Why You're Exhausted by 10am

Pull out your phone right now. Check your notifications. Open one app. Scroll for thirty seconds. Close it.

Notice anything?

Research on infinite scroll and persuasive design shows that even very brief, passive engagement with social media activates decision pathways, interrupts consolidation, and leaves a low-grade cognitive residue — you saw things, some of them wanted a reaction, you made small choices about what to keep reading, and your brain processed a small but real stream of micro-stimuli. A 2024 study on social media design found that users in an infinite scroll condition had significantly worse recall of what they'd seen compared to users who had to make a deliberate choice about each post. The design extracts engagement without necessarily leaving much behind.

Now imagine arriving at school having already scrolled through a news feed, fielded two texts, checked your email, and processed the ambient information of a morning at home with a family. And then you walk into a room of thirty students.

That's before your first class starts. And the decisions in a classroom — the continuous, relational, stakes-attached decisions that don't pause and don't wait for you to recover — are categorically different from scroll micro-choices. They require real cognitive labor. And that labor doesn't start fresh.

For this week’s Sustainable Studio, we want to expand on "teacher exhaustion."

– THE IDEA

Decision fatigue is the documented decline in decision quality that follows extended decision-making. The research that established it — originally from Roy Baumeister and colleagues on what they called ego depletion — has been complicated by subsequent studies, and some of the original claims have been revised. But the core phenomenon has been replicated in multiple professional contexts: the quality and character of decisions shifts after sustained decision-making, often in predictable directions. Research on teacher decision-making specifically confirms that cognitive load and affective state interact to shape the quality of instructional decisions throughout the day.

What makes teaching distinctively depleting — different from most other high-decision professions — is the absence of pause points. A lawyer who faces a difficult decision can close the document and come back. A designer who hits a wall can walk away for an hour. A teacher in a classroom has no pause points. The decisions are continuous, they are relational (meaning they carry emotional processing on top of cognitive processing), and many of them involve students whose wellbeing is at stake. By the time you're making your fortieth instructional adjustment of the morning, your brain is working harder than it was on the first one.

And unlike the scroll, you can't just put down the room.

– WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING

Beyond the familiar "there are too many decisions" framing, there are a few features of teacher cognitive load worth naming more precisely.

The ambient information load. A teacher walking into a classroom is reading the room before they've said a word. Who looks tired today? Who seems agitated? Who's sitting where they shouldn't be? Which student came in before the bell and which one just slid in at the last second? Most of this happens below conscious awareness — it's pattern recognition built from professional experience — but it is still cognitive work, and it starts the moment you cross the threshold.

The status-tracking load. Throughout a class period, experienced teachers maintain a running mental model of where every student is: who understood the last explanation, who has gone quiet and might need a check-in, who is about to disrupt and can be headed off with a proximity move. This is one of the things that distinguishes expert teachers from novice teachers — and it is genuinely expensive cognitively, even when it appears effortless.

The affective labor multiplier. Decisions made in the context of caring relationships cost more than neutral decisions. When you're deciding how to respond to a student who is struggling, or how to handle an escalating behavior, or what to say to a parent who is upset — the emotional dimension of the decision doesn't make it harder to complete, but it adds a layer of processing that neutral decisions don't carry. Over a full day, that multiplier accumulates significantly.

The data-on-top-of-everything problem. Research educator Carla Evans has described teachers as being caught in a "snowstorm of data masquerading as information" — data-rich, but rarely given the tools or time to make it genuinely actionable. Attendance dashboards, assessment platforms, progress monitoring tools, and behavioral tracking systems arrive on top of an already full cognitive day. Each one requests a response that takes from the same limited resource the classroom is already drawing on.

What it looks like in the classroom	What's actually happening
Going with the first answer that seems reasonable	Cognitive shortcuts replace deliberate reasoning
Feeling disproportionately irritable about small things	Depletion reduces tolerance for ambiguity
Avoiding a difficult conversation you know you need to have	High-cost decisions get deferred when resources are low
Reaching for familiar routines even when they're not quite right	Automaticity takes over when deliberate processing is costly
Feeling like every small thing is equally urgent	Prioritization is itself a cognitive function that depletes

– THE FRAMEWORK

Move 1: Pre-decide where you can.

