Slowing down: on integration and processing
Drawing and re-drawing our mental models of the world around us is exhausting. But without it, we get stuck.
Abstract away enough layers, and ultimately, what we do as humans is four things:
- Ingestion / absorption / seeking
- Integration / Processing.
- Production / output / dissemination.
- Maintenance / rest / prepare for the next cycle.
This is true for so many aspects of our lives, with different ratios. Our bodies follow this pattern in so many aspects. Sleep follows the pattern— light sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep. Food follow the pattern — the act of eating, turning food into energy and nutrients, processing waste, etc. Our production of cells, our breathing patterns. Even our human procreation cycles follow this general arc.
I realize that the balance of these things is often quite out of whack. In the universe of mental health, it seems as if the integration and processing piece is where I consistently come up short. A lot of humans — myself included — are stuck in the ingestion phase. As we go through our lives, we doom-scroll social media. We read the news. We listen to music. We read. We absorb, in what is essentially information hoarding: There’s very little structure to where we put all of this information and how it fits into everything else.
My brain can deal with it just fine: It just shrugs, forgets, and forgets that it has forgotten.
One example might be a conversation. A good, in-depth conversation has a huge amount of overlap in these cycles — you listen to the other person, you take it, you fit it into the worldview you have, and all the other information you have available to you. Then you answer or share your own experiences. But you’ve also experienced re-playing a conversation in your head and realized that you said something that didn’t make sense. Your conversation partner said something that didn’t quite fit into the map you had of the universe, and your reply reflected that. Later on, when you go over the chat, you realize that you didn’t fully process and integrate what the other person said before you replied.
I am as guilty here, too. On reflection, I am realizing that I am missing an important part — the integration piece. In my hunger for knowledge and with my drive of curiosity, I often end up trying to cram more information in. It doesn’t work. It’s like going to a bookstore, buying 20 books, then sticking them on your bookshelf. Yes; you own the information, but you haven’t read the books yet, and so they haven’t made their way into your universe. The same goes for all other stimuli. It’s a rare human who can hear a song once and appreciate its full depth. If you read something that completely turns how your mental model works on its head — revising how your universe actually looks takes time.
Big ideas need space to breathe and settle into the fabric of your mental map of the world.
Books are a great — and an awful — analogy here. Because they are, themselves, part of the challenge. When you’re reading, you are ingesting. Finding out how all the information fits into the puzzle is the integration part. Moving words from the page through your eyes is the first step of the journey. Now it needs to go from your short-term memory into your long-term memory. That’s the step where the information needs to be integrated. Read a book about a new topic, and you’re in an easy space: You have a blank slate, and everything in the book is the ‘truth’. Read the second book about the same topic, and it becomes more complex. Most books are internally consistent — but books don’t have to agree with other books. And so, new sets of information that get added need to somehow fit with the rest of the information you have about a topic. What if there’s a conflict between two pieces of information? What becomes ‘the truth’? What if there’s a nuance that augments your understanding of the original? What if you have two pieces of information that seem to make sense, but they don’t connect properly? Are they linked? If so, how?
As we get older and become better and better at certain aspects of our lives — we become experts — integration becomes harder. The landscape has more creases, more mountains, more gaps. And overlaying a new map on top of the landscape is hard work — especially if it causes you to re-examine how you had already internalized old information. Some people just give up — they get ‘stuck in their ways’ and essentially stop augmenting their mental map of the world. No judgement there — looking after your energy expenditure is self care. It becomes exponentially harder to add more and more context, finesse, and nuance to a map that is covered in layers of revisions, and the glue that holds it all together. At some point, the question becomes “Am I really going to invest the time to redraw my map from scratch?” or “I already did all of this work to make a mental model of how a particular thing worked. Am I prepared to do the work to rip it all out and make adjustments?”
The processing and integration piece can take many shapes. For some, it’s daydreaming. For others, it’s driving a car, going on walks, or settling into a session of meditation. And I am realizing that I have not done enough of any of these things. My absorption phase is voracious — I’m a fast reader, and a greedy and enthusiastic consumer of music, podcasts, news, and other forms of information. But those who know me well have also seen me completely tune out of a conversation. I’m starting to wonder whether that’s because my brain shuts down when there’s too much input, without being able to modulate it. When I’m reading, I sometimes pause, re-read, or slow down. It’s hard to find space for that type of processing in conversations; they flow on regardless.
Is there a point to all this? Well; yes. I think it is a re-commitment to carving out more processing and integration time. Does a walk feel ‘productive’? Does meditation? Sometimes. But without giving all the pieces time and space to reconfigure themselves into my mental model, it’s too easy to fall prey to information overload. My brain can deal with it just fine: It just shrugs, forgets, and forgets that it has forgotten. But that means that the time invested in ingesting the information is wasted. It’s mental bulimia: gorging on information just to forget it all means that none of the nourishment from the information gets to settle in and find its place. Stress, overwhelm, and anxiety follow.
Slowing down — finding the time and place to process — is a gift that multiplies the efficacy of information absorption. This very blog post is the result of sitting in a car for five hours this weekend: time spent without music, without pod-casts, and without talking on the phone. Time spent processing and integrating. Once integrated, the dissemination phase becomes possible: I have new information. I’ve fit it into my worldview. And I am able to draw a new map of how it all fits together. Or, in this case, write it up as a blog post.
