Focus: Why We Need To Find More Head Space In 2025

How Constant News, Noise and Notifications Scramble Our Thinking

Welomce to Field Notes for Modern Living. It's Monday morning. The rain is lashing on the windows, it's pitch black otuside and your brain suddenly signals that you've got an important work deadlone. The phone buzzed before the kettle boiled. A WhatsApp from a mate. Two work emails. A news alert about Ukraine. Another about the economy. Your banking app pushing a notification you did not ask for. By the time the tea bag hit the mug, your brain was already juggling wars, interest rates, a half-finished presentation and the faint dread that you had forgotten something important.

You open your phone to check just one thing, then you realised that you didn't buy any milk on the way home. Seven minutes later you look up and realise you have no idea what that one thing was.

Welcome to 2025. It is not that you cannot think clearly. It is that the world is doing everything it can to make sure you do not.

The problem is not that you are weak

We have built an environment that is hostile to clear thought.

Some of that is deliberate design. Some of it is just the side-effect of everyone wanting your attention at once. Put simply, you are swimming against a permanent tide.

Here are a few of the currents powering that tide.

Always-on news and notifications

There is no longer a natural “off” switch.

News used to arrive in editions. We had TV bulletins at 5:45, 9pm and 10pm. Now it arrives in a constant trickle of partial information, hot takes and breaking banners about things you cannot influence and did not ask to know.

Your phone (or the news agencies) does not care whether you are in the middle of a difficult conversation or a focused piece of work. It delivers the same alert about a scandal, a goal, a missile strike or a celebrity breakup, all with identical urgency.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference.

Fragmented attention

Attention is expensive, time is precious. Everybody wants to rent it to expend it.

You are nudged to “just check” something every few minutes. Email, Teams, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, the news. Each tap looks harmless. None of them are neutral.

Mentally, you are never fully where you are. A part of you is always checking the horizon for the next ping.

Over time, this does not just fragment your day. It fragments your sense of self. You stop doing deep, coherent thinking and start living in reaction mode.

The feeling that everyone else is keeping up

Another quiet weight: the sense that everyone else is managing this better than you.

Other people seem to read more, post more, know more. They appear to have solid opinions on interest rates, Gaza, AI, the latest scandal, the book everyone is talking about, and their fitness routine. They are “on top of things”.

You, on the other hand, feel like you are just trying to clear your inbox and remember to eat lunch.

That gap between the polished surface and your internal chaos can create a quiet shame. “I should have a clearer view. I should be more informed. I should be more sorted.”

Here is the truth.

Nobody is keeping up. Not really. Most of us are surfing the same wave of partial knowledge, strong feelings, and background worry. The difference is that some people have learned how to step back from the noise, at least some of the time.

Which brings me to a different kind of environment.

What soldiers know about clarity

Before I worked in offices and boardrooms, I served in the Army and deployed on military operations, often in hostile environments.

War is noisy. It is confusing, frightening and often chaotic. Yet some of the clearest thinking I have seen in my life happened in briefing rooms on operations.

The outside world might be on fire. Inside, around a battered table, you would get something very different.

A map.
A few key facts.
Three priorities.
One decision-maker.

That is it.

No one pretended we could control everything. No one tried to follow every rumour from every village. Instead, good commanders did three things very well.

They simplified the picture.
Not by ignoring reality, but by asking, “What actually matters for us, here, in the next 24 hours?”

What have I been told to do, and why? Is the first question a good commander understands.

Leaders ranked priorities.
If everything is urgent, nothing is. So you would leave the room knowing: if we achieve this and this today, we have done our job.

They accepted limits.
No patrol can fix the entire war. No unit can solve every problem. The art lies in knowing where your responsibility ends, and where someone else’s begins.

Under pressure, that kind of clarity feels like oxygen.

When I left the Army and entered civilian life, I expected the world to feel calmer. In some ways it did. Nobody was trying to kill us. But in another way, the mental environment felt far noisier.

No map on the wall. No agreed priorities. No clear sense of what is ours to act on and what is simply background.

Just a thousand inputs, flashing away.

Which leads to a simple question.

What does “thinking clearly” actually mean?

We treat “clear thinking” like a personality trait. As if some people are born with it and some are not.

