Relational Attention Load Theory: A Qualitative Synthesis of Social Media Information Overload and Cognitive Failures Across the Lifespan in India

India's rapid shift to inexpensive, continuous mobile connectivity has outpaced the development of digital regulation skills, institutional norms and clinical frameworks. This paper reports a qualitative interpretive synthesis of how social media induced information overload relates to cognitive failures among adolescents, working professionals and retired adults in urban India. A purposive documentary corpus of 67 scholarly works and 13 policy instruments was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and a line-of-argument synthesis. Five themes were developed: the obligation to remain available, attentional fragmentation, offloading and weakened rehearsal, erosion of role boundaries, and overload as appraised threat. The synthesis shows that vulnerability depends on the balance of load, capacity and buffers at each life stage, and that evidence for older adults and for India is thin. We propose the Relational Attention Load Theory (RALT), in which informational, relational obligation and role-boundary loads produce cognitive failure when they exceed life-stage capacity supported by buffers, and in which relational obligation amplifies informational load in relationally dense settings. Eight testable propositions and governance implications are derived.