It's my most hated question. Can you guess it? What's for dinner? Because suddenly, I have absolutely no idea what to do. And it's not because I'm trying to figure out or distinguish or decide on takeout or making some dinner or it's, it's not because I can't decide between like tacos or pizza or, you know, just chicken as usual. It's more like, please do not make me make another decision or choose one more thing today.

And maybe you're wondering why sometimes something so simple can feel so overwhelming. Because I know I do. I wonder why at the end of the day, I am so freaking lazy because it doesn't feel like I've done a lot. I've usually just sat in this chair. But here's the thing. The difficulty of that dinner decision is not actually about dinner, thank God. Makes me feel better. It might be about every other decision that came before it. All day long. Your brain, my brain, has been evaluating different options, weighing consequences, prioritizing, filtering through tons of information, because we've gotten a lot of information during the day most days. We prioritize, we filter, we resist the distractions because they're everywhere.

And deciding what happens next in our lives. What choice are we going to make next? And eventually?

I know I'm not just speaking for myself. Choosing can start to feel like work. And researchers have been trying to understand that important question. What happens to the way we make decisions after our brains have already spent hours upon hours making them? Because when we become mentally fatigued and mentally tired, We may start avoiding decisions, relying on defaults, or choosing whatever requires the least amount of effort, which makes you feel super lazy. So today we're going to look at what that research actually tells us about decisions and decision fatigue, and what happens in the brain when choosing becomes exhausting. Because it's not just, About the point of I don't care, just pick something.

There's all of that time before.

So welcome back to The Ariza Inspire Podcast. I'm Samantha Ariza, licensed professional counselor. And as always, this is not about therapy. This is just a space where we make mental health make sense for us. Around here, we believe that mental health doesn't have to be stiff or scary. It's a topic we can talk about any time of day. We keep it human, we keep it practical, and we do try to have a little bit of fun along the way. Usually I'm making fun of myself. Because you know what, life is messy and we're all just trying to figure it out. So, let's just grab a cup of coffee. Maybe you need an energy drink because the day has been long, and let's just get cozy and dive into it. Because today we're talking about a feeling that I know I've had.

And I'm pretty sure almost everybody else I know has had it as well. But it's something that we don't always understand, because the moment at the end of the day where you start to think, Why am I so exhausted? Because I didn't even do that much. Especially if you're like me and you work from home and all you've done is sat, you really feel like why am I so exhausted? I didn't run around. I didn't like go and work a heavy construction job. Sometimes I didn't even really check off a 1000000 different tasks. I just did a couple different things.

Maybe you were just answering emails or making decisions or, you know, switching between things. But your brain feels completely fried. So today, I'm going to introduce you to something called the cognitive load theory. Because once you understand this, this feeling starts to make a lot more sense. And even today, like, I was going grocery shopping and I was talking to my husband and I said to him, make sure you get like chicken breast because at the end of the day when I have to cook, cooking a chicken breast is like the easiest thing. And I was telling him, I was like, you know what? It becomes like the default for me because, I don't want to think about what I have to make for dinner. And I feel like I've talked about dinner a lot lately.

But this this is something that a lot of us already know. This whole feeling, this idea. Usually, we've been calling it the mental load, and it's something that has been circulating on social media, especially around like women and moms and about their experience, that experience that women have as parents and partners.

So what we're going to dive into is what is the cognitive load or the mental load? The 3 different types of cognitive load we have, the science behind what overload is? The emotional impact of it, and of course, my favorite part, practical tools.

So this whole mental load thing or cognitive load theory comes from decades of research and psychology and education. This was originally developed by John Sweller. And at its core it says this. Your brain has a limited capacity for processing information at any given time.

Specifically your working memory. This is the part of the brain that handles what you're actively thinking about and can only hold a small amount of information at once. That working memory is literally like the chalkboard that we're working on right now. And what ends up happening is the working memory then goes into long term memory. And it kind of like empties out. So our capacity for working memory and what we can keep in there at one time is very small versus our long term memory, which is a lot bigger. So every thought, every decision, every notification, every unfinished task, everything that you're trying to like keep in the front of your brain. It's taking up that working memory space.

Even though your day doesn't seem very busy. Your brain might be juggling. What do I respond to first? Did I forget something? Should I do this now? Where later? Why haven't I started that thing? What do I need to remember for later? What are the tasks in the front of my mind? Again, all of this is crowding into your working memory, which means it's not nothing. It's that mental load, that cognitive load. But that's not the only part of cognitive load theory we have to keep in mind, because there's technically 3 different types, and that research breaks it into these 3 things.

