're going to attain the power to stop this humongous drain on your batteries and even to charge them again. Today I'm opening your eyes to what's really going on in the world and how to protect yourself from all the noise flow Dreaming still kinda Woo Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of woo. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. We'll explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter, or how your personal growth can drive your business growth, or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right, we're a dash of woo woo. A sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight so much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to FL Dreaming Still Kind of woo Woo. Oh my friends, I am so delighted to be here with you today and I'm doing something that I've just been playing around with. I typically write a blog or a newsletter and I send it out an email and it's an observation about our, I don't know, way of going through the world as empaths, as personal growth devotees. And this time I wanted to talk about what it feels like being an empath right now with the absolute information overload that's going on. I really feel that you might recognize yourself in what I'm going to read to you today or share with you today. If you're an empath and you have been feeling irritable and cranky and well, just like I said in the beginning, oh my goodness. This might just explain so much and also give you some tools on how to change direction, change course, shield all this noise. And that's why I do call this punching through the noise. So with that, let's jump in and I'm going to share this with you. If you've already read it before, listen anyway it's different when I say it aloud. Here we go. Lately, I just keep feeling like I just don't have anything else to say, which is not true. I have a lot to say. I'm just ask my husband. There was a time when every week I'd be sending out a podcast or a thoughtful email about energy and flow and life and inner power and all the things we love to explore as we grow and curate our lives. But lately, when I've sat down to record a podcast or type an email, sometimes I feel as stubborn as a dog refusing to enter the vet doorway. I just don't want to add to the overload, our collective overload. I am overwhelmed. You're probably overwhelmed. It's like a family dinner and all 8 billion of us are talking at once. And not only that, but we've trained our AI to spit out even more reams of information than we ourselves do. And it's all just becoming noise now. Case in point, when I began podcasting in 2005, there were perhaps 12,000 podcasts to choose from. And today there are almost 3 million. How many newsletters were you subscribed to in 2005? Maybe four. And of those, two were ones you got an actual physical mailbox, like with a stamp on it. And now how many are you unsubscribing from each week in your inbox? I mean, I average 2 to 3, which is around 120, 150 a year. My point is that with so much information at my fingertips, I'm suffering from information paralysis. And our news cycle in the US and our whiplash politics is certainly not helping. Recently I heard that people reading books, well, it's declining and professors are studying why. And the result, well, you guessed it. It's because we're literally reading and scrolling all day long now, every day, on our devices. So sitting down to read a book for two additional hours in a day becomes a torturous exercise of attention. So teaching about flow, dreaming and limiting beliefs and lack thinking and personal inner power and intuition will always, always be in my blood. But at the moment, I find myself gestating on these concepts instead, pulling them back like a protective mother hen, carefully, you know, keeping her eggs safe. I think about how over the last 20 years, I've poured so much that I've learned out into the world. I've contributed to all, all of that communication. Three books, 40 courses, almost 800 podcast episodes, thousands of hours of live classes, many, many multiple live retreats, events, and 370 plus recorded audio flow. Dreams. I have certainly done my part in contributing to the personal wellness field and contributing to the information. Which brings me again to my point. If you're feeling a strange kind of life paralysis or an inability to make a decision about where to go next, or what program to enroll in, or where to move or what next career move to make, or maybe even just simply feeling a strange irritability about everything just being too much, you are not alone. You like me. We've done a lot and now choosing the next thing to do is being collectively muddled and oppressed by a deluge of information streaming down in our heads like a never ending rain. It's not just you. We are sensitives and empaths. We feel everything before we even have words to describe the shift in winds which often makes us doubt ourself. Which is why I'm here reminding you you're feeling our collective groan and sense of helplessness and confusion at the overflowing sewage of choices. I mean, choices. Decisions used to be easier to make. We had far fewer choices. It was easier to pick one thing and land. In fact, there's a landmark study by Yinger and Lepper in 2000. It showed us, maybe you've heard of this, that shoppers were more likely to purchase jam when presented with eight options 30% of people purchased compared to 24 options when only 3% purchased. And they coined it decision paralysis. But now. Now there are so many daily choices and choosing anything feels so precarious. It feels like there's more to lose if we're wrong. And yet we keep filtering the onslaught of information and making those choices. But each choice feels less steady and more feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. I noticed this when I was readying myself recently to adopt some new kitty friends. My very old gals passed away in 2023, so I've been shocked that it's taken me more than a year to find some some new little furry furry baby friends. Then I realized what was going on. In the past, I'd have just gone to the Humane Society or a local cat rescue and found a kitty who needed a home and bingo. Done. But today I follow dozens of rescue organizations on Instagram. Every day, hundreds of cats are up for adoption, not just in my town, but everywhere. And some rescues are even flying cats in from Dubai or Mexico to the US and they're all up there. And I can see them all and find them all and read all their stories and. And every evening that I spend on petfinder.com, it just leaves me more Listless and overwhelmed. I don't know who to pick. So maybe I should just keep looking. Or