Managing the Problem of Cognitive Overload
When everything just gets a bit too much
Audio and YouTube versions available at the end of this email.
I wrote most of this by hand using a fountain pen (I have become a fan of the ECO TWSBI series) while on a flight from Chennai to Mumbai.
Last week, a doctor messaged asking for an expedited report of a patient's scan done the previous day. At some point, I had to stop what I was doing and check about this patient because I didn't remember the name from the previous day's list... she was actually for a scan in a couple of hours, so I messaged this to the doctor, who said "OK". A few hours later, another physician messaged asking to speak to someone about the same patient's report... I connected him to the concerned radiologist and the radiologist to him. In the end, when I saw the scan the next day, it turned out to be a routine follow-up... apparently the patient was anxious and had messaged whoever she knew to try and get to know whether the scan was normal or abnormal. That was it…no medical emergency.
Both these doctors could have just waited or messaged asking to be told about the report when ready. But instead they decided to humor the patient's request. In the bargain, twice during the day, I had to stop what I was doing to switch gears in my mind to tasks that were completely unnecessary.
Our minds can handle a finite number of tasks and requests in a day before it becomes fatigued or gives up. If something is truly important or urgent, then this cognitive / sensory overload is absolutely fine. But when useless tasks cause the cognitive overload, you wonder what you could have done to prevent this.
Every avoidable request is one more task, adding to the overload, and there comes a time during the day when the brain just can't handle another request, and just wants to shut down. The older you get, the less overload you can handle... this despite having all my notifications off… and unless you reset or reboot your brain by sleeping or doing nothing for some time, it just becomes very difficult to function.
It happened at a recent conference I attended. In the morning, I had a lecture, and also met a lot of people, interacted with them, sometimes struggling to put a name to a face, and in a couple of hours, I was so fatigued that I went to the room, lay down, aimlessly scrolled through some IG reels, which probably adds to the brain rot, then went to sleep for a half hour. I had also run for an hour in the morning, but that was not the cause of the fatigue…it wasn’t physical, it was all mental.
Refreshed, I went back for lunch and a second lecture, and in 2 hours, with the same repeat cycle, I was fatigued again and the only reset was to sleep it off.
It was fun meeting people, chatting with them after a gap of a year or two and giving those lectures, but all this exacts a price... the brain/mind can only handle a certain amount of sensory exposure before it overloads and goes on the fritz, even if it is pleasurable.
This is also why no major decisions should be taken when tired or at the end of a busy day, because you are bound to make a mistake or a judgement error when the brain/mind is not working in an optimal way.
It is interesting…I can read any number of scans in a day, but if the reads are interrupted or if I have to spend time digging through clinical information or looking for priors when they should have been easily available, then the fatigue sets in.
Two different scenarios, one pleasurable, one not, both end up causing the same brain freeze... the commonality being cognitive overload.
One way to reduce overload is to reduce "digital noise" that I wrote about a few years ago. The other is to recognize our limitations and adjust our routines around the fact that our brain needs rest, more and more as we grow older, and we owe it to ourselves to do that at regular intervals in the day. We also need to do just “one thing at a time” as I wrote about in July.
For me, on a routine working day, the afternoon nap becomes that one major reset that gives my body and mind much-needed rest.
(I stopped writing here because there was turbulence and my already bad handwriting was becoming illegible even to me, so here is the rest of my thought process)
I am grappling with finding solutions to this problem, especially because requests just keep coming in at all times of the day…from patients, doctors, colleagues, friends and family…from medical related, to invites, to meet-ups…and it all just becomes a little too much.
A few things that I am learning along the way
1. I am saying “no” more and more, the older I get…to speaking invitations, wedding invites and other functions.
2. I am learning to ignore non-emergency requests with the understanding that people will generally wait for 24 hours and then tackle all these requests together at one time in the morning or evening as a single task.
3. Despite notifications being off, I still land up checking my emails and messages too often…I am learning to keep these down to not more than once an hour or two…that way you have time in between to focus on what you really want to do.
4. Silence unknown callers works very well…and if it is urgent, they will message, else these calls are likely not relevant anyway.
Yet, these are all avoidance measures that reduce cognitive load, not solutions to managing cognitive overload when it does occur, because at least once or twice a day, things do conspire to create situations that become difficult to handle. And it is not possible each time to walk away and take a break and rest.
How do you all handle these issues? Writing down things to do? Just walk around without a phone? Breathing exercises? Or something else altogether?
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