A few days ago I was at a specialist appointment with one of my kids. At some point the conversation turned to teen fatigue across the school week – the kind of bone-tired-by-Thursday feeling that a lot of parents will recognise. The specialist responded in a very matter-of-fact way: “It’s cognitive load”.
I thought about that comment a lot during the drive home, and how cognitive load was impacting my kid, along with the role of it in the modern workplace.
I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about cognitive load in the context of technology – tool sprawl, notification overload, the mental cost of switching between systems. But sitting in that car, I realised I’d been quietly ignoring something obvious. The physical environment of work creates cognitive load too. Constantly. And it affects everyone, not just people who are neurodivergent, and not just people who identify as sensitive to their surroundings. Anyone.
You don’t have to be autistic to find a loud open-plan office hard to concentrate in. You don’t have to have ADHD to lose your train of thought when three people walk past your hot desk mid-sentence.
Here are a few examples to explore how cognitive load comes up in the workplace, with some thoughts on what actually helps.
Noise
Open-plan offices are loud in a very particular way. It’s not just volume, it’s the unpredictability. A sudden burst of laughter, a nearby phone call, a conversation that starts just within earshot. Each sound is an involuntary attention redirect. Your brain processes it whether you asked it to or not.
What can help: Noise-cancelling headphones are the obvious one, but the cultural permission to use them matters just as much as the hardware. Teams also benefit from having explicit “focus zones” or quiet hours, not because everyone needs silence, but because predictability reduces the ambient monitoring your brain does just waiting for the next interruption.
Lighting
Harsh fluorescent lighting, glare on screens, or the flicker that most people never consciously notice, these things place a low-level load on your visual and sensory processing systems all day. It rarely registers as “the lighting is bothering me.” It registers as vague irritability or a headache by 2pm.
What can help: Wherever possible, access to natural light is really important, along with desk lamps as an alternative to overhead lighting. And simply knowing this is a real factor rather than a personal quirk can help people advocate for their own environment without feeling like they’re being difficult.
Hot-desking and the “where do I set up?” problem
The mental cost of hot-desking isn’t just logistical. Every morning, before you’ve done a single piece of work, you’re making a series of micro-decisions: where to sit, whether your preferred spot is taken, how to arrange your things, whether the person next to you is going to be on calls all day. That’s cognitive overhead before 9am. Typing all those factors felt like I was describing my autistic preferences, but this really does impact anyone. We all have preferences and a desire to work a certain way, and the desk is a crucial factor.
What can help: Consistency is crucial, even within a flexible model. Designated zones for different work types (focus work, collaborative work, calls) reduce the daily decision load considerably. This also helps people choose the environment that works for them or suits their day. We need some choice rather than feeling like cattle in a generic no choice paddock.
Social dynamics and the cost of reading the room
This one is rarely talked about as a cognitive load issue, but it is one. Every interaction at work involves a layer of social processing running in the background. We have to read tone, navigating relationships, managing how you’re coming across, and even pick up on group dynamics. In an open-plan environment, that processing doesn’t really switch off. You’re not just working, you’re also constantly monitoring the social temperature of the room. Depending on the person, it can be irritating to exhausting.
For some people this is largely unconscious… lucky them! For others (particularly those who find social ambiguity draining) it’s a significant and exhausting overhead that sits on top of the actual work all day. Don’t get me started on the hidden work neurodivergent folk are doing constantly just to exist and participate in a workplace.
What can help: Clear, direct communication norms reduce the interpretive load considerably. When people know what’s expected of them socially (how feedback is given, how conflict is handled, what “checking in” actually means on this team) there’s less mental energy spent trying to decode it. Psychological safety isn’t just a culture metric. It’s a cognitive load reducer.
The commute
For most people, the commute arrives at both ends of the day, when cognitive resources are either freshest or most depleted. A crowded train, navigating traffic, or the sensory load of a busy station. None of it is neutral. It either primes you for the day in a depleted state, or pushes you further past empty on the way home. It impacts how we arrive and the mood our colleagues encounter. Or it can determine our evening and how we feel after a day at work. And this changes day to day. A gusty freezing walking to the station, or being pushed together on a tram in extreme heat… ewww… so many possibilities to impact us!
What can help: This one is harder to solve structurally, but reframing the commute as transition time rather than wasted time can help. Some people use it to decompress deliberately with music, a podcast, or just doing nothing. Others find it useful for low-demand tasks. The point is choosing how you use it, rather than arriving at work already running a deficit. I really do think smart phones have helped people with commute challenges by occupying them, blocking out the world or helping them cope. Even a good book on a long train journey can help a commute feel more worthwhile.
Lunch and the “what are we doing?” problem
Unstructured social time sounds like a break. For a lot of people, navigating the unspoken norms of the lunch hour (where to go, who to sit with, whether to join a group conversation) is its own kind of load. Particularly for people who find social ambiguity draining. Being asked, not being asked, can cause anxiety. Or if you join the group, the decision making and courtesy in the lunch social time can be hard, along with small talk and sensory challenges of a cafe or restaurant.
What can help: Predictability helps here too. A standing lunch group, a regular walk, or the explicit permission to eat alone without it being read as antisocial. Psychological safety around how people spend their break time is underrated. It needs to be ok to isolate and be in our bubble. Lunch break can help many people cope, destress, recoup as part of their workday. And for those who have the desire or energy to make their lunch break a social event, that is great, but understanding of all needs matters.
Work allocation and the “am I doing the right things?” problem
When priorities aren’t clear, or when work is tracked inconsistently, there’s a particular kind of low-level anxiety that sets in. It’s not dramatic, and I think it rarely surfaces as a complaint. It shows up as a background hum of uncertainty: Is this the most important thing I should be working on right now? Did that task fall through the cracks? Is someone else waiting on me for something I’ve forgotten?
That ambient uncertainty is cognitive load. Your brain is holding open loops which are like unresolved questions about what’s expected, what’s complete, and what’s next. And those loops take up working memory whether you’re consciously thinking about them or not. This can unravel a person gradually over time, or just add to their daily overwhelm.
What can help: Clear prioritisation, consistent ways of tracking work, and regular check-ins that close the loop rather than create new ones are really important. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate system, it just has to be shared and predictable. When people can trust that the important things are visible somewhere reliable, their brain can let go of the monitoring, and that’s a meaningful amount of mental space returned.
The through-line in all of this is the same one I keep coming back to with technology: cognitive load is not a personal failing. It’s a design problem. The environments we work in were largely not designed with the limits of human attention and working memory in mind.
That doesn’t mean individuals are powerless. But it does mean that when you arrive home exhausted on a Thursday and can’t quite explain why, it might be worth looking at the whole day, not just the screen time. Think about which of these areas are impacting you. Get to know yourself a bit more – your challenges across the day and where slight changes could improve the daily experience.