maybe you remember a time when you could not endlessly swipe left. You only got to meet a potential new partner at a dinner party or maybe a bar. But it was live in the flesh and there were only a couple of people to even choose from on any given occasion, if you were lucky. Yet it was somehow easier. I mean, people still dated and they still got married just as much. And it worked, even with far fewer choices and much less noise. So again, my point is that society right now is currently hell bent on making it harder for us to make and put faith in concrete choices. Why? Well, this is partly the result of the giant web, the World Wide Web, the Internet of the interconnectedness that we've built in these last 20 years. It's this dark side. This is also the result of all the AI that are out there spewing, quintupling the output of information every week. I mean, now, even as we speak, and all of this is combined to make the choices that we're making feel less reliable, more fragile. Somehow our level of uncertainty is stopping us in our tracks. I mean, I'm still making choices and getting stuff done, but everything is tinged with that uncertainty. So hear me out. It's not you. It's not you. It's that we're all bathing in an ocean of contradictory, compelling, overwhelming noise. See me, read me, hear me, want me, buy me. The noise of all 8 billion of us is so loud, can't even hear each other anymore. Now, the way out, the way that I've found that I'm pursuing, is to pick up a butter knife and start cleaving my way through the thicket. On the one hand, you can unsubscribe, toss out those social accounts or apps, reduce the noise in your purse or pocket however you can. But on the other, go in and dig and start making choices. Commit, then go deep with those choices. Go deep with the information that you do allow to access your life. Let guidance step in, do get ready to course correct as needed and get back to real concrete things in people you love. Mostly, though, know that we're all feeling it and struggling to keep up. We're learning to swim in a new ocean. And in the beginning it's rough, but I think we'll get better and we will learn. And then one day it'll be like those olden times when we left voicemails on physical answering machines and had to wait a whole day before Someone got home and checked the cassette tape to discover that we'd even reached out. I want that space again. That blessed sense of space and privacy and the ability to focus on just one thing at a time. We had space to breathe and we had more time to filter. The fewer choices we had with much less anxiety about picking wrong. We can get there again. The first step is just waking up to our place in the deluge and then calling it what it is. Unimportant noise. Well, my friends, what do you think about that? And I want to point out why I feel that this observation, this article of mine, is really relevant to us in terms of our energy, our emotional flexibility, in terms of how we feel about ourselves and the guilt we give ourselves for feeling stuck, or not knowing what to do next, or not trusting the choices we make. All of this impacts who we are and how we navigate through this space of our lives. And right now, this is happening around us and we are in it. And some of us are the bellwether, the canary in the coal mines, right? We empaths, we tend to pick it up first and we look around and say, is anybody else feeling this? And everybody else shrugs and says, we don't know what you're talking about. So we scratch our heads and we feel crazy for a while. And then eventually everybody goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that thing. Yeah, yeah, you were right. I just told myself I was right. That was very. That was satisfying. But if you're feeling this, I. I just want you to know I'm. I'm here with you. This is what's really happening and going on. Remember, people did used to date and get married when they only met a couple people here and there, at parties. Without 5,000 choices, life can continue without all of the stuff all everywhere. There is no reason that you have to keep up. None, None. In fact, I argue that perhaps there's not a benefit, that perhaps there's more of a detrimental effect than an actual benefit. So come be a rebel with me now. With that, I'm going to wrap up today's episode. I do want to invite you, of course, become a Rising Light leader with me. I know irony. I'm inviting you into one more thing, even after that long discussion. But what we do in this group is we really just meet once a month and we do a workshop together. And you get to chill out on Zoom and you get to make some fun things and do ritual and energy work. And it's meant to be something that's an add on into your life. Not a have to, not a chore, not a burden, not a have to get there or achieve this. It's meant to give you a moment of soothing, redirection, alignment to get you back into your spiritual being, your spiritual state. And frankly, it's where I tell people things like I'm telling you right now. It's okay. Let it go, relax, be. Let's make something, let's just enjoy something. Let's make something pleasurable and beautiful and wild and wonderful in our lives. Let's flow dream together. So I do invite you to that and I do think it's a really good add on if you are able to have any small speck of your time. Well, this is one area where what you put into it will actually help all the other areas and perhaps get things even more in alignment. That is my goal with it. So you can find all of that@flowdreaming.com likewise, if you'd like to work with me privately or personally, please reach out. You can email me anytime summerlowdreaming.com or just come to my website and check it out from there. With that much, much love to you all and I'm going to see you next week with another episode of Flow Dreaming. Still kind of woo woo. I'd love the opportunity to work with you one on one because this is where I see the most remarkable growth in my clients. When we work privately, it's more than coaching. It's mentorship, energy work and intuitive guidance. And what I offer, well, kind of goes beyond coaching. Together we'll access insights and information you wouldn't typically have leading leading to real transformation. We'll start with a life assessment. What you desire, where you've been and where you're going. Then we'll align your desires with the universe with a personalized flow dream that you can use over and over. You start with an introductory private session or a deep dive. Or of course we can work together ongoing. Visit flowdreaming.com and search for private sessions. Or just reach out and email me. I can't wait to meet you.