Why am I so tired? The Attention residue and Ziegarnik effect

Do you feel exhausted before the end of the year, is your brain foggy and you can’t wait for holidays to take a break?

No need to wait until the break; start having rest by making use of the two related neuroscience concepts – the Zeigarnik effect and Attention Residue.

The Zeigarnik effect, named after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik from the early 20th century, states that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. For example, if you were preparing a presentation and got interrupted by an email, this presentation task would still be pending in your brain. So part of your attention will be allocated to it and prevent you from engaging fully with the new task. As such burdens accumulate throughout the day, at the end you would feel exhausted and unproductive.

The Attention Residue theory, based on the Zeigarnik effect, was formulated by psychologist Sophie Leroy a few decades later. It postulates that we need to stop thinking about one task to fully transition our attention and perform well on another. However, it’s difficult to do, as we typically continue thinking about several tasks at the same time.

Every unfinished task drains your energy and limits your ability to do complex deep thinking and problem-solving, as well as sleep. Your subsequent task performance suffers. Attention residue happens when we leave a task or a decision unfinished, or when we get interrupted, or when we anticipate that the task would need to be completed at some point.

Imagine a typical workday day filled with juggling multiple digital tasks. If you're simultaneously thinking about a report, a meeting, answering WhatsApp and see new emails coming in, the residue from each task impairs your focus on the current one, leading to a drain on mental energy. All unfinished items on your to-do list, too, stay prominently in your mind. As a consequence, your ability to tackle new tasks or make decisions gets compromised, as the mental residue of unfinished business continues to demand attention and create a constant mental background noise.

Unresolved decisions clutter the mind, making focusing on new tasks difficult. For example, if you cannot decide if you should take the Consciously Digital Certification course or not, the worst thing that you can do for your brain is to keep dwelling on the decision and postponing it until the deadline. Postponing it doesn’t add anything to your decision-making process but simply consumes more energy from your brain and makes you unhappy, and more likely to procrastinate on other important things. This persistent attention can lead to heightened stress and decreased overall productivity.

The good news is, now that you know the effect on your energy, stress, and focus, you can reduce it. How?

1.???? Do an audit of all decisions and things to do that you’ve been delaying to act upon in 2023, and do one of the two things with them – either do them/set up a deadline by when you’ll do them, or recognize that you will never do them, and just let them go.

2.???? Before you go to bed tonight, try to write out the list of all things you should have done today but did not (this way, you are outsourcing it to paper and cleaning up the brain). You’ll see how much better your brain feels.

3.???? Try to limit digital multitasking in the coming days so you don’t create attention residue.