Digital technologies alter attention, emotion regulation, and psychological self-steering at a historically new intensity. Permanent stimulus availability, algorithmic attention capture, and continuous interruption fragment cognitive processes and increase psychological load. This article develops a Stoic-psychological model of cognitive stability under conditions of digital overstimulation. The thesis: digital overload impairs not primarily attention in the technical sense but the capacity for inner autonomy — the capacity to direct attention deliberately, regulate emotional reactivity, and hold distance between external stimulus and one's own appraisal. The model joins Stoic concepts of inner control and distancing with modern research on self-regulation, emotion regulation, and attention steering. Digital overstimulation is understood not as an individual discipline problem but as a structural tension between highly developed stimulation architectures and limited human regulation capacities.
Björn Paulini (Thu,) studied this question.
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