The 1st one is the intrinsic load. This is the mental effort required for the task itself. Some things are just naturally more complex. Learning something new, solving a problem, navigating uncertainty, you know, thinking into the abyss of what this life means.

A lot. It's based on how complex something really is and how familiar you are with it. For example, learning how to do your taxes for the 1st time, which I still don't know how to do. Trying to understand maybe a new concept, like for me, if I'm trying to learn a new therapy concept or framework to work with my clients. It could be even trying to understand maybe a new gadget that you've got. Maybe following a complicated recipe, even having a difficult conversation, where you have to choose your words very specifically and carefully. That all takes this brain power. This is the kind of effort that makes sense. The task is just hard. So intrinsically, you're working on it and focusing on it.

The next type of load is the extraneous load. This is the unnecessary mental effort that we have. And a lot of this is going to sound triggering for us in the whole stress department just in case you are wondering. The idea of constant notifications, the switching between apps, poor organization, too many choices. What do I do next? What's going on? Who's yelling my name?

This is the one that usually drains us the most. And it doesn't actually help us get anything done. More examples can include switching between 10 different tests, emails, and tabs and texts, just going from one thing to another. That requires effort. It could also be a cluttered workspace, a disorganized home or schedule. Maybe it's even instructions that are super unclear or overly complicated. Maybe it's trying to work while you're checking your phone and your social media.

This is the kind of effort your brain is spending and spending, and it's spending on things that don't necessarily need to be spent on. Research consistently shows us that reducing the type of load improves performance and learning.

The last one we're going to talk about is the germane load. This is the helpful mental effort, the kind that actually builds things, builds understanding, it's learning, its growth, it's moving forward in your whole brain capacity of knowledge.

This is actually the productive cognitive work, because it builds understanding. Different examples of this is reflecting on something you learned and connecting it to your life. It could be practicing a new skill until it starts to click in your brain. It could be journaling to process your emotions. It could be applying a coping skill in real time, maybe even making sense of a past experience. This is the kind of effort that actually moves you forward. This is a good one. This is one we need to work on. So as you can see, not all mental effort or mental cognitive load is the same. Some of it comes from the task itself. like the intrinsic load. Some of it is just notes and distractions, which is the extraneous load.

And some of it is actually helpful. And builds understanding, which is the germane load. The problem is most of us are overloaded. With the wrong kind. And I know you know which one I'm talking about that extraneous load, which leaves us with less capacity for the things that actually matter. Thinking about trying to write an email. Versus the actual writing. You know, the actual writing is the intrinsic load, but that 15 notification, switching tabs, doing this and this and that. That is going to be your extraneous load. And taking a moment to clearly think through what you want to say in that email. That's the germain load. And by the time you finish, you are exhausted. Exhausted. You gotta think about it.

Those hard emails really take a lot out of you, and it's not because the email itself was hard. But it was because of everything happening around it.

We talk a lot about mental health on this podcast. Go figure. It's a mental health podcast, right? We break down the research, we explore why we think and feel the way that we do. And we discuss all the strategies that can help us navigate this crazy, chaotic everyday life that we deal with. But understanding something and having that knowledge and knowing how to apply it are 2 completely different things. And that's exactly why we have the mental health toolkit workbook. This started out from the summer season, but I built it out into something that you can use every single day. This isn't just another workbook filled with information you could Google, because why would I need to do that? It is guided resources.

Designed to help you take what you've learned, especially if you listen to the summer season, and actually put it into work in your own life. You'll find different exercises that cover 5 important areas. We have emotional, physical, cognitive, social and crisis tools. These are kind of the 5 very important sections of mental health and areas of mental health that we need to pay attention to. We're talking about not only how to use these tools. We're talking about how to identify your emotional patterns, to recognize how stress shows up in your body because sometimes we're either all here or all here and we kind of disconnect the two.

We also look at how to challenge unhelpful thinking patterns, as well as evaluating your relationships, because those affect us on the day-to-day too. We also look into creating a plan for those moments when your coping skills are not working, and maybe you need some extra help. But the best part is you don't have to figure it out all at once. You can work through these exercises at your own pace and build your own collection of tools that make sense for you. Because mental health isn't just about knowing what to do. It's about having the tools to do something with what you know. The mental health toolkit workbook is available now at arizainspire.com. So head over, grab your copy, and start building your toolkit now.

