Christ­mas is here and it is a great time to exchange gifts and spend time with friends and family.

Christ­mas is also a time that is syn­ony­mous with over­con­sump­tion and overeat­ing. It seems that every month, I read some alarm­ing sta­tis­tic about North Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing girth. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of us are now clas­si­fied as obese.

Now there’s the term infobesity—the ten­den­cy to gorge one­self on infor­ma­tion. British jour­nal­ist John Naish used the term in his book Enough: Break­ing free from the world of more. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restrict­ing one’s data diet. There are com­pelling rea­sons. The glut of infor­ma­tion is not only caus­ing stress and con­fu­sion; it also makes us do irra­tional things such as ignore cru­cial health infor­ma­tion. The British Government’s lat­est sur­vey on our food-buy­ing pat­terns shows that while we are giv­en more infor­ma­tion than ever about healthy eat­ing, our con­sump­tion of fresh food has fallen…We are so wired to gath­er infor­ma­tion that often we no longer do any­thing use­ful with it. Instead of paus­ing to sift our intake for rel­e­vance and qual­i­ty, the dai­ly diet of pruri­ent, pro­found, con­fus­ing and con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion gets chucked on to a men­tal ash-heap of things vague­ly com­pre­hend­ed. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by get­ting more.”

Many of us are over­ex­posed to infor­ma­tion. With social media pro­lif­er­at­ing and smart phone adop­tion sky­rock­et­ing, it’s now eas­i­er than ever to read blog posts on the go, see what your vir­tu­al friends are doing, and check out the lat­est videos on YouTube.

As pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors, I think we should all be mind­ful of not con­tribut­ing to the del­uge of infor­ma­tion. For a relat­ed post, see Why Writ­ing Less Can Offer More.