This explanation of administrative overhead as a hidden source of cognitive load feels especially important right now.
One pattern I keep noticing is that some people experience this shift in work much earlier and more intensely than others — not because they’re less resilient, but because their brains were never designed to operate inside constant coordination environments in the first place.
So the Slack/Teams/email layer doesn’t just add work.
It changes the type of work from focused creation to continuous context-switching.
And for many people, burnout starts exactly at that transition point.
Reducing cognitive load helps — but recognizing which environments your brain actually works well inside can be just as powerful for recovery.
I really love how you broke this down. I work with couples where one or both are in burnout and our first meeting we talk about the brain and even addiction to the dopamine and adrenaline that occur with stress. If we don’t understand how our brain is functioning we won’t know how to retrain/rewire it.
These couples treated their relationship like a rubber ball because their focus was so much on the mental load of their work. As we all logically know, our relationship isn’t rubber and every time you drop it, it cracks and chunks start to come off. It’s actually glass just like our health.
So important that we better understand the realities of what we are doing and how our brain can keep us driving in the wrong direction.
This explanation of administrative overhead as a hidden source of cognitive load feels especially important right now.
One pattern I keep noticing is that some people experience this shift in work much earlier and more intensely than others — not because they’re less resilient, but because their brains were never designed to operate inside constant coordination environments in the first place.
So the Slack/Teams/email layer doesn’t just add work.
It changes the type of work from focused creation to continuous context-switching.
And for many people, burnout starts exactly at that transition point.
Reducing cognitive load helps — but recognizing which environments your brain actually works well inside can be just as powerful for recovery.
I really love how you broke this down. I work with couples where one or both are in burnout and our first meeting we talk about the brain and even addiction to the dopamine and adrenaline that occur with stress. If we don’t understand how our brain is functioning we won’t know how to retrain/rewire it.
These couples treated their relationship like a rubber ball because their focus was so much on the mental load of their work. As we all logically know, our relationship isn’t rubber and every time you drop it, it cracks and chunks start to come off. It’s actually glass just like our health.
So important that we better understand the realities of what we are doing and how our brain can keep us driving in the wrong direction.
Something simple that's been working for me - 5 slow breaths before reacting to anything stressful. Sounds basic but genuinely changes how I respond.
This struck a cord with me and where I was 18 months ago.
One of the reasons I took a shot at this topic as well.
You can find it here, hopefully it may be of interest/use to some:
https://primeagain.co.uk/2026/04/05/when-pushing-throughstops-working/
Burnout doesn’t always feel like stress.
Sometimes it feels like guilt…
for not being able to be who you were before.
Great suggestions on how to actually recover from adrenal and cortisol overloads. Thanks!