Blog
A space to share thoughts & ideas related to all things therapy.
December 10, 2025
Why Your Thoughts Feel Like They Never Turn Off
By Nastasia Petrella
Humans have always had the advantage — or disadvantage — of consciousness. With heightened awareness comes constant thought processing. Some of us are vulnerable to rumination, while others lean toward avoidance. Some live inside memories; others live without recall. Both, in their own way, are survival strategies.
And while thinking has always been part of the human experience, something about the pace and frequency of our thoughts feels different today. Many people describe it as the inability to “turn off” their brains, as if such a button ever existed. But the longing to turn something off suggests we’ve known a different mental state before, one that felt slower, quieter, less relentless.
When I imagine turning the brain “off,” I picture technology: the power button on a TV or a laptop. Strangely, I don’t think of the power button on a smartphone — because most of us rarely, if ever, use it. When was the last time you intentionally turned off your phone?
That question led me to wonder whether our thinking patterns now mimic our phone usage: fast, constant, always-on, and whether turning off our phones more often might actually bring some mental relief. Again, not a revolutionary idea, but it raised a deeper question:
Is the reason we can’t “turn off our brains” the same reason we can’t (or won’t) turn off our smartphones?
Then I came across a study from the University of Texas at Austin: even when a smartphone is off but still nearby, it reduces our cognitive capacity. Our brain is quietly working to resist checking it. In other words, its mere presence is mentally taxing.
So if shutting down a phone doesn’t immediately quiet the mind, what will?
This led me to retweak my original question:
Maybe the issue isn’t that we can’t turn off our brains at all but that our brains, like our phones, never stop signaling, pinging, and pulling for our attention.
And just like a phone sitting nearby, the mere presence of a thought is enough to occupy us.
And when I ask myself why our thoughts feel so overwhelming now, more than ever, the answer starts to look a lot like the design of our devices.
Our phones are built to be:
always on
always updating
always refreshing
always notifying
And somehow, our inner world has begun to mirror that. We’re absorbing more information in a week than humans once processed in months. We move from app to app, task to task, stimulus to stimulus, with almost no natural pause. We rarely experience the quiet spacing our nervous system relies on.
Our thoughts don’t just arrive anymore, they compete. They stack. They overlap. They interrupt each other. They take on the same low-level urgency as a notification badge we can’t quite clear.
Our brains weren’t built for this pace, this volume, or this level of comparison and input. So the overwhelm we feel isn’t a personal failing or a lack of resilience; it’s the natural response of a system being pushed beyond its original settings.
And just like a smartphone that runs too many apps at once, a mind without rest will eventually slow, glitch, or overheat.
Maybe that’s the real point:
Our thoughts aren’t overwhelming us because they’re stronger than before but because life is asking our minds to operate at a speed they were never meant to sustain.
And maybe that’s why we want to turn off. Not because we’re weak or unable to cope, but because on some level, our mind remembers what it felt like to move more slowly, to think more spaciously, to simply be without the noise.