The Hidden Cost of Everyday Life

Have you ever reached the end of the day feeling mentally exhausted, even though you haven't done anything that seems particularly demanding? You may have gone through your usual routine of work, looking after your home, answering messages, making meals, dealing with people and simply trying to stay on top of the usual responsibilities of life, but at the end of the day your brain literally feels like it has run a marathon.

There is a reason for that, and it has less to do with how much you 'physically' accomplished than you might think.

Your brain is constantly making decisions, organizing information and figuring out what needs your attention.

• What should I do first?

• When should I exercise?

• What am I going to make for dinner?

• Did I remember to send that email?

• Can I fit this in today?

• Should I respond now or later?

Looking at these decisions individually, they may seem insignificant, but the cumulative demand of constant organizing, prioritizing, initiating and shifting between tasks can consume a tremendous amount of mental energy.

This is where executive function comes into the picture.

Executive function is the collection of mental skills that helps us navigate everyday life. It allows us to plan, organize, remember, prioritize, begin something, shift our attention, regulate our responses and follow through.

We typically only notice executive function when something becomes difficult, however all of these processes require energy, particularly when life is already demanding more of us than usual.

Every Decision Has a Cost

We know that decision fatigue can happen when we're faced with important choices, such as changing careers, making a major purchase or deciding where we want our life to go. But, much of the mental fatigue we experience actually happens from the accumulation of much smaller decisions that occur thoughtlessly throughout an ordinary day.

Consider what can be involved in something as simple as going for a walk. You have to decide when you're going, what you're wearing, where you're going, whether you have enough time and what else needs to happen before you leave. If you've been absorbed in another task, you also have to shift your attention away from it and transition yourself into something completely different.

None of those individual steps is particularly hard to accomplish, but all together they require your brain to organize, prioritize, initiate and adapt.

For many people, these processes happen with relatively little conscious effort. For others, particularly when stress, fatigue, sensory demands or other cognitive pressures are already high, the same sequence can feel overwhelmingly difficult.

It is important to be careful about interpreting 'difficulty getting started' as laziness or lack of motivation. You can genuinely want to do something and still find that your brain doesn't have the available capacity to organize the steps required to make it happen.

Executive Function Isn't Just About Productivity

Executive function is often mentioned as though its primary purpose is helping us become more productive, organized or efficient. I think that gives us a very narrow understanding of what it actually does for us, because executive function has much more to do with how we experience and navigate our lives than simply how much we accomplish.

When your executive capacity is being stretched, everyday activities can begin to feel harder than they logically should.

• You may know that you need to make dinner and still find yourself standing in the kitchen unable to decide what to prepare.

• You may genuinely want to exercise but struggle to figure out when, where or what you should do.

• You may have a list of things that need to happen and feel increasingly overwhelmed simply looking at it, even though none of the individual tasks seems particularly complicated.

That experience creates a frustrating gap between intention and action.

We know what we want to do, we may even understand exactly why it matters, and yet something between knowing and doing isn't connecting.

Rather than immediately questioning our motivation or discipline, it can be more helpful to recognize that our capacity changes depending on what else our brain and body are already managing. Sleep, stress, nourishment, emotional demands, sensory stimulation, physical energy and the constant pressure of making decisions all influence how much executive capacity we have available.

Your Environment Is Part of Your Executive Function

One of the most powerful things we can do is stop assuming that every aspect of managing our lives needs to happen inside our heads.

We already understand this principle in many other areas of life. We use calendars because we don't expect our brains to remember every appointment, alarms because we know we won't always remember something at exactly the right moment and lists because writing something down means we don't have to keep holding it in our working memory.

The same principle can be applied to everyday wellbeing.

Having a few familiar breakfasts available can remove unnecessary decision-making in the morning. Keeping things where you naturally use them can reduce the amount of searching and remembering required. Having a regular movement routine can give you a starting point on the days when deciding what to do feels like more work than the exercise itself. Preparing food ahead of time can make nourishment much easier when your capacity is already being used elsewhere.

They are ways of designing your environment so that your brain doesn't have to work unnecessarily hard to accomplish things you already know are important to you.

The Wisdom of Making Things Easier

Within todays wellness culture, there is a tendency to turn every healthy behaviour into another responsibility we need to manage. We are told to eat well, exercise regularly, sleep properly, manage our stress, drink enough water, meditate, prepare our meals, remember our supplements and somehow make time for ourselves in the middle of everything else.

Each recommendation does have value, but when they are all presented as things we must consciously remember and execute, even taking care of ourselves can become cognitively exhausting.

The most supportive change, I've found, is removing some of the decisions that make the wellness journey difficult to follow.

It is in routine.

A routine doesn't have to mean living according to a rigid schedule or taking the spontaneity out of your life. It can simply give your brain a familiar pathway to follow when you don't have the capacity to figure everything out from scratch. When something becomes familiar, fewer decisions are required, and that leaves more mental energy available for the things that genuinely require your attention.

There is an intelligence in making life easier for yourself. We don't need to prove that we can carry everything simply because we technically can.

Protect the Energy You Actually Need

An imporant question to ask yourself is, what do you want our mental energy to be available for.

Your ability to focus, adapt, solve problems, respond to unexpected situations and make thoughtful decisions is incredibly valuable. Life will inevitably ask you to use those abilities, and there will always be circumstances that cannot be anticipated or organized in advance.

The goal, then, isn't to eliminate decisions or create a perfectly organized life. It is to become more aware of where your executive energy is going and whether you are spending it on things that actually deserve it.

When you reduce some of the unnecessary cognitive load, you create more capacity for the parts of life that require your attention, creativity, relationships, presence and judgment.

I think this is an important shift in the way we think about caring for the brain.

We don't always need to find another way to make ourselves more efficient, more disciplined or more productive. Sometimes we need to recognize how much our brain is already being asked to manage and make thoughtful choices about what we can take off its plate.

Your mental energy is limited, the more thoughtfully you use it, the more you have available for the people, experiences, and things that matter most to you.