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Average, A mother can barely concentrate for a few minutes before something—a question, a request, a noise, an alarm—interrupts her.. Every time you try to complete a task, a different stimulus demands your attention: making a snack, responding to a message from school, finding a lost item, resolving a minor conflict. The breaks accumulate, the focus fragments and the day becomes a series of invisible micro-cuts.
The feeling of not being able to do anything is not exaggerated: Various studies on attention and psychological distress agree that domestic interruptions are continuous and that their impact is magnified when they almost always affect the same person. The result is not just fatigue: It is a type of sustained cognitive stress that forces the brain to continually reconfigure itself, changing its rhythm, efficiency and ability to rest.
Throughout the day, the average woman can be interrupted every three minutes. This frequency – found in studies of attention and mental load similar to those conducted by the University of California, Irvine – suggests that the brain has a hard time concentrating before it has to respond to a new stimulus. Each time this happens, the cognitive system must stop, reorient itself, and start again: an invisible effort that repeats itself hundreds of times, leaving a mark.
When applied to the domestic context, this pattern multiplies. There are not only external interruptions (such as commands, sounds, messages or urgent tasks), but also internal ones: the need to remember, anticipate and plan. In fact, a University of Kansas study found on the topic mental stress found that women take on 71% of cognitive household tasks. This includes everything from planning schedules to checking that nothing is missing, a form of constant multitasking that doesn’t stop even during breaks.
The result is a persistent feeling of fragmentation. According to the American Psychological Association (APA, 2023), Mothers with young children report 40% higher levels of stress than men in the same situation. Not only because of the volume of tasks, but also because of the impossibility of maintaining concentration for long periods of time. Each interruption incurs a recovery cost that can take minutes, and that time adds up to a full day of distracted thinking.
Added to this is the overload of decisions. It is estimated that an average woman makes about 35,000 decisions per day, while a man makes about 15,000 decisions. Although many of these decisions are made automatically, the ones that require planning – what to cook, when to go out, how to organize the family day – require mental energy and produce what the psychologist Roy Baumeister called Decision fatigue or decision fatigue. Over time, this fatigue reduces attention span and emotional control, leading to stress and cognitive fatigue.
The human brain is not designed to function under constant interruptions. Every time you have to move from one task to the next – respond, participate, start again – what neuroscience calls is happening Switching costsor switching costs. In this process, the brain deactivates one neural network to activate another, which uses energy, increases errors, and increases stress. A study about Journal of Experimental Psychology found that even interruptions of just 2 or 3 seconds double the chance that a task cannot be continued.
When these interruptions cease to be exceptional and become structural disturbances—as is the case in home life and parenting—the brain switches to constant surveillance mode.. This hyperalertness activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is responsible for regulating the stress response, which increases the production of cortisol. Investigations of the Stanford University and from Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences show that sustained excess cortisol reduces the plasticity of the hippocampus (the region involved in memory and learning). and alters the connectivity of the prefrontal cortex, which is essential for decision making and emotional control.
In practice, This constant state of reactivity leads to what many mothers refer to as “scattered mind” or “invisible exhaustion.”: Difficulty concentrating, irritability and memory lapses, which are explained not by a lack of will but by a real physiological overload. When the brain is forced to respond to every stimulus, it loses the ability to prioritize and the feeling of never being able to switch off becomes chronic.
Seen in the long term Neuroscience has shown that chronic stress can change brain structure, reduce the ability to self-regulate emotions, and increase susceptibility to anxiety and depression.. The call Parent burnoutor parental exhaustion, recognized by the Society for Research in Child Developmentis now a measurable phenomenon: not just emotional fatigue, but also biological changes in the way the brain works.
According to experts, the challenge is It’s not just about reducing interruptions – which is difficult in real life – but also about recognizing the invisible costs they cause.. Giving fatigue a name is the first step to legitimizing rest, regaining concentration and most importantly Giving the brain something back that it urgently needs: silence and continuity.
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