I caught myself the other morning standing in the kitchen, coffee in hand, paralysed by three different notifications that had come in before I’d even fully woken up. It wasn't that the decisions were hard. It was just that there were so many of them, already, and the sun wasn't even properly up.
Our brains seem to be having a bad day. Pretty much all the time.
Right now, yours is likely juggling half a dozen micro-decisions while you try to read this. Should you grab another coffee? Is that Slack notification urgent? Do you really have time for this article?
From SMS to push notifications, emails to social posts, our phones have about a million different ways to let us know there’s a new "limited time offer" that expires in 3 hours. That's ignoring the forty-seven browser tabs open in your mind, and the project deadline looming like a storm cloud.
And that's before you even get to the real stuff - concerns about the world, your family, people you actually know.
💡We act like mental bandwidth is a renewable resource that refills instantly. But every notification you ignore is still tax; it costs you something just to look away.
I want to talk about cognitive overload. Not just as a business metric to optimise, but as a reality we all live with.
The battery we can't see
"The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy." – Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet
In the last Stacked Behaviours essay, I mentioned that Forbes had highlighted research indicating that we receive an estimated 10,000 messages a day. In this context, self-care begins to feel more like self-defence. It seems like every little task now comes with a marketing message. Even when all you want to do is buy a new toothbrush.
We can't defend against messages coming from all around us. We can try to restrict our attention to those that deserve it - who deserve our energy.
Paying attention to that battery doesn’t just help you receive better quality signals from the world. It makes for a more empathetic way to live. When your task is to buy a new electric toothbrush, you naturally lean towards the brands that make it easier for you. You choose those that simplify what they're offering, and you might even accept a little more cost for a more straightforward proposition.
That overwhelm has a direct relationship to the value of a founder's offering. But here's the thing: often the smartest, most well-meaning people are the ones creating this complexity.
When intelligence becomes the problem
A friend was telling me about their struggles with their climate action organisation recently. Despite having important work and clear messaging, people couldn't remember how their different projects connected. The newsletter, the deep-dive reports, the action campaigns - none of it stuck together in people's minds.
"It's like each piece exists in isolation," they said. "People care about what we're doing, but they can't seem to remember how our stuff connects."
This friend is brilliant. They understand climate science, systems thinking, and stakeholder engagement. But their intelligence was working against them. They wanted to show the full complexity of their work, prove their expertise, provide comprehensive value.
💡It’s easy to mistake thoroughness for value. But when your audience is already drowning, adding more 'value' just feels like adding more weight.
The result? Cognitive overload for everyone trying to support them.
I see this pattern everywhere. Wonderful founders trying to solve important problems but accidentally complicating the lives of the customers they serve. The desire to prove themselves, to over-provide, to demonstrate sophistication often creates the very friction that prevents people from engaging with their mission.
What's actually happening in our minds
"The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol." – Rory Sutherland, Alchemy
When we encounter too much complexity, our brains essentially shut down. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed us that we operate two mental systems: System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slower, effortful, rational) (Kahneman, 2011).
Most of the time, we're running on System 1. It's efficient, effortless, and handles routine decisions without conscious thought. But when something requires effort to understand – when we hit cognitive load – we're forced into System 2 mode.
💡Most marketing demands deep, rational thought for decisions that should be automatic. You're asking for premium mental energy at a discount rate.
System 2 is expensive. It drains mental energy quickly, and when people are already overwhelmed, they simply won't make the effort.
Research on the Paradox of Choice demonstrates this beautifully. When psychologist Sheena Iyengar offered shoppers 24 jam varieties, 60% stopped to browse but only 3% made a purchase. When she offered just 6 varieties, fewer people stopped (40%) but purchases jumped tenfold to 30% (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000).
Choice complexity kills action, even when people care about the outcome.
The real cost of good intentions
Here's where this becomes particularly painful for climate organisations, nonprofits, and purpose-driven businesses: the importance of your work can justify complexity in your mind. Climate change is complex. Social justice is nuanced. Sustainability involves trade-offs. Even basic ethical marketing is a mine field of “anti-hypocrisy sense checks”.
But complexity in your mission doesn't require complexity in your experience.
I know a climate nonprofit that was obsessing over donor segmentation. Their donation form asked for income bracket, environmental priorities, communication preferences, volunteer interests, and referral source. Completion rate: 3.2%.
They stripped it down to name, email, and amount. Completion jumped to 18.6%. Within three months, they gained £47,000 in additional monthly donations - not by explaining their work better, but by making support effortless.
When people's brains are already maxed out from daily digital chaos, every additional bit of complexity you add becomes a competitive disadvantage. You're not just competing with other organisations; you're competing with every notification, every decision, every cognitive demand they've already encountered today.
The empathy solution
The most successful purpose-driven organisations have learnt this lesson: truly empathetic design always prioritises the customer's cognitive capacity over the creator's need to be comprehensive.
Take Patagonia's "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign. Climate action involves incredibly complex systems thinking, but their message achieved perfect simplicity: consume less. Zero cognitive load, maximum emotional impact.
Or consider how the climate tech startup I mentioned earlier grew from 200 to 12,000 newsletter subscribers in eight months. Instead of explaining carbon capture technology, they simply said: "Climate change feels overwhelming. We find the solutions that actually work and explain them in 3 minutes every Tuesday."
System 1 simple. System 2 depth available for those who wanted it. The result? 47% of subscribers became monthly supporters, compared to an industry average of 8%.
Your cognitive load audit
The fix starts with recognising where you're accidentally creating friction. Map every decision point in your supporter journey. Count every form field, menu option, and piece of information you're asking people to process.
Ask yourself:
Does this serve their goal or my need to appear thorough?
Could I eliminate this choice with a smart default?
What would happen if I removed this entirely?
If someone already cares about my cause, what's the fastest path to meaningful action?
Remember: people's mental bandwidth is more precious than their money. When you waste their cognitive energy, they'll find someone who doesn't – often a competitor who understood this principle before you did.
Building for overwhelmed minds
Our brains are maxed out, and that's not changing anytime soon. The organisations that thrive will be those who become cognitive sanctuaries – places where important decisions feel effortless and meaningful action requires minimal mental effort.
This isn't about dumbing down your mission. It's about respecting that the people you serve are already overwhelmed, and your job is to make their path to supporting you as frictionless as possible.
When you design for overwhelmed brains, people begin associating ease of engagement with competence and trustworthiness. Cognitive simplicity becomes a competitive advantage that no marketing budget can replicate.
Next time, we'll explore how this understanding transforms the way we architect choices, and why the most powerful decision-making experiences feel like no decision at all.