A week ago, someone described information overload to me as infobesity, and it landed with the dull, accurate thud of a diagnosis you already knew was coming. Not overwhelmed. Not busy. Not “a bit stretched”. Infobese. Too much coming in, too little being properly processed, a permanent feeling of being uncomfortably full yet somehow still unsatisfied.
The digital equivalent of living on bitterballen and fries and wondering why you feel awful and your skin has the texture of a neglected croquette.
As it happens, I am extremely well qualified to appreciate a good diet metaphor. Like many middle-aged women, I have spent most of my adult life on one, oscillating between saintly calorie tracking and chaotic cookie-eating optimism. I can tell you the calorie content of almost anything, right up until the moment I absolutely stop wanting to know (somewhere around the second glass of wine).
So when I first heard “infobesity”, my brain did what it always does and immediately leapt to the current GLP-1/Ozempic moment. Not the celebrity weight-loss headlines, but the genuinely interesting bit underneath: a world in which people are no longer constantly being told by their own biology that they are hungry.
Yesterday I shared that metaphor out loud for the first time, in a room full of senior comms people. And the reaction was telling. Not laughter, not pushback — just that weary nodding you get when you’ve described something people have been living with for years but haven’t quite had words for.
Because when you strip away the platforms and the process maps and the polite euphemisms, that’s exactly where most organisations now find themselves.
We don’t have an information shortage. We have infobesity. A corporate world crammed into communication jeans two sizes too small.
And if that’s the disease, it’s probably time we asked an awkward question: what’s our Ozempic?
Infobesity is not a content problem
Let’s get one thing out of the way. The reason your organisation feels overwhelmed by communication is not because your comms team can’t write, or your intranet is ugly, or you picked the wrong tool. It’s because there’s too much for any human to reasonably process.
A typical knowledge worker now receives hundreds of signals a day: email, Teams, Slack, intranet alerts, HR system nudges, calendar reminders, policy updates, dashboards, pop-ups, signage, posters, and the occasional frantic “just making sure you saw this”. All of it competes for the same finite, exhausted slice of human attention.
Humans, meanwhile, can only hold a small number of things in working memory at once. We are built for focus, context and meaning — not for a conveyor belt of micro-interruptions. So what happens is entirely predictable: people don’t process more, they simply tune out.
The result isn’t just mild irritation, it’s systemic failure. Important messages get missed. Critical updates are buried. Leaders conclude that people “don’t care”. Employees feel permanently behind. And so the organisation does the only thing it knows how to do in response: it sends more.
This is why infobesity isn’t a content problem. It’s a metabolic one. The system is producing and pushing information at a rate the human brain cannot digest, and no amount of better writing, prettier templates or shinier channels will change that. Just as you can’t outrun a bad diet, you can’t out-communicate a broken information metabolism.
You don’t need more comms. You need a better comms diet.
Why willpower has failed
For years, the comms profession has been told a familiar story. Be more strategic. Write better. Publish more. Buy this platform or that one. Video! Social! Forums! AI! The metaverse! (remember that? LOL.)
It’s the workplace equivalent of “eat less and move more” — and, just like in diet culture, it hasn’t worked. Not because people are lazy or incompetent, but because the system keeps telling them they’re hungry.
Most communication environments are quietly designed to reward exactly the wrong things: speed, volume, coverage, and a kind of anxious “just in case” messaging. If something might be important, it gets sent. If someone complains, it gets resent. If leadership is nervous, it gets broadcast to everyone, immediately.
So even the best, most disciplined comms teams end up trapped in a feedback loop of ever-increasing output. You can be brilliant at content design and still drown people. You can have immaculate governance and still overload them. You can have world-class tools and still generate noise.
Because the underlying assumption never changes:
If people aren’t engaging, they must need more.
That assumption is wrong.
What people usually need is less — less interruption, less repetition, less bloat and filler — so they can actually notice the things that matter. This is why the problem won’t be solved by better discipline alone. As my waistline can (un)happily attest, you can’t willpower your way out of a system that is constantly telling everyone to keep eating.
The GLP-1 shift: when the signal changed
GLP-1 drugs didn’t just make people thinner. They changed how people experience hunger.
For the first time, large numbers of people stopped feeling that constant background pull of food — the low-level, ever-present “I could eat” that turns into grazing, snacking, and eventually a sort of resigned nibbling through life. People didn’t suddenly become virtuous. The signal changed. And once the signal changed, everything else followed.
People started eating less — but they also started eating differently. They wanted food that actually satisfied them. Not giant plates of fried matter, (I see you, bitterballen) but smaller, more nutritionally dense meals that didn’t leave them hunting the biscuit tin an hour later.
And the world has begun to adapt.
Restaurants are shifting to small-plate menus.
Supermarkets are rolling out high-protein, high-nutrition ranges for people who want to eat less but better.
Food companies are being forced to confront a future in which volume is no longer the growth strategy.
This isn’t just a medical intervention. It’s a cultural reset around consumption.