So let's zoom in a little bit, because what is the signs behind this? And what's actually happening in your brain when you are mentally fried? Because it's not just a feeling. It's actually something that can be measured, observed, and studied. Surprising, no? Makes you feel a little bit better because I know when I was going through this. I was like, ooh, okay, it's not just me. There's actual science behind this. Awesome. So your brain has a real biological limit. At the center of the cognitive load theory is this idea. You know, the working memory is limited. And working memory is studied by giving people different tasks that force the brain to keep information active for a short time while using it.

So what researchers might ask someone to remember is like a sequence, a pattern, updates of information, as new items appear, or to spot changes after a delay. Then they measure how accurate the person is, how right they are, and how fast they respond. And sometimes what their brain is doing during the task. So it's giving them things to remember and work on, figuring out how long fast it takes them to see things, and maybe sometimes even putting something to measure their brain waves. And that's how we know that working memory is real, limited. And deeply connected to attention. Not only deeply connected to attention, but learning and also mental fatigue. It can only hold and process a small amount of information at one time.

And when that limit is exceeded, your brain enters a state called. Let's guess it. Cognitive overload, or mental overload if you want to say it that way. And research shows that when we are getting to the limits of our cognitive load and it gets to be too much. Our focus drops, information processing slows, learning, and performance decline. So right away, we have to challenge that common belief, because we think about it's about willpower, and it's like, I just need to push myself.

I need to push myself to get this stuff done, right? Because I've said it to myself. But it's not about willpower. It's about capacity. You have to think about it like almost like a battery and and you're reaching, you know, like the end of your limits of stuff. It's capacity. A lot of this stuff that we blame on willpower is actually capacity issues. And the thing is, multitasking doesn't help surprisingly, I think we all try to like pride ourselves on this whole idea of mental multitasking. We think we're great multitaskers. We pride ourselves on multitasking, but multitasking has never been shown to help. It actually overloads the system a lot more.

And a lot of people just think I'm just juggling a few things, but research shows something completely different. When you multitask. Your brain is actually increasing that cognitive load, because it has to manage multiple streams of information at once. And of course, that creates interference. And studies on working memories show that multitasking increases mind wandering. So it's kind of like almost like breadcrumbing to another task. We are focusing here. We have something else, and then our brain is just like, well, since we're all over the place, might as well just be all over the place, right? It again reduces task engagement, since we're not focusing on one thing. And it can impair overall cognitive performance.

And across multiple studies. Researchers have found that multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40%.

40%. And a lot of times we think we're doing so much at once when we multitask. But this just means what feels like being productive and doing things is actually just making your brain work harder for not so great results.

So even if you feel productive. Your brain is working harder. And that's not what we want, or we don't want our brains to work that hard, right? Task switching. Also has a cost. So it's not just about trying to do 2 things at once. Sometimes this idea of hopping from one thing to another. Is also not so good. Because every time you switch tasks like email, text, work, back to email. Your brain has to disengage from one task. Reorient to another, reload the context. And then get into it again. And research is showing that this creates something called a task switching cost. The cost includes increased mental effort, slower performance, and higher error rates. Meaning you're making more mistakes by this constant switching.

In fact, some findings suggest it can take a significant time to fully refocus after a switch, and productivity can drop substantially in that time.

There are also lab studies showing that switching between more dissimilar tasks create even greater cognitive strain and fatigue.

And that, you know, we'll dive more into this when we talk about multitasking in episode 6 of this season, but if even if we were to call back to our microstressor episode in season three, right? Season 3 or season four. I don't remember. But the microstressor one. All of this task switching is a small stressor we are adding to our system.

So when your day looks like checking your phone, answering messages, switching tabs, starting something, stopping something, starting something else, listening to the kids doing that, doing this, working. I was stressed as doing that.

It's it's hard. And if you're a mom, This feels very familiar, right? Because it could be like starting dinner, stopping your kids from fighting, answering that text message, helping with the homework, seeing the pot of your dinner, boiling over and burning. Because you've been everywhere.

Your brain isn't just doing a little of everything. It's paying a cognitive tax every single time. Those switches come at a cost. Which means. That cognitive fatigue, this mental tiredness is actually real. And it's going to change your behavior. Because it's not just feeling tired. It's actually changing how your brain makes those decisions. All this neuroscience research shows that as people become more fatigued and brain tired, they're less willing to ever hurt. They choose easier, lower effort options, and even when the reward is high, they'll still kind of choose the path of least resistance. So that moment when you think, why can't I just do this? It's not motivation, friends.

Shocker. It might be that your brain is literally trying to conserve energy. And I know my brain tries to do that because it's like, I've done so much. This is why sometimes we end up doom scrolling because our brain is like, I don't want to think. I just want to do the easy task right now of scrolling and listening.