The most powerful protection against in-the-moment decision fatigue is removing decisions from the moment of depletion entirely. This isn't scripting your teaching — it's identifying categories of decision you make repeatedly and establishing a clear default position for each one.

Which behaviors get a private redirect and which warrant a formal consequence? What happens when a student hasn't completed work — the first time, the second? What gets cut when a lesson runs long? When these have pre-decided answers, you're executing a plan rather than reasoning from scratch under load. That distinction is the difference between a decision that costs nothing and one that costs something.

Write down three of these defaults this week. Three fewer decisions requiring fresh reasoning tomorrow.

Move 2: Triage your data before it triages you.

Not all incoming information demands equal processing, but the cognitive experience of receiving it often feels equal — each notification, update, or request triggers a response cycle. Building a deliberate triage practice means assigning a category to incoming information before you engage with it: Does this require action today? This week? Does it require my attention at all?

This is different from ignoring things. It's creating a system where not everything arrives with the same urgency — because the cost of treating every data point as equally requiring immediate response is enormous and largely invisible until the depletion is already in.

Move 3: Protect your highest-quality decision windows.

Most people have predictable windows of sharper cognitive function — generally earlier in the day, before sustained mental effort has accumulated. For most teachers, this means the complex decisions (the difficult parent conversation, the instructional redesign choice, the accommodation question) are better made early in the day or after a genuine recovery period than at the end of a full teaching block.

This isn't always controllable — you don't always choose when hard conversations arrive. But where you have any flexibility in when you engage with cognitively demanding work, protecting the higher-quality window for higher-stakes decisions is worth structuring around.

Move 4: Use the three-minute reset deliberately.

The mindfulness and breathing exercises in the Accingo Lounge are not a solution to structural overload. We want to be honest about that. They will not reduce the number of decisions your role requires. What research on brief mindfulness practices does support is that focused breathing can reduce mind-wandering and partially restore attentional capacity — even in short, single sessions. A few deliberate minutes between classes is a small but real intervention on your cognitive state before the next demand begins.

A simple reset between classes:

• 90 seconds: Slow your breathing deliberately — in for four counts, hold for two, out for six. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
• 90 seconds: Name three specific decisions you made well today. Not general gratitude — specific acknowledgment of your own competence. This partially counteracts the negativity bias that compounds under fatigue.

It doesn't fix the load. It changes your state before you re-enter it.

– THE HONEST PART

Decision fatigue in teaching is not primarily a personal management problem. It is a structural feature of a role that has been asked, year after year, to absorb more complexity — more students with more documented needs, more data infrastructure, more compliance requirements — without a commensurate reduction in anything else. Individual strategies create breathing room. They do not redesign the job.

There's also a compounding dimension worth naming directly: the longer you've been carrying high cognitive load, the more the cumulative toll matters. What a first-year teacher experiences as a hard day, a veteran teacher may be experiencing as a hard year — the same daily load, accumulated over a decade. This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to take the structural self-protection moves seriously, not just the micro-level ones.

And if the depletion has crossed into something more persistent — difficulty feeling anything about your work, physical symptoms, an inability to recover even over weekends — please consider talking to someone outside school. This framework is not the right response.

– YOUR MOVE

Today: write three categories of decision you make repeatedly. Write one default response for each. That's three decisions removed from tomorrow's depletion zone.

This week: try the three-minute reset between classes for three consecutive days. Not because it solves anything — to see whether it changes your state when the next class begins.

When you notice decision quality degrading — when you're going with the first answer, deferring things that shouldn't be deferred, feeling disproportionately reactive — name it as depletion, not as a character flaw. The naming itself changes what you do with it.

What's the decision category that costs you the most — the one you're most depleted by when it arrives at the wrong moment in the day? Drop it in the comments. Naming the hard stuff is where better structures start.

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Note: This series provides professional frameworks for managing workplace stress and workload. It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing persistent feelings of hopelessness, severe anxiety, or physical symptoms, please consult a healthcare professional or mental health provider.

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This is part of Accingo's Sustainability Studio — making teaching a lifelong career.