Cognitive Load Vs Cognitive Distribution

Life can be a lot to handle. We’ve get commitments to deliver on, decisions to make, people to appease and situations that call for bringing a good attitude. Over the course of a day, it can wear you down and compromise your ability to show up how you want to.

What I’ve just described is called ‘Cognitive Load’. It’s literally the energy that the mind uses to process information and exhibit self-control. Think of it like carrying a 50 pound weight all day… Eventually your body is going to tire out. The same goes for your mind.

That’s why I want to introduce something called ‘Cognitive Distribution’. This is the intentional process of spacing out moments that require cognitive load throughout the day. Rather than having decisions, commitments, and actions stacked on top of each other, they get spread out and therefore, are less demanding.

The reason why this difference is significant, it´s because your mind functionally pulls from different fuel sources, let’s call it ‘executive function’ and your ‘willpower reserve’. 

Using the metaphor of electricity… Let’s say your executive function is like a wall outlet that can deliver a certain amount of voltage to power a task. For the most part it’s a stable electrical current but, over the course of the day, it’s capacity slowly decreases as we fatigue. 

But, so long as the demands of life are under this threshold, executive function is the fuel source that will be used. Taking action from the wall outlet doesn’t feel hard because it’s tapping into your natural capacity. 

However when you try to pack too much cognitive load into a single moment, and multiple things need to be powered at the same time, the demand of that often goes beyond the capacity of the wall outlet and needs more energy. 

That’s where the extra battery kicks into gear, our willpower reserve, which works to power the task. This feels hard, and the reserve depletes quickly...

To maximize your personal energetic potential, the goal is to use the wall source as much as possible and save the willpower reserve. That’s exactly what ‘Cognitive Distribution’, or spacing out your brain’s processing power, accomplishes.

To make this practical: It explains the difference in energy between preplanning a healthy meal and cooking it vs deciding what healthy meal you want to eat right before cooking it. Or why figuring out what to post on social media and creating the post at the same time is so much harder than deciding what topic you want to cover in advance, and in a different moment creating the content. 

Metaphor aside, the way to practice cognitive distribution is to be more consistent with your planning. Planning is a hack for maximizing your capacity for control and in doing so, allows you to bring your best to more of your day.

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