It seems easy to underestimate the extent to which one “cognitive load” might sap your capacity for others. This underestimation could be having detrimental effects you aren’t aware of.

For instance, if you are trying to have a deep and important conversation in a noisy and distracting environment, it may seem that it’s merely hard to hear. But, it’s possible that the effort you expend trying to understand the other person’s words causes fewer cognitive resources to be available for actually processing the conversation.

There’s a wide variety of loads that can drain on your cognition in this manner. Basically, ambient things your brain either attempts to process, adjust for, or draw your conscious attention to.

This suggests the idea of trying to make the information as easy to cognitively process as possible when you’re trying to think deeply or do difficult work.

For example, when:

• reading a challenging article, make the font size on your computer bigger and increase the screen brightness so that your brain has to expend less effort visually processing the sentences

• doing work that requires intense focus, use earplugs or put on headphones with gentle white noise or music without lyrics (ideally music that you are very familiar with) so that your brain isn’t trying to make sense of all the natural sounds around you. This neat site let’s you create your own customized white noise, exactly to your tastes: http://bit.ly/2nQIZuN

• you are trying to get difficult work done on your computer, move all the clutter from your desk (or, at least, out of your line of sight) and make the computer window fullscreen

• you’re about to have an important meeting but you are hungry or thirsty, quickly eat or drink something so that your physical needs won’t be subtly drawing your attention throughout

• there is something blinking that you can see out of the corner of your eye from your desk, go put some dark tape over it

• you need to get something done, but you feel anxious and are having a lot of worried thoughts pop up, take 5 minutes to do deep breathing or meditation or whatever else works to quickly calm you down so that your brain doesn’t expend so many resources on the things that are worrying you

• other people you know who are walking by are drawing your attention during a conversation, rotate yourself relative to your speaking partner so that you can’t see the other people moving around the room