What I Do When My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open

I'm building a few things at once right now. Micro Mindfulness, Kanala, a raise, wellness program, app, AND A LIFE. And if I'm honest, there have been weeks lately where I've felt like I'm running at max capacity before lunch. I don't think I'm alone in that. If you're building something, leading a team, or just holding a job that never fully switches off, you probably know the feeling: the moment you sit down and your brain hands you everything at once — the deck that's due, the email you haven't replied to, the thing you forgot, the thing you're worried about — all in the same breath.

For a long time I thought that feeling was just what ambition costs. Turns out, there's real science behind why it happens, and more importantly, real science behind what actually helps.

Your body can't tell the difference

Here's something I remind myself constantly: my nervous system doesn't know the difference between an actual emergency and a Slack notification. Both get filed under "alert." Both get the same rush of cortisol and adrenaline, the same shift into fight-or-flight. The threat doesn't have to be dramatic — it just has to feel urgent, and in founder life, everything feels urgent.

That's not a personal failing. It's just how the autonomic nervous system works. It has an alert mode (sympathetic) built for short bursts, and a recovery mode (parasympathetic) that's supposed to balance it out.

The problem is a lot of us, myself included, spend entire days stuck in the first one without ever dipping into the second.

Why "just think about everything" never works

One thing I've learned the hard way: I cannot hold my entire to-do list in my head at once and expect to function. If I try to think about the raise, the program, the brand launch, and my inbox all in the same moment, I freeze. It's not overwhelm as a feeling — it's overwhelm as an actual mechanism.

Working memory — the mental space where we hold and manipulate information in real time — has a hard limit. Cognitive psychologist George Miller's early research put it at roughly seven items, and later work narrowed that further, showing we can only actively juggle around three or four pieces of information before performance drops¹. This is the foundation of what's now called Cognitive Load Theory: past a certain point, more input doesn't get processed better, it just doesn't get processed at all².

This is exactly why my rule is: what's the next one. Not the whole list — the next one. When I catch myself spiraling into everything-at-once mode, I ask that one question, and it's genuinely the fastest way I've found to get unstuck.

There's a name for part of what's happening when I don't do this. Researcher Sophie Leroy calls it "attention residue" — when you leave one task unfinished and jump to the next, part of your attention stays behind on the first one, and it measurably drags down your performance on whatever you do next³. The more tasks I'm holding open in my head "just in case," the more residue I'm carrying into everything I try to do. Closing the loop even mentally, even just by deciding what's actually next is what clears it.

The reset I actually use between tasks

Between calls, between decks, between the fortieth thread of the day, I don't have twenty minutes for a proper practice. What I do have is about thirty seconds, and that's genuinely enough.

My go-to is the physiological sigh: four inhales through the nose — one full breath, then a short second pull of air on top of it — followed by one long, slow exhale through the mouth. Stanford researchers Melis Yilmaz Balban, David Spiegel, and Andrew Huberman tested this against box breathing, a hyperventilation-style breathing pattern, and mindfulness meditation in a month-long randomized trial, and cyclic sighing came out ahead on every measure; mood, anxiety, and resting breathing rate⁴.

Even a single round of it does something. You don't need the full five minutes to feel your shoulders drop.

I do this in between tasks now. Before I open the next tab, before I join the next call. Not because I have time for a wellness break, but because I don't, and this is the one thing that fits inside the cracks.

What I've landed on

I'm not going to pretend a breathing exercise fixes an overloaded quarter, because it doesn't. Some seasons are genuinely just a lot, and no reset changes that. But most days, I'm not actually drowning in the workload itself. I'm drowning in trying to hold all of it at once.

So: one next task. One reset breath in between. That's the whole practice, and most days, it's enough to keep going.

Sources

1. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review; Paas, F. & Sweller, J. (2012), on working memory's concurrent processing limits.

2. Sweller, J. Cognitive Load Theory — on working memory capacity and information processing limits.

3. Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.

4. Balban, M. Y., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895.