How many times a day do you check your phone? How about your Facebook and your Twitter? Do you share everything you think is interesting with everyone you know on social networking sites? Most people would have a difficult time counting how often they check their newsfeeds these days. It’s not just boredom, though. It’s about information.

Two decades ago, if you wanted information about something you had to work for it. You had to go to a library, find the right books, and manually search them for what you needed to know. Now technology has made information one of the easiest things to come by. Not only can you search for anything and find results instantly, but we’ve also got flowing feeds of information coming at us from all directions, tuned into our individual interests, all of it hooked up to a device we carry with us constantly.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this flow of information is a bad thing. To the contrary, I have seen the power it has to educate and inspire, and to connect people on a level never possible before. There comes a point, however, that your tweets and shares cross over into the boundaries of Information Addiction.

There are some tell tale signs that you may have crossed that line. Do you check social networking and social media sites first thing in the morning and last thing at night? Do you have a hard time imagining going a day without that feed of information? Do you feel anxious when you haven’t checked your feeds, or a sense of physical relief once you have? If you answered yes to any of these questions, it might be time to pull back from the screens and spend some time outside.

Information never slows down, and there is always something new to see, read or watch. At a certain point we have to accept that we cannot consume it all. There will be things we do not know, and that has to be OK. The world is a big place, but you’ll only ever see it through other people’s eyes if you don’t look up from the screen.