A topic clients often bring up in therapy is feeling unable to act due to feeling overwhelmed by the consequences of acting, or struggling with a persistent feeling of stress that makes coping with reactions to life events feel impossible.
At the root of these concerns is often a common obstacle: Mental Bandwidth Overload.
Cognitive bandwidth is the brain’s ability to use mental processes effectively. Bandwidth is two things:
- Cognitive capacity (problem solving)
- Executive function (attention, planning and judgement)
When you have low bandwidth, it’s harder to solve problems, your attention and ability to focus go out the window, you can’t plan your time and your ability to make good judgements drops. Put simply, everything gets harder.
What goes unconsidered is that everything we do each day takes up bandwidth, whether conscious or unconscious, intentional or automatic. The range this covers is significant, and it includes things like:
- Tasks yet to begin or complete
- Conversations that are still ongoing with someone
- Social media posts you want to or do respond to
- Compartmentalized thoughts or feelings in response to a trigger
- Anticipated physical needs (food, hygiene, etc)
While not comprehensive, this list provides some insight into pitfall habits in our lives that can be consuming mental bandwidth when we don’t realize it. Small common things like being on our devices, our tendencies to avoid conflict, even waiting too long to eat breakfast in the morning, all have impacts on how much free bandwidth we have available.
And we need that free bandwidth, because it’s what we use to process in the moment experiences. When we don’t have much available, we have limited capacity to think and understand our feelings in response to an event. People who have jobs that push them to the limit are well aware of response fatigue, and the lack of an ability to have “anything to give” in response to something. Existing in this state is something we can accidentally be doing to ourselves, not because we’re a nightshift ICU nurse or high volume call center phone jockey, but because we’re keeping a bunch of small ongoing tasks running in the background of our brains.
So what helps?
We get focus back when we practice at focusing our awareness on what those ongoing processes are, assessing them for their roles in our lives, and figuring out which ones we can close, which ones we need to put in time boxes, and which ones we may need to practice abstinence from because of how compulsively we engage in them.
One example of a tool experiment I will try with clients is turning off notifications on your phone, because our brains create representational processes for the notifications that run in the background. There’s a little percentage of bandwidth always being consumed to run a process that has the sole function of reminding you to check your notifications. People often find after practicing having their notifications deactivated for a few days, a feeling of weight or pressure being removed from their present moment experiences, a sensory representation of the bandwidth they’re getting back.
For more tools, tips, and ideas on ways to improve your executive functioning, cope with ADHD symptoms, and improve your day to day experiences with focus, visit the contact form linked below to sign up for a free consultation call.
Sean Sparks Counseling 