You don’t need to read this piece. Really, you don’t. It may contribute to a sense of growing malaise and confusion. But perhaps you already know that. You may already have started a data diet to fend off information overload. You might even have ditched a source of life pollution such as the TV, mobile, video or e-mail in the interests of your mental wellbeing.

Everywhere you look, every time you listen, someone is trying their very best to snag your attention. Your neurones are being bombarded by marketing messages, badgered by adverts, stalked by product placement. Every week sees another new magazine, supplement, cable channel or radio station. Then there are e-mails, websites, text messages and those DVDs with special extra bits you didn’t see the first time. We drown in data. And often, in an attempt to make sense of it all, we seek more information.

Back in the 1970s, when my local council banned the town’s aquarium from keeping dolphins, the animal welfare experts explained that Flipper and Co’s sonar clicks were bouncing back on the creatures from all angles in their cramped pools. “They are being blinded in a world of their own white noise,” the campaigners said. Now we know how the dolphins felt.

Even some of the people responsible for targeting 24-hour ad blitzes on us are concerned. The Henley Centre marketing consultancy said last week that we were being hit by about 1,600 marketing messages every week. In the past decade, it says, the number of British TV advertising spots has jumped from 3,000 to 8,000 and our channels have multiplied from four to 123. Ten million spam e-mails are sent every day. More new information has been produced within the past 30 years than in the previous 5,000. The consultancy fears that we are becoming deafened by sales clutter to the point of apathetic immunity.

The Henley people worry that new messages roll off the top of our ad-stuffed heads. But something odder is going on. Henley’s consumer survey discovered that we are becoming manic hoarders, the new-media equivalents of hermits living in homes crammed with old newspapers and books. More than 70 per cent of us surveyed agreed with the statement: “I can never have too much information.” But more than half of us also agreed with the declaration, “I don’t have the energy or time to use information to its full advantage”.

We live in an age of unheralded bounty but our famine-wary Neolithic brains have not evolved to meet the challenge. The classic example is, of course, food: the Western world has lakes, mountains and landfills of it, but our primitive instincts don’t direct us to seek the healthiest choices. They tell us to stuff our gullets with fat-laden, sugary foods to get us through the next crop failure, rather than through the next turnstile. It is the same with information: we are suffering an epidemic of info-besity.

There is already an accepted diagnostic term for this malaise: information fatigue syndrome. The name was invented by the British psychologist David Lewis in his introduction to a Reuters survey of 1,300 business people in Britain, America, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. In it, two thirds of interviewees said that stress from information overload had damaged their relationships with loved ones and colleagues. A third said it caused them stress-related health problems. Dr Lewis says that many people’s response to all this is to try to seek more information to help them.

Critics say that the Reuters report was a stunt to associate its global brand with the magic power of mass information gathering and dispersal. It very possibly was. But that is rather the point — it is so difficult to escape the constant flood of manipulative, insistent information. Even studies warning us about it are a Trojan Horse, filled with yet more words, pictures, sounds and statistics.

The glut is not simply stressing us; it is, ironically, causing us to ignore important messages about our health. The Government’s latest expenditure and food survey shows that while we are more clued up than ever about healthy eating, household consumption of fresh food and veg has fallen.

Catherine Collins, of the British Dietetic Association, blames the paradox on information overload. “We are so informed that we can’t be bothered,” she says.

Tamar Kasriel, the head of knowledge venturing at the Henley Centre, has seen this very effect with nutrition information on packages. “When it comes to wellbeing, people want reassurance from food labelling but they only really want to know it is there,” she says. “They often don’t read it or understand what is on it, they just feel reassured that it exists. A huge number of people we have surveyed don’t even know what RDA* stands for.”

Too much information and too much choice now simply leave us bewildered. Recently, Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist, lectured the Royal Society of Arts on the perils of “choice fatigue”. He believes that the seemingly endless expansion of consumer options on the high street is making us thoroughly miserable. With 20 different styles of jeans to choose from, 24 flavours of jam, 38 types of breakfast cereal and 22 models of mobile phone, we freeze and cannot pick anything at all.

Schwartz identifies two consumer types, “maximisers” and “satisficers”. The former always seek out the best, are compelled to test everything, take longer to make decisions and, although objectively they may end up with better results, are usually less satisfied with what they get. “They are also less happy with life in general, less optimistic and more depressed,” he says. The “satisficers”, meanwhile, settle for what is good enough. They go home happy and do not look back. The solution, the professor believes, is simple. Expect less. And then relax. It is time we did the same with sources of information, too.

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