Cognitive Overload

 

Photo by Michael Reuter
via Creative Commons

A few months after I moved from Indiana to Utah, I started carrying a clear, plastic stadium purse? Why?  I kept losing my phone and my keys. I am in my early 60s, so some might assume that I am showing signs of dementia. However, I have another hypothesis. 

I have been experiencing cognitive overload. 

I was trying to manage too many new situations at once, and my brain could not process all of the demands: 

• Setting up a new house, which required furnishing the house since we can sans furniture
• Finding places to shop and new doctors.
• Supporting Michael (who was hospitalized with pneumonia for two weeks)  
• Setting up new friendships.
• Getting established in a new congregation including accepting a new calling.
• Starting a part-time job teaching a new topic (water conservation)
• Learning a new course management system (Canvas)
• Starting a part-time job at the local library.
• Learning new software at the library for cataloguing books and circulating books as well as software for timesheets, shift reports, and processing payments. Also, the cash register had software, too.  I also learned Canva for making brochures, etc. (not to be confused with Canvas). 
• Learning 25 different positions at the Manti Temple as an ordinance worker.
• Establishing a new exercise regime at four locations with four sets of teachers / classmates
• Caring for a geriatric dog.
• Joining four different book clubs (and running two of them)
• Joining the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers and presenting twice on ancestors. 
• Volunteering at the local clothing bank. 
• Judging for a book prize that required me to read 100 books in three months. 
• Starting caring for two sourdough starters and baking two loaves of bread a week.

This created a lot of demands on my cognition, and I had trouble remembering where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to be doing, and what materials I needed to bring with me. 

What did I do to cope? 

First, I got the clear purse so that I could do an inventory on the basics: wallet, keys, phone. 

Next, I started putting every commitment in my phone with an alarm for a day before and an hour before. 

Additionally, I set three different alarms: I got a sunrise alarm that takes 30 minutes for the light to progress from red through orange and yellow to white before the sounds of birds chirping. I also got an alarm clock that is battery operated. 

Finally, I downloaded a Buddha clock app that chimes in increasing frequency over fifteen minutes as a way to cue me to leave the house in time.  (A single alert tempts me to try to do "one more more thing," but the Buddha clock kicks me in the behind to get moving more rapidly over the 15  minutes prior to my departure time.)

I do admit that I have been a bit slovenly about housekeeping unless we were hosting guests for dinner or for an overnight stay. 

I also have started to go to bed earlier and to completely crash on Sundays (other than attending church in the morning and a book group for two of the four Sundays per month.) 

I also have not been good about maintaining long-distance friendships.  I am hoping to be acclimated to my new social settings and my new software programs soon so that I can reconnect with friends from Indiana, Kansas, West Virginia, DC, California, and other towns in Utah. 

Related:

Cognitive Changes: The Usual Suspects