The Impact of Oversharing on Situational Awareness

Have you ever been around someone who takes twenty minutes to tell a five-minute story? What does that do to you? I know what it does to me. It lowers my vigilance (i.e., the amount of attention I am channeling to them), it can cause me to become frustrated, bored, tune them out and find other things to give my attention to. And, it flaws my situational awareness. The same thing can happen on an emergency scene when someone is oversharing on the radio. Let’s explore this challenge.

Information Overload

When operating in a high stress, high consequence environment, being exposed to high volumes of information is not your friend. It is your enemy. Stress impacts the brain’s ability to analyze complex, detailed and massive amounts of data. When bombarded with information, the information processors of the brain will begin to shut down.

If the information is auditory and your processor shuts down you may go deaf and not even realize you have. In the process of shutting down, you may experience a phenomenon where you are hearing something but cannot make out exactly what the words are. Think of the teacher on the Peanuts cartoon when she’s talking to Charlie. You hear something, but you cannot make out what she is saying.

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