Question
What is alarm fatigue?
Quick Answer
Too sensitive and the agent fires too often — too insensitive and it never fires.
Example: You set a rule: 'Every time I feel frustrated, stop and journal.' Within a day you're journaling twenty times — after a slow elevator, a mistyped password, a lukewarm coffee. You abandon the practice within a week. The trigger wasn't wrong. Its sensitivity was miscalibrated. You needed 'frustrated for more than five minutes about something that affects my work' — a threshold that filters signal from noise.
This concept is part of Trigger Design in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for trigger design.
Learn more in these lessons
- Trigger sensitivity calibration
- Trigger fatigue
Too many triggers overwhelm your attention — curate ruthlessly.
- Monitoring fatigue
Too much monitoring data overwhelms attention and leads to ignoring signals that matter. The solution is not more data — it is fewer, sharper signals routed to the right layer of attention.