“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” – the quintessential song that generally captures this season’s mood.

Yet I’m not feeling it, even as “fish are jumping and the cotton is high” in the Charleston, SC region where I now live.

Instead, I’m preoccupied with my heavy cognitive load  – the amount of information that my working memory can process at once. That’s not surprising considering recent travel and weather hassles I’ve been experiencing, plus the administrative responsibilities I’ve had to assume (not my jam).

Cognitive load wasn’t so endemic an issue back in the 1930’s as it is today. That’s when the composer George Gershwin and lyricists Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward were writing their ambitious 1935 opera Porgy & Bess featuring the song Summertime and many other classics. The pace of life was slower, hurricanes were weaker, and modern communication technology was non-existent.

No backward time travel for me, please. However, I’d appreciate a break from technology outages (such as the CloudStrike incident), tropical storms (Goodbye Debby!), and payment problems from clients and banks for the near future.

What wishful thinking on my part—especially since the 2024 hurricane season continues through November 30. Instead, it’s more realistic and valuable to focus on learning how to deal with cognitive load extreme when these incidents happen.

What’s my plan?

• Figuring out the best ways to muster the energy needed to deal with these unexpected challenges.
• Remembering all the other resources I can count on, including my resilience and my many lessons learned from dealing with other disasters, such as tornadoes in Oklahoma, earthquakes in California, hurricanes in South Carolina, and the Gramercy Park (NYC) steampipe explosion.
• Reaching out to my friends, family, my relatively new and powerful neuroplasticity community, and other experts who can provide helpful advice and support.
• Staying hopeful by taking in the natural beauty of sunrises, sunsets and the stars, being around creative people, and following scientific inventions.

To further ground myself, I’m also doing the following. I can’t promise these tips will work as well for you since each of us is unique. However, they may spark some ideas for you.

1. Understand that holding a heavy mental load can be harder on your brain and body than doing any tasks. You can stress yourself out by thinking about all the things you’ve got to do, planning how to do them and worrying about how you’ll get everything done. And when you’re stressed and anxious, you expend significant amounts of metabolic energy, which hurts your ability to focus and remember.

Actions:  To make sure I don’t forget anything important, I diligently record my commitments and ideas on a paper to-do list or in a cell phone app. I then reconcile my lists at least once a day. (Yes, this system may seem inefficient but it frees me from looking at my phone when volunteering with @Marcelthetherapydog or taking walks with him.)    

2. Take care of yourself. Your number one job is making sure you get enough sleep, eat a healthy diet, and exercise. These big three — sleep, food, and exercise — are critical for ensuring your brain operates efficiently and you stay healthy in body, mind, and spirit. Deep breathing also helps.

Actions: Throughout the day, especially if it’s chaotic, I evaluate what adjustments to make. If I’m with my husband, I count my blessings. He’s an excellent cook who enjoys cooking healthy meals and cleaning up. If we’re traveling, he steers me toward healthy food choices.

Sleep and exercise are trickier. For example, exercising was hard to do during the recent tropical storm Debby. Due to the heavy rains and street flooding, it was dangerous to walk outdoors and my gym was closed. I did some indoor floor exercises and short outdoor walks when the rain briefly stopped. The stress from the cognitive load is adversely affecting my sleep so I’m building in rest breaks during the day.

3. Adopt a growth mindset and manage it and your energy. Adults use a mix of mindsets depending on the situation and our experiences, according to Dr. Carol Dweck. Yet, even when we want to take risks and be open to new ideas and opportunities, we may resist if we’re feeling fearful and uncertain.

Actions: Consider your current state of mind and how you may respond under various scenarios. Choose what works well for you. For instance, when my husband and I learned on Friday night of the CrowdStrike outage that Delta had cancelled our Saturday afternoon flight home  – after we had already checked in – I asked this question: “Knowing we want to get home, do we want to deal with the craziness at any of the NY area airports, assuming we can even find an available affordable flight over the next few days?” No. Is there an alternative? How about Amtrak? Yes!

We reframed our situation: we were adventurous travelers rather than annoyed Delta flyers. The train station was just a short car ride from our hotel. The train ride was much longer than the flight – 15 hours compared to a little over 2 hours – but we had seats, stayed on the same train, and experienced Amtrak.

(And now we’re satisfied Delta customers after receiving a refund for the LGA-CHS leg, a gift of bonus miles, and a partial reimbursement for our Amtrak tickets plus an apology. Thank you, Delta!)

According to the neurospyschologist Julia DiGangi and author of the fascinating book Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power, we humans are able to deal with more obstacles when we’re comfortable working with our emotional energy, that is, our body’s electrical, chemical, and magnetic energies that combine to create our emotions.

Her point is that we need to view our emotional power not as what we do, but as the energy we possess, notice, and apply, which becomes the emotions we feel. Then we can distill our emotions into two kinds of energy: healing (recharging us) and hurting (draining us).

In terms of helping you with your cognitive load, figure out what energizes you and do more of it. And also identify what drains you and try to do less, or even better eliminate it from your life. In other words, if you’re going to feel tired, make it be from what invigorates and stimulates you, not from what already depletes you and makes you feel cranky.

And show yourself some compassion. Also, please customize these coping skills for yourself and start using them. When dealing with extreme cognitive load, you can reduce your pain and make your life feel easier and better.