Cognitive Load Mapping: Understanding Where Your Mental Energy Goes

Welcome to Mental Performance Unleashed with Emily Heird. Hey everyone, welcome into an all-new episode of Mental Performance Unleashed with Emily Heird. I am your host, Mike Leon. You know, Emily Heird is a licensed psychotherapist and certified mental performance mastery coach who's been helping attorneys and legal leaders perform at their best without burning out. She's been helping me as well too. She has another. Today's episode. We're going to be diving into cognitive load mapping. Another term I have no idea what it means and Emily is going to break it all down. It is simply put a practical way for lawyers to see exactly where their mental energy is going. From distinguishing the high-value task, managing the constant contact switching, Emily is going to break down how attorneys can protect their focus, reduce mental strain and prevent burnout before it starts. We all want to prevent burnout before it starts, Emily. It's good to see you as always. Let's talk about, and we talked about a recent episode about this cognitive overload, right? So why is cognitive overload matter for lawyers in these high-pressure environments? It's good to see you again, Mike. Glad to be here today. Yes. So cognitive overload matters in these high-pressure environments because for the legal professionals and other clients that I have, the brain is the instrument of performance. If a professional violinist's instrument is out of tune, you know, that violin is out of tune, then their performance suffers. If an athlete is out on the field and they have trained too hard, and the load of their weight is too heavy for them, then that puts them at risk of injury. So for the lawyer, the cognitive overload is the equivalent of overtraining and being at risk for injury or playing with the broken instruments. The legal industry and other corporate environments really reward the grind and working hard, and they believe that more hours equals more values, value, but there is a physiological limit to how much our brain can handle. And so when we are experiencing cognitive overload, then we cross over from being intentional and responsive to being reactive and going into survival mode. So this is when we start missing nuances in a contract, for example, or snapping at your associate. You stop being that wise counselor and being that fire extinguisher. And the other thing that I see when my clients come to me, they often are describing experiences of feeling anxious or burned out, stressed out, depressed, or even, you know, wondering if they have ADHD. And a lot of the times what it really boils down to is this idea of cognitive overload is what's causing their mental health symptoms. Emily, you just mentioned before about some signs of lawyers snapping at an associate, missing a detail in the contract. What are some other common signs that a lawyer's mental energy is being spent inefficiently? Yeah, so one of the most common signs I would say is that 4 p.m. fog, you know, if you find yourself staring at the same paragraph for 20 minutes or scrolling social media because you want to break or you just want to feel something, then that's another sign of energy bankruptcy. For me, I know when I was in the depths of my experience with burnout at 3 p.m. when I was talking to a client, I was just trying to do everything I could to stay present, even though I had felt like a MAC truck had hit me at that point. So it's really like, you know, are you in that foggy zone in the late afternoon? Does it feel like everything is taking you a ton of time and is arduous to get through? Another subtle sign is irritability. You know, when our cognitive load is maxed out, we really don't have a lot of capacity. I'm at my capacity. I'm at the end of my rope is what you might hear often. Our emotional regulation is not as strong as it could be because it's that same part of the brain that's managing all of the thinking and the decision making. So it is depleted from our ability to manage our emotions as well as it could. So that bandwidth to filter our impulses or maintain that sense of self control is low, it's depleted. Emily, in a previous episode, we talked about lawyers managing tasks, right? How can attorneys identify which tasks are really high value versus the ones that are low value in terms of what we've been talking about with cognitive energy? Yes. So the high value tasks we want to look at, again, like, what is the priority for today? What is going to move the needle the most today? There's always hundreds of tasks that we could be tending to, but what are the things that are of most importance that are going to give me that return on cognitive investments? So that might be drafting something, it might be preparing for trial, it might be some of my clients are preparing for board meetings and developing reports for that board meeting. So that is going to be an example of a high level task. The lower level tasks are going to be the administrative friction that people deal with, you know, chasing down signatures, dealing with your clients' emotion, handling a colleague who's difficult to engage with. So I tell my clients, you know, if you can do that task while you're kind of half distracted or watching TV, then that's a low level task. And so really, throughout the day, we want to look at, again, which one of those tasks need to be our priority and get it done first thing in the morning. And then which ones are the lower return on our cognitive investment and can either be done later in the afternoon or delegated, automated, or eliminated? So let me stay on that for a second because in that scenario, right, the lawyers kind of, you're telling them to distinguish between something that's maybe productive versus something that's purely draining. What do they do with that? Like, if it's deep legal analysis that they have to do versus something else that's my new show, how do they stay on task? Like, how do you keep them on task to identify that and distinguish between those? So one example would be to do an energy audit for a few days. Every 60 minutes or 90 minutes look at the tasks that you were doing, the mental effort that it took on a scale of 1 to 10, how hard is my brain working right now? The impact that that task had, how much does this task actually matter to the outcome of the case or the top priorities for my firm this week? And then energy, does this task drain me or does it energize me? And so if you see a pattern where you're exerting a 9 out of 10 on effort and it's a 2 out of 10 on impact, like, you know, you were obsessing over the font on your internal email or rewriting an email four or five