Forty years after Alvin Toffler popularised the term “information overload”, we might as well admit this: our efforts to fight it have failed. Unless you’re willing to be radical – to give up the internet completely, say – the recommended cures don’t work.

Resolve to check your email twice daily, and you’ll find many more messages waiting when you do. Go on an “information diet”, and it’s likely to end like any other diet: you’ll succumb and consume the bad stuff, with extra guilt.

So maybe we need to reframe things. The real problem isn’t too much information: it’s the feeling of being out of control. Why not focus, then, on finding ways to feel more in control – even if that’s based, in part, on self-deception?