Because decision making itself can also drain our brains. Another major contributor to cognitive load is decision fatigue. Research shows that as you make more decisions, the quality of your decisions decline. Your mental resources are just getting drained and depleted, and you feel more overwhelmed and avoidant. Meaning you don't want to do things. The more overwhelmed you are, the more you will avoid doing the things that you need to do. Because here's the part that most people don't realize, and it even, It was until this episode that I realized. That your brain doesn't rank decisions the way you thought it did.

Small decisions still count a lot.

The idea of what should I eat? Should I respond to this text message now or later? Which task do I start? And I've come to realize this is probably why sometimes I don't text back right away. Because the energy to open the text, figure out what I want to say to the person, especially if it's a person who I'm having a lot of emotional reaction to. I'm like, I'm going to deal with it later, deal with it, you know, hours because I don't know what to do. I don't have the energy or the thought process to pick and choose what words I want to say. All of these things draw from the same limited pool of cognitive energy. And it's such a huge topic that we'll cover more about it in episode 2 of this season.

Because overload is going to impact your brain's control center. And from a neuroscience perspective, a lot of this is happening in that prefrontal cortex, you know, the brain part that is responsible for focus, planning, decision making, self-control, you know, the big like in charge part of your brain. And when cognitive load is too high. The system gets overworked. Executive functioning declines and you experience these lovely side effects of brain fog, forgetfulness, and difficulty focusing. And I want to be really clear here. This isn't just a theory or a feeling. This is something we see in the research. There's a study by Quinn and his colleagues in 2009, and it was published in the Journal of Neuroscience that specifically looked at what happens in the brain as cognitive load increases.

And what they found is that the prefrontal cortex, you know? The one in the front, the whole control center, kind of in charge of all the thinking and decision making we do. And actually becomes very less efficient when it is overloaded. Meaning the more your brain is trying to hold, process and manage at once, the harder it becomes to focus, organize, and follow through. And this finding is supported by other neuroscience research as well. For example, Arnston's work published in the Nature Reviews neuroscience shows that when the brain is under stress or cognitive strain, that prefrontal cortex starts to lose its ability to regulate its attention and decision making.

It's very hard to focus when your brain doesn't have the power and battery to continue to focus. So instead of operating from that thoughtful, controlled part of your brain, You shift into a more reactive pattern. Instead of focusing and doing what you know you should do and making like conscious choices, you kind of shift into autopilot.

And there's the research by Duncan and Owen, which describes something called the multiple demand system. This is essentially a network in your brain, centered in that frontal lobe. That gets activated across all types of mental effort. So whether you're making decisions, switching tasks, solving problems, saving the world, or just trying to focus. It's all pulling from the same limited system. And this is supported by other neuroscience research as well. For example, Arnston's work, published in nature's review neuroscience, shows that when the brain is under stress or cognitive strain, the prefrontal cortex starts to lose its ability to regulate attention and decision making. So instead of operating from thoughtful, controlled part of your brain, you shift into a more reactive pattern.

So you kind of, instead of being fully in control of your senses and what you're doing, you kind of fall into autopilot, which for some of us is not the greatest thing. And then there's the research by Duncan and Owen, which describes something called multiple demand systems. This is essentially a network in your brain centered in the frontal lobe that gets activated across all types of mental effort. So whether you're making decisions, switching tests, solving problems, or just trying to focus, it's pulling from all the same limited system. So here's the key takeaways from all of that research. Ready? The factors don't happen in isolation. They stack. It's not just one thing. They just stack and it kind of magnifies if you think about it.

Multitasking increases that load on your brain, task switching, add strain, and decisions drain those precious brain resources we have. And of course, that tiredness, that fatigue, it reduces the effort overall, and over time, this creates that feedback loop where the more overloaded your brain becomes, the harder everything feels, the less able we're able to, you know, engage, the less, the less capable, the less able, the less ability overall. So when you say I didn't do anything today, why am I so tired? What the research would say is, your brain was processing switching, deciding, holding, filtering, all day long, and that is work. Invisible. Not noticeable to anybody outside of you, but still very real work.

And once you kind of understand that, kind of makes things make sense. It changes from that question of what's wrong with me too. What has my brain been doing all day? What has my brain been carrying? What have I done to overload my brain? And this is the effect it has. It's because it doesn't just affect your productivity. It affects how you feel. About yourself. And because when your brain is overloaded, everything feels so much harder, and small tasks feel so overwhelming, and you're more likely to do our favorite thing, which is to avoid. You feel stuck. Or you shut down. And it's not because you don't care and it's not because things aren't important because even like as a mom, as a therapist, like, I know everything that I do has an impact on my kids, on my clients, on everything.

