The Weight We Ask Our Minds to Lift

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This week I’ve been thinking about mental energy—how we spend it, how we waste it, and how we protect it. In engineering, you learn quickly that every system has a load limit, and the human mind is no different. Over thousands of hours working with students, I’ve seen how managing cognitive load can make the difference between a concept clicking in seconds or never landing at all.

On Focus and Cognitive Load

Some days you finish work and feel like you’ve run a marathon—without moving more than a few feet. Other times, you can spend hours on something and end up more energized than when you started.

That difference?

It often comes down to two variables: focus and cognitive load.

Think of focus as the narrowness of your attention—how tightly you’re tuned in to one thing.

Think of cognitive load as the mental weight you’re carrying—the amount of information you’re holding, processing, and making sense of at once.

When you put those two on a grid, you get a simple but revealing picture:

Mapping your mental workload: focus on one axis, cognitive load on the other. Where you spend your time determines not just output—but energy and clarity.

High Focus + High Cognitive Load — "Flow" The surgeon in the middle of a delicate operation. The chess player deep in a match. The student working through a proof they almost understand, where each step demands everything they've got. Your mind is fully engaged and under a heavy lift. Done right, it can be exhilarating. Done wrong, it's exhausting. I've seen students hit this zone when we derive something from first principles—they're locked in, and the clock disappears.

High Focus + Low Cognitive Load — "Grind" Proofreading for typos. Long-distance driving. Drilling multiplication tables for the twentieth time. You have to pay attention, but the mental weight is light. This can be meditative… or mind-numbing. It's necessary work, but it shouldn't be where students spend most of their time.

Low Focus + High Cognitive Load — "Create" This one is misunderstood because it doesn't look like work. Brainstorming, strategic planning, staring at the ceiling while an idea takes shape—your mind is juggling complex threads, but in a diffuse, wandering way. Many breakthroughs happen here. When a student walks away from a problem and comes back twenty minutes later with the answer, this is the zone they were in.

Low Focus + Low Cognitive Load — "Rest" Staring out the window. Listening to music. Letting your thoughts idle. The mental equivalent of putting your feet up. This isn't wasted time—this is where you recharge. Without it, the other three zones degrade.

The Teacher’s Role in Managing Load

I've spent over 4,000 hours one-on-one with students.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is this: a great teacher doesn’t just pass on information—they lighten the mental weight required to understand it.

If you give a student a concept wrapped in jargon, ambiguity, and tangents, you’re asking them to bench-press twice their limit. But if you strip the idea to its essence and present it clearly, something magical happens. You can see the shift in their eyes: Oh… that’s it? That’s easy.

That clarity doesn’t happen by accident. It starts with clear thinking. Without that, even the most polished explanation will land awkwardly.

Cognitive Load Is a Muscle

Like any muscle, your mind gets stronger with intentional use—and weaker with haphazard strain. You wouldn’t lift a heavy weight with bad form and expect to get stronger without getting hurt. Mental work is no different.

The right kind of cognitive load—delivered in the right dose—builds capacity. Too much, too fast, and form breaks down. That’s where burnout starts.

This Week's Challenge: The Load Audit

Map your week. Take five minutes and list your major activities—then place each one in a quadrant.

1. Tally the zones. Where are you spending the most time? Most people are stuck in "flow" and "grind" with almost nothing in "create" or "rest."
2. Find the imbalance. If you're burned out, you probably have too much grind and not enough rest. If you feel productive but uncreative, you're likely short on diffuse thinking time.
3. Make one swap. Replace thirty minutes of grind this week with deliberate rest or open-ended creation. Take a walk without your phone. Sit with a problem without trying to solve it.
4. If you teach or lead: Look at your students' or team's week through this lens. Where are you overloading them? Where could you lighten the cognitive weight so the concept lands faster?

We don't always get to choose the weight we lift. But we can choose how we lift it.

About the Author Matt Starolis is the founder of Engineering Confidence, a transformative mentorship practice built on over 4,000 hours of one-to-one mentorship and deep AI-driven analysis. His work is dedicated to helping ambitious learners—and their families—build lives defined by clarity, resilience, and earned confidence.