Ep. 193 - The Neuroscience of Less: A Digital De-Clutter Guide

 Digital clutter isn’t just messy—it’s mentally exhausting. This episode breaks down how digital overload affects attention, decision-making, and mental energy—and offers practical ways to reduce digital noise in short, manageable bursts. Discover how creating breathing room in your tech can help restore focus, momentum, and a calmer brain. 

Show Notes:

Episode 31 - https://youtu.be/9GRS0mwAr8A
This episode explores the cognitive and psychological benefits of de-cluttering, how unfinished decisions tax the brain, and why making space creates mental momentum. The ideas introduced there form the foundation for today’s conversation about digital clutter.

Episode 156 - https://youtu.be/lVW4JjN2TEU 
This conversation explores invisible drains on time, money, energy, and attention. A helpful companion episode if you’re interested in how overlooked systems quietly tax our mental bandwidth.

Transcript

The Neuroscience of Less: A Digital De-Clutter Guide 

This podcast is dedicated to the art and brain science of doing fewer things better. Part of this conversation has also focused on the opportunity to own fewer, better things. 

In our quest for less, there is one place that most of us rarely take time to purge - our digital space. 

The Bottom Line on Top of this episode is that our tech isn’t just a tool. It’s a storage unit of unfinished business.

If peeking into the tech closet feels overwhelming, you are not alone. We are living in an environment that constantly asks, actually demands our attention.

In 2025, it was reported that 376 billion emails were sent every single day. Just email!

Similar studies show that the average adult has more than 1,000 emails, a dozen unread text messages–that’s for sure me, and about 15 open browser tabs at any given time.

I have my digital clutter, like we all do, and my digital secret is my email inbox. When the numbers climb, I feel it.

I don’t see it as digital clutter. I see each one as someone I am letting down. 

This emotional layer hooks back into the brain. Every unread email, every browser tab, every notification is a decision anchor. And our brain registers it and quietly tracks it as unfinished business. 

Each of those items becomes an unclosed loop. And our brains are built to keep these loops active, it’s its job. That’s why, when we’re not even consciously thinking about it, digital clutter still taxes our attention and ends up slowing us down. 

It does this by creating cognitive overload. Your working memory, the part of your brain that holds and processes information in real time, has its limits. When there is too much input, it simply cannot keep up.

That is why you can look at a long inbox and feel frozen. It is not laziness on your part; it just means you’ve reached cognitive capacity.

There is also something called directed attention fatigue. Your brain is constantly working to stay focused and resist distractions. Yet every time a notification pops up, your brain briefly shifts attention to process it and register it. 

Research shows that even very short diversions can interrupt working memory for the current task and make it take longer to return back to what we were doing. So all these digital interruptions are like little mini-stop signs your brain has to pay a toll just to get back to where it was.

We’ve talked before about how making space creates mental momentum, especially in Episode 31, we explored how clutter keeps decisions suspended. This is that same idea, just applied to our digital lives. 

Okay so that was a lot of science and psychology. So what can be done about all the digital-ness?

Well, certainly not everything and definitely not all at once. Technology is designed to pull you in, so progress and de-cluttering is best done in sprints, not in marathons. 

Before you start any attempt at digital de-clutter, it’s important that you know where and when you are going to stop. That part matters more than you think.

Set a timer, an actual timer. Ten minutes, 15 minutes at most.

Pick one digital space that has a little anxiety for you and then set the timer and just start.  

Close some browser windows. Delete a few apps you no longer use. Unsubscribe from some emails you always avoid.

Give yourself a mental gold star when it is done…an offline star of some sort. 

If you feel the pull into the digital depths, try doing these steps with a partner. This is known as body doubling and it’s a way to share focus and dopamine as a little gift with purchase for your effort. 

Digital de-cluttering looks simple in theory, but it’s going to be different for each of us and it definitely needs boundaries. The best boundary is to start with a time block. Don’t do anything more once you hit that time–going slow here definitely helps.

The goal isn’t ever to tackle it all, just lighten the space. Every email that’s deleted, every app that’s removed, and every tab that is closed is a win all by itself.

So this week, start by starting. And then stopping. 

Making more space in your digital will return more energy and focus in your physical one. It’s another way–and an important one– to take care to take care of all of our spaces.