Have you ever reached the end of the day feeling completely mentally exhausted, despite being busy all day, and still felt like you hadn’t achieved as much as you’d hoped?
You’ve answered lots of emails, replied to messages, sat in meetings, dealt with unexpected problems, had some important conversations and constantly felt like you were rushing from one thing to the next. Yet despite all of that activity, it doesn’t really feel like you’ve made much progress.
If that sounds familiar, I can tell you that you’re certainly not alone because it’s something I hear from people all the time.
Most people assume the problem is that they’re trying to do too much, they tell themselves they need to be more productive, better organised, or improve their time management, and sometimes there is truth to that.
But in my experience, there’s also something else going on.
The Invisible Mental Load
Mental load isn’t simply about how many things are on your to-do list, it’s everything your brain is trying to keep track of in the background.
- Trying to remember everything you need to do.
- Constant interruptions from emails, messages and notifications.
- Switching between tasks all day long.
- Carrying around unfinished tasks and conversations in your head.
- Making hundreds of small decisions throughout the day.
- Feeling like your attention is constantly being pulled in different directions.
Individually, none of those things seems particularly significant, but together they create a constant background noise that’s taking up mental energy throughout the day.
I often describe it like carrying a bag. Every task, reminder, interruption, unfinished conversation, decision, and worry gets dropped into it. At first, it doesn’t feel too heavy, but as the day goes on, the bag gets fuller and fuller until you’re carrying around far more than you realise.
Often, that’s what leaves people feeling mentally exhausted. It’s not necessarily just the amount they’ve done, but the amount their brain has been trying to process, remember, and respond to throughout the day.
A Modern Day Problem
One of the main things I want people to understand is that I don’t believe this is simply an individual problem, it’s a modern-life problem.
Our brains haven’t suddenly become weaker or less capable, it’s the environment we live and work in that has changed dramatically. Every day, our attention is pulled in countless different directions by emails, messages, meetings, social media, news, notifications, AI tools, and endless streams of information. And the important thing is that this isn’t happening by accident – there’s an entire economy built around capturing and holding our attention, and every interruption comes with a cost.
Researchers often refer to one of these costs as attention residue – even after we’ve switched back to the task we were originally working on, part of our attention often remains attached to whatever interrupted us. Multiply that by dozens of interruptions every day, and it’s easy to see why so many people feel mentally drained.
Then there are what psychologists often call open loops. These are unfinished tasks and unresolved decisions that keep popping back into our awareness because our brain naturally wants closure. It’s why you suddenly remember something you forgot just as you’re falling asleep, because your brain is trying to stop you forgetting.
The downside is that those unfinished tasks continue taking up valuable mental space until they’re dealt with.
From Reactive to Proactive
One of the biggest patterns I’ve noticed over the years is that many people think they have a workload problem. Sometimes they do, but very often they have a reactive way of living.
Without a clear plan, everything starts to feel urgent – other people’s priorities become our priorities, and we spend the day reacting instead of intentionally choosing where our attention and energy go. That means our brain is constantly making decisions in the moment, and that’s exhausting.
So if mental load is partly created by constantly reacting, constantly deciding, and constantly trying to remember everything, it makes sense that one of the best ways to reduce it is to create more structure.
One of the biggest things that’s helped both my clients and me over the years is something incredibly simple: Planning.
And while most people assume planning is just about productivity, I think that’s missing the bigger picture. Good planning reduces mental load, protects your attention and energy, and helps you move from reacting to everything around you to intentionally choosing where your time, energy, and focus go.
Ultimately, it changes the way you experience your day.
When you spend a few minutes planning your day or your week, you’ve already answered many of the questions your brain would otherwise have to solve in the moment.
- You’ve decided what’s important.
- You’ve thought about your time and your energy.
- You’ve created structure.
That structure gives your brain something to follow instead of constantly trying to work everything out as you go.
I often describe planning as moving from reactive to proactive. Your structure and the tools you use to maintain it are your anchor. Of course, life will always throw unexpected things at you, but having a plan gives you something to return to, even if you need to adjust it, it pulls you back into proactivity.
Protecting Your Attention
Once you’ve created that headspace through planning and getting things out of your head, it becomes much easier to be intentional about where your attention, focus, and energy go. Instead of constantly reacting to whatever appears in front of you, you have more capacity to pause and make conscious choices.
That might look like:
- Switching off unnecessary notifications.
- Checking emails at specific times rather than constantly.
- Batching similar tasks together.
- Working uninterrupted for 30–60 minutes.
None of these things are really possible if you’re constantly operating in firefighting mode. They become much easier because you’ve created enough structure to stop reacting and start choosing.
And for me, that’s really the bigger message. Supporting our wellbeing isn’t just about doing more – it’s about creating a way of living that works with our minds rather than against them.
Final Thought
I don’t think most of us are struggling because we’re disorganised or not trying hard enough, I think it’s more that we’re living in a world that’s constantly competing for our attention and working against our natural biology. And so, if we’re not intentional, it’s very easy to default into spending our lives reacting to whatever comes our way.
Modern life will always try to fill every bit of space we give it, the question is whether we’re going to let it.
For me, that’s why planning is so powerful. It’s not about colour-coded calendars or becoming hyper-organised; it’s about what planning facilitates – deciding where your attention and energy go instead of letting everything else decide for you.
Kate x