And it's not because I don't care about it. It's because my system has been maxed out. I have maxed it out.

So the question becomes, what do we do now that we know this? How do we fix it because we're always trying to fix the things? We can't eliminate cognitive load completely.

But we can work with it instead of against it. So here's my favorite section, friends. Here are the practical tools, the things that we can do, the strategies that will help us with managing that mental load.

The 1st one. But you might get mad at. Or you might say, I've heard this before. I want you to reduce that extraneous load. Clear the noise. Ask yourself. What is draining me that doesn't actually matter? What notifications can I silence? What can I simplify in my environment?

Like all that clutter and stuff? Get out. Move it out, get rid of it. You don't need it. How can I reduce my multitasking? How can I create the space to focus on one thing at a time? And that's going to actually free up all that mental space that you need and have been taking up. I don't actually give you a chance to do what matters.

The other thing, which probably sounds very familiar as well, is to externalize your brain. Take it out. Take those thoughts, all those tasks, all those things out of your brain because your brain has very limited working memory. So take it out. It doesn't have to hold in your brain. Right things down. Use a running list. Brain dump in a journal before bed. Take the information out of your brain, free up that space. I mean, you can even put it in your notes app, you can do audio messages to yourself, whatever you have to do, get it out of your brain, because this moves information out of that working memory, which gives your working memory more space to do what it needs to do.

The next thing that you can do is close open loops. Pick one small unfinished task and complete it. Even something super tiny. And we'll talk more about open loops in another episode, but close those unfinished tasks. Finish up those small things that you've been leaving, you know, and that's just kind of sitting in the front of your brain that you need to do. Because once your brain completes it, It feels so happy, it reduces all of that mental strain and having to remember to finish it. Limit decision making, and I know. You're probably coming at me like Samantha, I cannot limit the decision making, but you can, you can. And it's with those not so lovely things, the things we don't like, those habits. I know I know I'm using the H word.

You kind of have to create these default things in your brain. Maybe you just eat the same breakfast every day. Maybe. It makes me think of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon is like, no, it's not like French toast, French toast Tuesday or whatever. Maybe you have like a set schedule of how you eat things. Maybe you set routines. Maybe you pre decide certain things. Like for us, like, whether that's as good or bad and you judge me, we have fast food Fridays. On Friday, I don't have to think about what we are eating and what we are doing for dinner because guess what? It is fast food Friday, and we're just going to go pick something up and that is one less thing I have to deal with. Because when we have less decision making and less things to decide on.

We have less cognitive load.

The next thing you can do is make a single task. Instead of multitasking. Focus on one task at a time, my friends. Do that one thing. Fully. Because this is going to reduce on that switching cost that that multi-tax multitasking task tax that we have on our brain, right? And it helps our brains stay very efficient and not spending on something we don't want to spend. You want to match your load to your capacity. Because remember, your brain has a limited capacity. And I know it's hard, but when we plan our days based on what we actually have and our capacity, we actually have, we'll feel good because we can accomplish it. Because some days, you can handle more. And some days, you can't, and that's okay.

It's not like a failure in the system. It's just, you know, life be life in. Some days you feel 100% and sometimes you only feel 60. So you're going to ask yourself, what is realistic for my brain to do today? And then you're just going to do that. And not beat yourself up about it.

If there's one thing. I want you to get from this episode, it's this. That feeling exhausted doesn't always mean you did too much physically. Sometimes it just means your brain has been doing a lot of invisible work all day. So the next time you catch yourself thinking, I didn't do anything today. All I did was sit at my computer. I want you to try to replace it. That man, my brain might have been doing a lot more than I realized.

But that's it for today's episode, my friends. Thank you for hanging out with me. If you found something helpful, inspiring or even just validating. I'd love if you would share the show, if you would leave a review, if you would just share this with somebody who you know needs to hear this, because I know there's probably a tons of moms out there who need to hear this. Do you want more support in your mental health journey? Why don't you head over to arezainspire.com? Because you'll find different resources to help you heal, grow and show up for yourself. You'll find the mental health toolkit, which has strategies and resources on every area of mental health. And, of course, don't forget to follow us on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, because that's where we're going to keep this conversation going. All of these links, all of the things we talk about today, will be linked in the description below.

Don't worry, my friends. I just want you to take care of yourselves. And I'll catch you next time, my friend.