Your brain's capacity is stressing you out
In the following article, I will briefly introduce to you my reader a mental model for thinking about your brain’s limited resources. I hope this model helps to alleviate the feeling of overwhelm and stress of daily life. I know in my life this has helped a great deal to reduce the mental fatigue I feel on a daily basis. The psychological theory I wish to introduce to you is called “Cognitive Load Theory” created by John Sweller. I shall avoid any terms that may be unfamiliar to a general reader. That is to say there is a lot of technical jargon in the field of psychology. I wish to take the approach of Bertrand Russell and talk in plain English.
To start, it’s important to note that your brain has a limited capacity for incoming information. It can only process so much at a time. You may be aware of this when you are trying to write a message and talk to your partner at the same time. You will inevitably miss something your partner is saying, let’s hope it’s not important. This limited processing capacity is a long standing discovery in psychology. There is a common idea that the fast access memory that you use when you’re thinking, can hold roughly 7 items at a time. Whether this is true or not, it clear you brain can’t hold very much information at one time, it must either store it or get rid of it. So what takes up this processing capacity? There are two types of load that may weigh on your brain when you are tackling any task.
2 Types of load on your brain
- Difficulty of the problem
- Distractions not related to the problem
Splitting this load into categories helps us take action on this load to help reduce unnecessary weight on our brain. The first is the difficulty of your problem. This is simple enough, reducing the difficulty reduces the load on your brain. However, you brain likes difficulty to some extent to feel like this task is worth doing. Therefore, load in this regard is a matter of balance. Too much and your brain hits capacity and stresses you out. Too little, and your brain doesn’t see the task as worth doing (I shall explain this in more detail in my Bayesian Brain article). The second type of load is anything not related to the problem. This is seen as largely unnecessary load that takes away those resources from solving the problem. This may seem obvious but when you start to think about what really matters for your work, you will see your brain is doing unnecessary work all the time. That fancy new app you downloaded, now you have to learn how to use it. Is it really getting you more efficient or are you adding more load to your brain? When your brain hits capacity, your stress will spike and you will experience overwhelm.
The main point is that everything you process and every decision you make takes up these resources. It’s important that this energy is focused on things that matter to you. You probably have less mental energy than you think and you are likely using that energy to process things you don’t care about. Seeing your productivity this way will lead to you being more aware when your brain hit max capacity.