Mental squeeze point
A Mental Squeeze Point is when your unsorted knowledge becomes so messy it overwhelms and discourages you. It’s an emotion you feel in your body - that familiar overwhelm, discouragement, or frustration when your system stops helping and starts hindering. ^27a4e0
It’s a physiological stress response triggered by cognitive overload, manifesting as that sinking feeling when you can’t find what you need. It isn’t just disorganization—it’s the emotional tipping point where your knowledge system becomes your enemy instead of your ally.
The squeeze point exists in the gap between your current organizational capacity and the volume of information you’re trying to process. Recognition is the first intervention—awareness interrupts the spiral before abandonment becomes inevitable.
Either you are equipped with frameworks to overcome the squeeze point, or you are discouraged and possibly abandon your project. This is usually followed by yet another search for the next shiny thing to distract from the pain.
Try to be aware of when you feel discouraged, or overwhelmed, or disappointed with yourself, or unhappy with your efforts. It’s possible that’s the form that the mental squeeze point has taken.
Perhaps the best way to overcome these squeeze points are to create a new safe space to assemble and organize the knowledge you’re currently working on—before it completely overwhelms you. That dedicated space for thinking is called an MOC (Map of Content).
See: [[MOCs Overview]]
Related ideas:
- Add in clarity for overcoming the mental squeeze point (relating to Tiago’s quote of “What’s going wrong in my system that’s causing me to feel this way?” in POP, see page ~v.54?)