In practice, it is a set of habits, and a way of relating to the world. It is less about IQ and more about posture.

For our purposes, thinking clearly in 2025 looks something like this.

Slowing down, at least for a few minutes

Clear thinking is incompatible with constant hurry.

You do not need a monastery. You do need small pockets of slowness. Ten minutes with your phone in another room. A walk without a podcast. A train ride where you stare out of the window instead of into the news.

You cannot process life if you never stop consuming it.

Separating signal from noise

Not all information deserves equal weight.

Signal is information that affects your actions, responsibilities or relationships in a real way.

Noise is everything that outrages, entertains or distracts you without changing what you will actually do today.

The headlines might be loud. Your child’s question at breakfast, your client’s main concern, your partner’s tiredness, your own health, the one decision on your desk this morning. That is signal.

Most of us know this, but we rarely act like it.

Being honest about what you cannot control

Clear thinking has boundaries.

Part of the mental strain in 2025 comes from feeling responsible for things that are completely outside our control, while neglecting the things that are firmly inside it.

You cannot control central banks, election results, or the entire course of a war. You can control where you get your news, how often you check it, how you treat people, how you spend your money, and what you work on today.

When you consciously shift your attention to the zone where your actions actually matter, your thinking sharpens. You move from anxious commentary to practical engagement.

That is clarity.

Not perfect knowledge.
Not clever takes.
Just being present, honest and focused enough to choose your next move on purpose.

Practical Field Notes for a Clearer Head

Theory is nice. Practice is better. Here are a few simple habits that have helped me. Treat them as field notes, not commandments. Try what fits.

Field note 1: One notebook

In a noisy world, give your mind a single, steady home.

Use one notebook (physical or digital) for your thoughts, questions, and plans. Not six apps and fourteen scraps of paper.

Every morning, open the same place and ask two questions:

• What actually matters today?
• What cannot I control that I am still worrying about?

Write short, honest answers. That act alone is often enough to take the temperature down.

Field note 2: One real question per day

Each day, choose one question worth thinking about, properly.

Not “What is happening in the world?” That is too big. Something like:

• What is the most important conversation I am avoiding?
• What would make today feel well spent?
• What decision have I been postponing that would take under ten minutes to make?

Carry that question with you. Let it sit in the back of your mind on the way to work, on a walk, while you queue for coffee. You are giving your brain a chance to go deeper, instead of skimming endlessly across the surface.

Field note 3: Two deliberate decisions

Do not try to perfect your entire life. Make two decisions each day on purpose.

Examples:

• “I will check the news at 08:00 and 18:00, and not in between.”
• “I will finish this task before I open my email.”
• “I will leave my phone in another room after 21:30.”
• “I will say no to one unnecessary thing.”

Two small, conscious choices will do more for your clarity than twenty vague intentions.

Field note 4: One briefing, not a constant drip

Borrow from the briefing room.

Instead of sipping news all day, give yourself a daily or twice-daily “briefing window”. Ten or fifteen minutes when you catch up on the world from a couple of trusted sources.

Outside that window, you are off duty from the global outrage machine.

You will not miss anything you can actually act on. You will gain back attention for the things you can.

Field note 5: A weekly reset

Once a week, sit down with that notebook and ask:

• What drained my attention this week for no good reason?
• What helped me think more clearly?
• What is one small change I can make next week?

That is your own personal after-action review. Not dramatic. Just honest.

Over time, you will learn how your mind works in this noisy environment, and what it needs from you.

A final word

If you feel scrambled in 2025, you are not broken. You are reacting as any human would in an always-on environment that was never designed for our brains.

Nobody is thinking clearly all the time. Not the experts, not the loudest accounts online, not the person on your feed who looks effortlessly informed and productive.

Clarity is not a permanent state. It is a practice. A daily decision to step back from the noise for a few moments, to choose what matters, and to act within your actual circle of control.

Some days you will nail it. Some days you will slip, scroll yourself into a daze, and wonder where the morning went.

That is fine.

Tomorrow you can sit down, open your notebook, ask one honest question and make two small decisions.

That is what these Field Notes are for. Not to turn you into a perfect, hyper-optimised machine, but to help you find a bit more space, a bit more sanity, and enough clarity to choose your next step in a noisy world.