And that’s the part that really matters for communication. Because right now, most organisations are still built like all-you-can-eat buffets. They optimise for maximum output, maximum reach, and maximum frequency, operating on the assumption that if people aren’t paying attention the answer must be to put more food on the table.
In a GLP-1 world, that logic collapses.
The future of food looks like smaller plates, higher protein, fewer empty calories and more intention. The future of communication can look the same.
And that’s where information restraint comes in.
Introducing Infozempic: information restraint
So if GLP-1 changed eating by changing the hunger signal, what does the equivalent look like in internal communication?
This is where I’m going to commit to a slightly ridiculous word: Infozempic. By which I mean information restraint — a phrase that sounds faintly puritanical, but is really just about not force-feeding people until they cry.
Not censorship. Not fewer channels. Not less transparency. And definitely not a comms detox involving green juices and LinkedIn affirmations.
Information restraint is about designing the system so it feels full sooner.
Right now, most organisations behave as if attention were an infinite natural resource, like air or executive confidence. Every team assumes its message is important. Every platform assumes it should interrupt. Every leader assumes people must be reminded again, and again, and again, just in case you missed the first 17 emails. The result is a system that never experiences satiety — just a permanent, twitchy state of informational hunger.
Infozempic is the opposite. It starts from three deeply unfashionable assumptions:
- Attention is finite
- Interruption is costly
- And if everything is urgent, nothing is
It isn’t about starving people of information; it’s about making sure what they get is worth digesting.
In a GLP-1 world, you don’t ban food. You simply stop people feeling constantly hungry. In an Infozempic world, you don’t ban communication — you stop the organisation feeling constantly compelled to broadcast.
The outcome is the same in both cases: smaller portions, better choices, healthier habits — and, crucially, a system that no longer has to keep shovelling more into its own gaping maw just to be heard.
What information restraint looks like in practice
Information restraint isn’t a slogan. It’s a set of design choices that change how communication behaves inside an organisation. You see them most clearly if you keep the food metaphor in mind.
Meal planning (governance)
Healthy diets aren’t improvised. They’re planned.
In comms, that means moving away from the constant reactive scramble and towards something that actually resembles a menu. A visible editorial calendar, a deliberate mix of formats, and a predictable cadence give people confidence about where to look, what to expect, and when they need to pay attention.
It also forces better decisions upstream. When teams can see what’s already on the menu, duplication drops, clashes become obvious, and last-minute “can we just send this?” requests get harder to justify. We must allow full communication air traffic control: visibility of all the content hitting employees. It’s not enough for one team to meal plan if another is sneaking in the turkey twizzlers.
Good meal planning also depends on standards. Not brand guidelines, but nutritional ones: what makes a message worth sending at all? What level of clarity, relevance and actionability does it have to meet before it gets a slot? Those standards are what turn communication into protein rather than empty calories.
Without them, everything becomes a sugar hit: urgent, loud, briefly energising — and then instantly forgotten.
Nutrient-rich foods (content design)
When people eat less, quality matters more.
Smaller portions of information have to do more work, which is where content design becomes critical. That means shorter messages with clearer structure, stronger headlines, obvious calls to action, and language that lets people quickly understand whether something is for them.
It also means thinking about how content is packaged and surfaced, not just what it says. A long policy document might still exist, but most people should encounter it first through a short, well-designed summary, a checklist, or a “what this means for you” box.
Good content design makes things not just readable, but findable, reducing cognitive load.
High-nutrient messages beat platters of #content every time. Content that is valued, valuable, and worth the time it takes to consume is the only kind that belongs in a system practising information restraint.
When you shrink the portions, you’re forced to make every mouthful count — and that’s exactly what most communication environments are missing.
No all-you-can-eat (targeting)
Broadcast comms is an all-day buffet: everything laid out for everyone, whether they want it or not.
Targeted comms asks harder, more adult questions. Who actually needs this? Who is hungry for it right now? Who can skip it entirely? Who just needs a quick snack-sized update rather than the full three-course meal? Right people. Right time. Right plate.
And here’s the uncomfortable bit: we already have the data to do this properly — we just don’t use it.
We have quantitative insight from analytics, search logs, click-throughs and channel usage. We have qualitative insight from interviews, surveys, feedback and frontline conversations. We know what different roles, locations and functions actually need in order to do their jobs. Yet we keep defaulting to broadcast because it’s easier politically than being precise.
Information restraint means using that insight to target updates so people get what’s relevant to their work — and skip what isn’t. If you work in payroll, you shouldn’t have to wade through retail promotions. If you’re on the shop floor, you shouldn’t be drowning in head-office policy updates.
And if you really want to be ambitious, you can go further. Behavioural data lets you see what people open, search for, return to and ignore. Used well, it means you can give people more of what they respond to, when they need it — a kind of internal retargeting that marketing has been doing for years.
Regulated intake (digests)
Digests aren’t a downgrade. They’re metabolic control.
Constant drip-feeding — another email, another Teams ping, another intranet alert — keeps people in a state of permanent snacking. It fragments attention and creates the illusion of activity while quietly destroying any chance of focus.
Batching changes the rhythm.
