Win at Life
(If you’ve got 47 tabs open and no idea what you were doing – this one’s for you.)
Cognitive Load Theory
Element: Healthy Mind
Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort being used in your working memory.
What it is – and why it matters
Walking into a room with no idea why you went in…
Or the brain fog we attribute to baby brain, menopause, stress, midlife, ADHD, too much raving in the 90s, being a bit ditzy, or just not being very organised –
might actually be a simple case of Cognitive Load Theory in action.
Your brain isn’t broken.
It’s just busy.
Educational psychologist John Sweller developed this theory in the late 1980s.
His work focused on how we learn, but what he found out is useful far beyond classrooms and revision sessions.
The core idea is simple:
Your brain’s working memory has limits.
(We’ve looked at this in Neutralise Your Overwhelm.)
When it’s full, your ability to learn, focus, or make good decisions starts to fall apart.
Sweller described three types of load:
- Intrinsic Load – the natural difficulty of the task itself.
(Like long division being harder than remembering your postcode.) - Extraneous Load – the unnecessary effort created by poor presentation or distraction.
(Unclear instructions, noisy environments, unstructured information.) - Germane Load – the helpful, desirable effort that leads to understanding and learning.
(Things like making connections, summarising, highlighting, applying the idea.)
We want to make room for germane load.
That’s where growth happens.
That’s where learning happens.
But to do that, we have to reduce the noise.
When we don’t, when our brains are juggling irrelevant details, unnecessary re-reading, or the background hum of too many tabs open, it hits a limit.
And that’s not on you.
That’s not a character flaw.
It’s a cognitive one.
This isn’t about doing less.
It’s about managing what’s coming in – so your mind can actually do its job.
Real-life examples
The Post-it Avalanche
Reminders on your phone.
Your whiteboard.
Your wrist.
Your diary.
4 overlapping Post-Its on your laptop.
Uncountable screenshots.
Each one is small.
But together, they ask your brain to rescan and reprioritise constantly.
It’s not the tasks themselves.
It’s the exhausting cognitive switching between them.
Classic extraneous load: Too much clutter. Not enough clarity.
The Messy Email
You open a message.
It’s a wall of poorly organised text with six unrelated points, no paragraph breaks, and an ambiguous deadline. Classic Sue-from-Accounts move.
You read it.
You go to reply… and honestly? It’s hard to know where to begin.
So you close it. Then you feel guilty.
Extraneous load in action.
The Forgotten PIN
You’re at self-checkout, chatting with the cashier.
You’re juggling your club card, your bag, vouchers, shopping, your trolley.
Then there’s the dry cleaning you’ve got to collect,
and you must remember to get that key cut from the guy in the booth in the car park.
Add polite social masking.
Then the cashier says: “That’ll be £126.77 please.”
You put your card in…
And your brain blanks.
Nothing.
Not one number.
The embarrassment.
You weren’t losing your mind.
Your mind was just full.
A classic capacity breach – your working memory had more inputs than it could juggle.
No need to get yourself checked in anywhere, just Cognitive Load Theory doing its thing.
Why it matters
In daily life, we tend to blame ourselves for feeling distracted, snappy, or forgetful.
But often the culprit isn’t attitude.
It’s load.
When you understand the difference between a genuinely demanding task and a messy, overloaded one, you start to see where your energy is really going.
This isn’t just about learning.
It’s about living.
- Respect intrinsic load (what’s genuinely hard.)
- Reduce extraneous load (the junk.)
- Make room for germane load (The good work. The bit that matters.)
This applies whether you’re managing a team, parenting a teenager, building a habit,
or just trying to make it to Thursday with your brain intact.
Schemas (noun):
In cognitive psychology, a schema is a mental framework or structure that helps us organise and interpret information. They’re like templates your brain uses to make sense of new things quickly.
Example:
When you walk into a restaurant, you don’t have to work out what to do from scratch. You already know you’ll be seated, get a menu, order food, eat, pay. That’s a schema for “restaurant”.
In Cognitive Load Theory, building schemas is the goal of learning. Once something is stored in long-term memory as a schema, it takes less mental effort to use it, reducing working memory load.
So in short:
Schemas = mental shortcuts that save brainpower
(Once they’re formed, they free up space in your working memory for more useful stuff.)
Human Upgrade tools that apply
In Human Upgrade, many of our tools are built around this exact idea.
The Overwhelm Challenge breaks the cycle by guiding you to:
- Brain dump
- Sort
- Organise
- Assign time
- Block it out in your calendar
The Eisenhower Matrix – you know we love that – adds clarity:
What’s urgent? What’s important? What’s just noise?
The slightly cheeky but unerringly accurate Idiotic Eureka Checklist flags the basics:
Have you eaten?
Moved?
Hydrated?
Spoken to another human?
Sometimes the cognitive load isn’t mental –
It’s unmet human needs.
Neutralise Your Overwhelm & Cognitive Load Theory
– How it maps
Cognitive Load Theory breaks mental effort into three categories:
- Intrinsic load – the actual complexity
- Extraneous load – the avoidable nonsense
- Germane load – the helpful stuff, where clarity and learning happen
Neutralise Your Overwhelm is a great tool to reduce the ‘bad loads’ and make space for the good one.
Here’s how the steps map to CLT:
Reduce Extraneous Load? Brain Dump
Get everything out of your head and onto paper.
This stops your working memory from holding it all in limbo.
Clears the clutter. Instantly.
Respect Intrinsic Load? Sort by Locus of Control.
Some things are hard.
Some things are out of your hands.
By separating the two, you stop wasting effort on what you can’t do anything about.
Protect Working Memory? Park the Rest
Not now. Not yours. Not helpful.
Ruthlessly parking the non-essentials keeps your bandwidth focused.
Make Room for Germane Load? Post-it Sorting
Once the junk’s gone, your brain can engage in meaningful sequencing –
connecting dots, deciding what matters, what comes first.
Increase Flow? Assign Time
Estimating how long something takes reduces task-switching and internal friction.
Now your brain has a framework, not just a pile.
Create Mental Margin? Time Block It
Tasks go into specific time windows.
Poof. Ambiguity disappears.
Your brain can relax between tasks instead of constantly keeping score.
You’re not being dramatic or ‘overly emotional’ when you feel fried.
You’re experiencing cognitive overload.
It’s tempting to look outward for answers and find blame, external factors or fault elsewhere.
But turning inward, organising and simplifying what’s already there, is often the fastest fix. At the very least isn’t going to lessen the effects.
This doesn’t just calm you down.
It gives your brain the structure it needs to function again.
Want to drill this down?
- When do you feel most mentally clogged – and what seems to trigger it?
- What looks easy on paper but drains you far more than it should?
- How much of your day is spent handling information instead of doing the thing?
- Where could you use clarity instead of just trying harder?
Optional challenge
Pick a 15-minute window this week to tackle something you’ve been avoiding.
Clear everything else:
Your desk. Your tabs. The noise. The other tasks.
Give that one thing your full, undivided, un-overloaded attention.
Then notice how it feels –
Not just to get it done, but to work with a clear, free brain.
A Buddh-ish Take
“When the mind is full, there is no room for wisdom to enter.”
– Zen proverb
It’s not always about slowing down.
But it is about giving your mind the space to think clearly.