This article was originally published on nine.com.au and is republished with permission
If you’ve ever wondered why your brain feels like an internet browser with multiple tabs, a concept called open loops is likely to blame. It’s the idea that we remember unfinished tasks more than things we’ve completed, and it can be hugely taxing on our brain.
But not everyone experiences this to the same degree, according to Dr Nikki-Anne Wilson, Lecturer at the University of New South Wales School of Psychology. She told nine.com.au it’s the emotion attached to the task that makes it stick in our heads.
“Some people will be more prone to remembering things that are unfinished than others, so some people are more ambitious and sort of task-oriented,” she said
“But also, it’s how much we care about that task. It’s a bit different between focusing on that project we’re worrying about and that emotion of something unfinished, or just having forgotten to pick up milk on the way home.”
Too many open loops can have an impact on both our mental health because the working memory, which is in the frontal lobes of the brain, can only hold so much. This can make us feel tired, not just because our brain is trying to juggle thoughts of these unfinished tasks, but also because that overwhelm can disrupt our sleep.
“If you’re mentally tracking many unresolved goals at the same time, like an email you haven’t replied to, or a decision you haven’t made, you’re overloading a system that wasn’t built to hold more than a handful of active threads at once,” Dr Kelly Gough, president of the Australian Psychological Society, said.
“Having lots of unresolved tasks in our head at once is why it feels effortful and overwhelming rather than just mildly annoying.”
The reason so many people relate to the concept of open loops is because we’re so busy and overloaded with information in our modern lives that it’s hard for us to keep up.
“I think we have too much information coming at us, and our brains weren’t really designed to cope with the amount of information that we have now … Technology and information has expanded at such a rate that we’re still catching up with how to best approach that,” Dr Wilson said.
But even though our brains can’t close open loops on their own, there is plenty we can do to lighten the load.
Writing a list of the unfinished tasks that keep circling our minds offloads those thoughts, and deciding when you’re going to complete them can help as well.
“Putting a reminder on your phone, a calendar entry, or specifically saying to yourself, ‘I’ll deal with this Tuesday at 2pm’ appears to be enough to quiet the loop,” Dr Gough said.
“Deliberately writing down your plan also helps reduce the demands on our brains by cognitively offloading and not storing in our memory.”
Once you’ve written down the tasks that need doing you can then prioritise them in order of importance, particularly if one is really worrying you, as the emotion of that open loop will keep it going around your mind.
For bigger tasks, breaking them down into smaller steps is also useful, and once you get started you’ll be motivated to keep going because our brains like being rewarded.
“Instead of having one huge loop that we're trying to close at one point, then you get that dopamine hit of closing those smaller loops, which then builds momentum to close the bigger loop,” Dr Wilson said.
This tip is particularly helpful if you struggle with procrastination, which can fuel, and be fuelled by, open loops, as it makes the task feel less overwhelming to achieve and helps you know where to start.
Habits can also help reduce open loops because they are formed and controlled in a different part of the brain to our working memory. Just as we automatically brush our teeth before bed, we can also turn other tasks, such as wiping the bathroom sink after said teeth brushing, into habits so we do them unconsciously without having to actively remember them.
“Different kinds of memory can be supported in different ways. If we can strengthen those pathways through creating stronger habits so that we’re not actively having to keep these things in our mind all the time and keep those loops turning, that can be a great way of offloading some of those tasks,” Dr Wilson said.
Similarly, routines can also help close open loops by setting tasks for a particular time or day, such as the popular Sunday reset, which means main chores like changing bedsheets always get done on a Sunday.
But while we can close some loops, it’s not possible to close all of them, so Dr Wilson recommended practising acceptance.
“We’re living in a time when we’re going to have more loops than ever, there are more things to do every day, it seems. So accepting that we can’t close every loop, and prioritising and focusing our attention where it’s needed,” she said.