Instead of spraying out dozens of small messages, you publish once and package later. Updates are gathered up, prioritised, and delivered at predictable times, so people know when to look and when they can ignore the noise.
In practice that means:
- Using scheduled newsletters rather than endless one-off emails
- Creating role-based or team-based digests so people only get what’s relevant
- Treating the intranet as the place where things live, and the digest as how people discover them
One balanced plate, once a day or once a week, beats twenty drive-by biscuits.
It also forces better behaviour upstream. When teams know their message will have to compete for a place in a digest, they get clearer about what actually matters. Priority emerges. Duplication drops. The system starts to breathe.
That’s what regulated intake looks like in a communication environment that’s serious about restraint rather than just volume.
Stopping signals (analytics and feedback)
In medicine, appetite matters. In comms, we tend to treat it as failure.
Flattening open rates, CTAs that stop climbing, clicks that turn into shrugs, the sudden rise of “can you just summarise this?”
These aren’t signs that people need more communication. They’re satiety signals — the organisational equivalent of pushing the plate away.
Information restraint means learning to read those signals properly, and then acting on them. That starts with looking beyond vanity metrics. Don’t just ask “did this get sent?” or even “did it get opened?” Look at what people actually do afterwards. Did they click? Did they complete the action? Did they come back to the content later? Did they search for it?
When engagement plateaus, that’s not a cue to blast out a reminder. It’s a cue to pause, rethink the message, or let it rest. It also means combining the numbers with human insight. Short pulse surveys, quick interviews, comments, frontline feedback — all of it helps you understand whether people are confused, overloaded, bored, or simply done.
The discipline is in stopping. Most organisations have no problem creating content. The hard bit is having the confidence to say, they’ve had enough for now. When people are full, stop feeding them.
Healthy habits (agency)
None of this works if people have no control over their intake.
You can have the best meal planning, portion sizes and targeting in the world, but if everything is still force-fed by default, people will continue to feel overwhelmed. Information restraint only becomes real when employees are given agency over what, when and how they consume.
In practice that means designing channels so people can:
- Subscribe and unsubscribe instead of being auto-enrolled into everything
- Control notifications rather than living in a permanent state of alert
- Use Do Not Disturb without it being read as disengagement
- Pull information when they need it, instead of having it constantly pushed at them
When people can shape their own information environment, they stop feeling hunted by updates and start engaging more deliberately. They read with intention instead of skimming in self-defence.
Feeling in control is part of feeling full — and it’s one of the simplest ways to turn an infobese organisation into a healthier one.
Why this is a leadership problem, not a comms one
Infobesity isn’t just irritating. It’s expensive, risky, and structurally corrosive.
Every unnecessary email, update, microsite, campaign and intranet post has a real cost attached to it. Someone had to write it. Someone had to review it. Someone had to approve it. Someone had to publish it. And then hundreds or thousands of people had to spend time working out whether they needed to read it at all. Most of that effort is quietly wasted.
People skim, delete, miss the important bit, or open things with the weary intention of “I’ll come back to this later” — which is the corporate equivalent of putting something in the fridge before guility throwing it away two weeks later when it starts to smell bad. So the organisation pays twice: once to create the content, and again in the lost staff time trying to metabolise it.
At scale, that’s a staggering drain on productivity, and not because employees don’t care, but because they are being asked to process far more information than any human system can sensibly handle.
The risks stack up alongside the costs. When people are overloaded, safety messages get buried, compliance updates are missed, and strategic intent dissolves into background noise. Leaders assume there is a clear line of sight from “we announced it” to “people know what to do”, but in an infobese system that assumption is wildly optimistic.
What looks like a comms hygiene problem from the outside is, in reality, a governance and leadership failure. It’s a refusal to decide what actually matters, and to pace the organisation accordingly. Information restraint is not about being nice or minimalist; it’s about protecting money, reducing risk, and preserving the organisation’s ability to think, decide and act in a noisy world.
The uncomfortable truth
Most organisations don’t have a communication capability problem. They have an output addiction.
They are extraordinarily good at producing things: emails, updates, campaigns, microsites, toolkits, videos, decks, talking points, launch packs, FAQs. Whole ecosystems of content exist purely because it is easier to create another thing than it is to decide which things actually matter.
Very little of this is measured in any meaningful way. Success is counted in what was sent, what was published, and how busy everyone looked while doing it, not in what was understood, what changed, or what people actually did differently as a result. So the system optimises for production, not digestion.
And because the waste is mostly invisible, it feels harmless. No one sees the hours of attention burned by unread updates, duplicated messages and frantic “just checking you saw this” emails. But everyone feels it. People feel behind. Leaders feel unheard. Comms teams feel like they’re shouting into the void.
The instinctive response is always the same: send more.
That is how infobesity perpetuates itself. Not through malice or incompetence, but through a complete lack of responsibility for the organisation’s information metabolism. Until someone is willing to say, calmly and politically, “we are creating too much for this to work”, nothing changes.
Infozempic isn’t a tool. It’s a choice — a decision to stop force-feeding the workforce and start treating attention as the scarce, valuable resource it actually is.