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When faced with high-stakes life shifts such as a cancer diagnosis, caring for an aging parent, or a family mental health crisis, people try to hoard information in order to overcome feelings of defenselessness or being unequipped. However, frantic data-gathering is counterproductive—it destroys proper sequencing, distorts risk calibration, and increases cognitive friction. The solution to feeling unprepared is not more knowledge, but a strategic shift toward four stabilizing practices: Prioritization (filtering down to 4–5 immediate needs), Discernment (calibrating real risk vs. anxiety-induced perception), Pacing (finding the healthy rhythm between frantic rushing and inaction), and Release (deliberately not holding on to non-essential information). 

A lot of us use the internet as our brain’s cloud storage. There’s too much information to hold on to all of it, so we turn to AI or Google when we need a particular piece of knowledge.

I think that’s a smart tactic, to a point. I write important things down so I don’t have to remember everything. I keep the most relevant, timely facts in my memory for quick recall, but do I really need to memorize how to program my car’s clock?

Of course not. I’ll look it up twice a year when it’s relevant.

Antoinette raised a better example this morning. She’s been gardening in our back yard, and over the weekend she turned to AI with many specific questions about her plants. Brown leaves on one, a new bug on another, uncertainty about how much to water a third.

AI, the sycophant it is, of course praised her for doing such a great job caring for her plants. Which was kind of ridiculous because the conversation went like this:

PROMPT: “Hey AI, I literally know nothing about this thing. Tell me about the thing and what to do about it.”

AI SYCOPHANT: “You are doing such a great job of tending your plants! Your plants must love you! You are so right to bring this question up. It’s a brilliant insight to realize you don’t know anything about this thing. Here is the answer.”

It gave her the facts she needed. She used those facts to accomplish the thing. And then she promptly forgot those facts because they were no longer relevant. If they’re ever needed again, she can simply look them up once more.

That seems a healthy way to interact with information in this kind of low-stakes, once-in-a-while situation.

Let’s put aside for the moment that she did not learn anything in this process. She got the information, did the task, and moved on. Learning was not her goal. Getting the task done was her goal. Intent matters, as I’ve written about before. But I’m not talking today about the brain atrophy that outsourcing your thinking to AI can cause.

When the Stakes Shift: The Psychological Instinct to Hoard Information

Instead, I want to focus on a typical change in behavior I’ve seen when the stakes are significantly higher.

Most people do what Antoinette did with low-stakes situations. Change the brakes on the car? Replace a light switch? Make a shepherd’s pie? Store that knowledge in the cloud and retrieve it only when you need it through search tools.

But raise the stakes and throw in a major life shift, and that ability to rationally control data intake, storage, and retrieval seems to go out the window.

Taking on a caregiving role is a perfect example. The caregiver for a newly diagnosed person is suddenly given full access to all the known information about this condition they heretofore never had to know anything about. But that complete access comes without a clear map.

Uncertainty vs. Exposure: The Hidden Emotion Behind Overwhelm

The caregiver often gets overwhelmed from the sheer amount of information they think they have to learn. A cancer diagnosis, for example, can disrupt every aspect of someone’s life. It throws a blanket of uncertainty over everything. You feel defenseless to what may be coming.

It’s not always defenselessness that drives the overwhelm. When my own child came out as transgender and went into a phase of suicidal depression, it felt less like a blanket of uncertainty had been thrown over my life and more like my comfortable blanket of certainty had been yanked away. I could no longer easily predict what was to come. I didn’t feel defenseless so much as unequipped.

In both cases, the feeling of exposure is suffocating.

And in both cases, people often feel that if they just knew what to do, they could handle whatever is to come. So they dive into learning everything they can. They gather information. They hunt for more facts. They hoard internet bookmarks until they’ve saved half the internet.

The act of gathering and hoarding information feels useful, but it’s actually counterproductive. It gives you too much knowledge to hold in your head without solving the true problem: You feel unprepared.

But the solution to feeling unprepared isn’t more knowledge. It’s a combination of prioritization, discernment, pacing, and release.

Navigating the “City of Caregiving”: Why Rushing Causes Disaster

If you moved to a new city, you wouldn’t learn every single street and every business on each of those streets. Most of that information will be completely irrelevant nearly all the time. Instead, you identify the four or five highest priority destinations and the easiest routes to them. Then you let the rest stay in the cloud until you need them.

Over time, as you get to know your city better, you identify better routes and other priority destinations. You internalize the patterns that help you most often and look up the other information when it’s needed.

But when moving into the city called Caregiving, people feel a need to know everything all at once. The stakes seem unbearably high. One mistake could mean disaster. Or, that’s how it feels.