times and you have found an energy leak. Also being aware of the energy drain is an opportunity to see what could be delegated to someone else. So for a period of time, we need to have some, like, observation and curiosity about how they're spending their time, what the return on that time is and then how much energy it is taking for my clients with ADHD. This audit is very important because oftentimes their internal clock is kind of offline. Their sense of time works a little bit different. So they might hyper focus on a low value task for 45 minutes and not realize that they've spent that amount of time on something that really we need to work on constraining to 5 to 10 minutes. But Emily, the font can't be times new Roman. It has to have impact. It needs to be aerial or something like that anyway. Let me ask you in that vein and with keeping with that theme, are there, like, small daily practices or some exercise that you introduced to kind of help these attorneys become aware of how they're spending their mental energy? Yeah, so, you know, before, like, when we get started, it's really auditing. Before you start to pay attention to these things, you're operating on autopilot. You're getting in, you're doing everything that you've always done. And we need to slow the process down. It takes a little bit of time, takes a little bit of effort. But if you don't have data on where you're spending your time, how much energy is taking, high value task, low value task, is it something that energizes you or drains you, then we can't make changes accordingly. So the first step is to spend time auditing, gathering data and seeing where things can be tweaked, where it can be refined. And then we start to put more structure in place, whether that's structure from a planning perspective, whether it's systems and workflows to streamline and reduce cognitive overload, where we can automate decisions and really start to reduce the cognitive overload, that's where we start to see capacity opening up and energy coming back and stress decreasing. When you share some common surprises or insights, specific patterns, you've seen when attorneys start mapping their cognitive load for the first time. A lot of times, clients don't understand how much emotional labor they spend throughout the day. I mean, lawyers are taught not to have emotions and to really suppress their emotions to be the best advocate that they can be, but a lawyer's job is very emotionally draining. You are dealing with clients oftentimes who are coming to you in a time of crisis or have high levels of emotional reactivity, so you have the clients' emotions to deal with. You have your colleagues' emotional moods to deal with sometimes. Sometimes the partners are difficult personalities to deal with, or you're just dealing with a lot of personality and ego in the legal industry. Or also going back to that piece of helping others in the office, answering questions, supervising staff. All of that, it's not only a cognitive drain, but it's also an emotional drain. They're surprised by that, and we work on strategies around boundaries for those things. We work on strategies around compassion versus empathy so that you aren't draining yourself emotionally, but then also how to connect with and release your emotions and stress, because as much as you want to pretend like you are not emotional, the emotions are in there. If you don't deal with them and release them, that's when it gets stored up as chronic unmanaged stress in the body and leads to burnout. Emily, one thing I did want to ask you was about the context switching that we talked about. A little bit in this episode and in previous episodes, moving between cases, client-caused meetings, how does that also affect cognitive load? That's a big drain on cognitive energy. It's requiring more decision-making from that cognitive overload perspective, but also a change in emotional demands of the role. If you are in a client meeting, let's say there's a new client, you are presenting as that on attorney who's really listening and gathering data and you want to onboard them as a client. That's a different performance role and then you walk back to your office, you answer some questions from your assistant, get back to your chair and start drafting on legal work. These are three different areas of your brain and your performance that you're bringing out and that's draining from a mental energy perspective. Your brain has to switch between the different rules of the roles. It's asking, am I executing the right rules for this environment and this role and so on as you move between these different roles? I encourage people to move into batching and do all your review tasks at once, spend a dedicated period of time in your email, schedule client meetings for certain days and times of the week but really be strategic about going back and forth between different roles so that you don't have to think about the different rules for that role. Emily, as we put a bow on today's episode, if an attorney came to you, they want to start reducing their cognitive load starting tomorrow. What's the first practical step you would recommend they take? Well, there's a lot of starting points but if you want to start reducing your load tomorrow then the night before I encourage you to look at the next day, look at your quote unquote to-do list and find that one task that requires your elite brain and then one task that is cognitive noise. Again, kind of coming back to like what's important now, WIN or what's the priority? And then as you structure your day, decide already before you get to the office at the first thing that you're going to do before anything else is that one task that requires your elite brain, reduce any distractions, stay out of your email and get it done. And then find a way to eliminate, automate or delegate that cognitive noise task. So the more that we can reduce unnecessary cognitive energy drains or decisions that we have to make, then the more cognitive capacity we're going to open up. Love the acronym. What's important now, I like that. Emily, thank you so much for the time, the insights I appreciate it as always. Thank you, Mike. That's it for today's episode of Mental Performance Unleash with Emily Heird. If you want to learn more about how Emily helps attorneys perform at their best without burning out, do me a favor, visit VantageViewCoaching.com today to connect with Emily. Thanks for listening, but before you go, do me a favor, hit like, subscribe, leave a review and comment, or share the episode with someone who's maybe feeling a little bit of burnout. Let me a little cognitive overload. As always, I'm Mike Leon. See you everybody next time.