After a stroke, people can become easily overloaded with information. This can apply to all the senses and they could have difficulties with:
- Starting or completing everyday tasks
- Engagement in social activities
- Interacting with people
- People may appear uncooperative or try to avoid or refuse to complete tasks that they find overwhelming
- People might display a ‘fight or flight’ reaction where they try and leave the area that is causing distress or react aggressively to overstimulation
- People may have low mood or challenging behaviour due to anxiety from becoming ‘overloaded’ with information
- Some people may achieve a task one day but struggle with the same task the next – this might be due to overload by environmental changes i.e. the first day they completed the task in a quiet space the next day there were distracters or they could be worried about something else and not have the capacity to process the information required for the task in hand.
Please watch the following video of sounds and images to experience information overload. How much of this conversation and how many images can you remember? Please note this has audio.
Difficult, wasn’t it? After a stroke, many people experience overload even with regular information. The next page includes a list of helpful strategies.
Page last reviewed: 15 Jul 2022