What actually causes the most mistakes and the biggest disasters is the frantic dive into everything all at once. Trying to learn the entire city without knowing which parts may be important and which will never be relevant. This rush to hoard information destroys your ability to prioritize, sequence your tasks, and assess real risk.

The 4-Part Framework for Crisis Resilience: Prioritization, Discernment, Pacing, and Release

So what should you do instead? Slow down. Breathe. Set aside the fear that what you don’t know will be your downfall. Then, focus on these four things:

1. Prioritization

You may ultimately need to know everything about this new city, but not today. What are the four or five most critical things to focus on right now? It’s going to be different in every unique situation. Do a little research and consult with others on what those top priority items might be.

Remember that specialists always think their item is top priority, so the more specialists you consult the more top priorities there will seem to be, and you’ll be right back in the information overwhelm. The estate lawyer will understand the urgency of getting your paperwork in order. The PT will want you to exercise appropriately. The nutritionist will tell you not to delay on reshaping your diet. Your friend may project their own experience onto your situation with all kinds of mistaken prioritization.

So, when given access to the totality of all the information about this new thing, you’re much better off slowing down and creating useful filters on all that information.

The day my child came out as transgender was not the day I needed to know everything about bottom surgery. The day a person is diagnosed with cancer is not the day you need to know everything about the possibility of infection from a portacath.

Getting clear about what is needed right now will help with the other three focus areas below.

By the way, a good number one priority is self-care. 

2. Discernment

When uncertainty rules your day and you have no ability to predict what’s going to happen next, your ability to assess real risk goes right out the window. Every tiny issue starts to look like a symptom of what might be a much larger problem you hadn’t yet identified.

Even worse, every tiny non-issue starts to look like an issue. For example, I visited the elder care facility where a loved one was living, and I saw a spot of dried orange juice on the linoleum floor. If I were overwhelmed, I might see that as a sign of inattentiveness on the part of the staff, and then I might start looking for other evidence of their incompetence. This tiny thing would seem like a symptom of a much bigger potential problem.

The truth was, they had spent their limited time caring for my loved one instead of caring for the spotlessness of the floor. If I had to choose one or the other, I would have wanted them to do exactly what they did. Turning that small spot into a Big Deal might have sent me into a negative spiral, ending in a lot of totally avoidable stress and conflict.

Discernment is about calibrating your own perception to be as close to reality and truth as possible, and to stay in a healthy zone in between fear and magical thinking.

3. Pacing

Sometimes, emergency action is required. In those cases, take emergency action. If your doctor says to go to the emergency room, then go to the emergency room. Those are not the situations I’m talking about in this blog post.

There’s a saying that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Another bit of useful wisdom is if you don’t have time to do it right, you won’t have time to do it over.

Both of these point out what we already know: Frantic rushing into the unknown is a pretty good way to make more mistakes, take more wrong turns, and miss important signals.

Somewhere between “too slow” and “breakneck” is an ideal pace. In distance running, speed and endurance are in conflict; it’s a zero-sum calculation between the two. The faster you run, the sooner you run out of energy. So distance runners work hard to understand their ideal pace that maximizes the relationship between speed and endurance.

I don’t like one other old saw that life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. In fact, it’s neither. It’s more of a trek. And there are hills, and rivers, and lightning, and sometimes dogs.

So, by focusing on proper pacing, you can slow down when you need to smooth things out, which will allow you to go fast when the road is smooth and clear. You have more control over your pace than you might think when you’re faced with this kind of overwhelm. Breathe, pause, and discern whether this is a moment for sprinting or a moment for something else.

4. Release

Don’t hold on to things that need to be let go. The more things you try to hold, the more you will drop.

So be ruthlessly clear about what is truly important to hold right now, and then get ruthlessly diligent about putting down everything else. If you might need it later, put it down in such a way that you can pick it back up when you need it. Or maybe someone else can hold it for you.

Because if you’re trying to hold too many things, you may not get to decide which ones end up getting dropped. So put down the unimportant ones.

This goes double for times when you don’t feel overburdened. Put down the unimportant things. Use that extra capacity to hold space for yourself instead.

Feeling Overwhelmed?

Whether you’re taking on caregiving, stepping into an executive role, taking over a business, or managing a crisis, stop opening more browser tabs. Take a breath. Click over to my calendar and book some time with me. Let’s talk through it and get you sorted with the right priorities, the right pacing, and a much more measured pace.

Other Things to Do

Check out the podcast interview I did with Business RadioX, explaining the help I offer caregivers. Or download a free chapter from one of my books. Or, book some time to talk with me.

My approach to caregiver coaching in 30 minutes