06/06/2026
Cognitive Load Bingo.
This one is for anyone who
has ever walked into a room and had no idea why,
realised mid-handshake that you have forgotten the name they told you 10 seconds ago,
or stood at self-checkout hoping to goodness you can tap it because your PIN is weirdly eluding you.
Cognitive Load Theory (shameless plug, a much deeper dive on this in Tanya Furness upcoming book Mindset Mechanics 😉) tells us why this happens.
Working memory is the part of your mind that handles what is happening right now.
It is not unlimited.
It can only hold and work with a small amount of information at once, it is said, typically between 5 and 7. Add an 8th and something falls by the wayside.
A great example of this is when we try to remember telephone numbers.
07956318723 is much harder to remember than:
079 563 187 23.
We can wrap our heads around smaller groups of numbers, even a few groups of groups.
Try to remember a string of 11 in one go, much harder.
So when you are trying to remember the thing you came in the room for, while thinking about the email you still need to answer, and the project due in next week, while your phone is pinging, while you are deciding what to eat later,
while also trying to look polite to people,
your working memory starts to run out of space.
The task itself might be simple.
The problem is that your mind is rarely only doing that one task.
It is holding the task, sorting the task, switching away from the task, coming back to the task, checking what else matters, suppressing distractions and trying not to drop anything important.
That is why tiny things can suddenly feel mentally expensive.
It's never even just the email.
It is the email plus the impending deadline, the annoying sign-off, the lack of paragraph breaks, the fact you need to check your diary, the break in your flow to reply, and the three other jobs that you have to do before you can answer.
That extra effort is what Cognitive Load Theory would call extraneous load.
The extra things around the task.
Clutter, ambiguity, task switching, mental background noise - once that gets too high, the useful thinking has less room.
Working memory is what you use to manipulate information, sort it, think about it, decide things, offload things, calculate them, weigh them up, pass them on, put them on a post-it note.
That is why you can read the same sentence three times and still not take it in, or forget a word you use all the time.
Or when you put something “somewhere safe”, which is just.... gone now.
I'm still mourning a make-up bag that disappeared about 10 years ago.
The point is not to become a perfectly optimised productivity machine.
It is to notice where your particular load is coming from.
Are you keeping information in your head that would be better written down?
Too many open loops that your mind won't let you forget about until they are closed off?
Have you got decisions to make, half-finished tasks and information that you plan to come back to?
If you're suffering from brain fog, whatever else is going on, try this, to help yourself and get some relief.
So here is your weekend experiment, pick one thing you have been avoiding.
Before you do it, remove the load around it.
Close the tabs, confiscate your phone, clear the desk, noise cancelling headphones, whatever helps, and simply write down the next step. Give yourself 15 minutes.
Then notice whether the task was as difficult as you thought, or whether the load around it was doing half the damage.
You'll find your solutions and ideas come much more easily.
And if you want to streamline everything you can do it with us.
A lot of the initial work in Human Upgrade Core is about reducing unnecessary load, because energy is currency and cognitive load spends it fast.
Core blends neurology, physiotherapy, biomechanics, fitness, nutrition, behavioural science, hypnotherapy and performance coaching.
We find your hidden energy drains, the micro stresses that add to your load, the clunky systems in your life and the places where your effort is producing very little return.
Which sounds like a lot, but in practice, it always means making things simpler.
We reduce the noise, the friction, the pointless drains.
So you have space to think, recover, decide and move forward with the really cool stuff you haven't got the energy for.
Human Upgrade Core is open for the summer intake.
Drop me a message with any questions.
