THE INVISIBLE WEIGHT WE ALL CARRY

Like most working mothers, I juggle.

- By Farzana Baduel

I juggle being a mother, a wife, a daughter, a businesswoman who runs a strategic communications firm, and someone who sits on several charity boards.Multitasking is a constant companion. Some days I carry it with ease, other days it feels like an overpacked suitcase that refuses to close.

It often makes me think about cognitive load, that invisible weight we carry inside our heads, the mental effort it takes to process, decide, remember and respond. We live in an age that rewards busy. The modern world celebrates the one who answers emails while stirring a saucepan, joins back-to-back calls while scrolling through a news feed, and still posts a polished photo of it all Yet beneath that glossy surface, our brains are working harder than ever. We are running high-performance engines with no time for maintenance.

Cognitive load theory was developed by the Australian psychologist John Sweller in the 1980s. In simple terms, it tells us that the brain has a limited amount of mental bandwidth, what psychologists call working memory. This is the part of our mind that juggles information in real time. Sweller found that when our working memory is overloaded, we start to lose efficiency. We make poorer decisions. We miss details. We feel exhausted not because of physical effort, but because our mental engine has overheated. He divided this load into three types. The intrinsic load is the natural complexity of the task itself. The extraneous load is the mental clutter added by poor systems or distractions. The germane load is the effort we invest in making sense of what we are learning or doing. A well-designed day, like a well-designed classroom, reduces the unnecessary load and frees up space for the meaningful work.