We're Not Imagining It - The Overload Is Genuinely Making Us Stupider

Summary: Even once routine returns, sustained strain from constant vigilance and survival mode shrinks our ability to focus and think - and when that difficulty gets read as personal failure, the paralysis only deepens

Michael still hasn't managed to open his emails, for weeks now. Noa can't finish her university assignment, even though she's already written most of it. Roni feels like she's just pretending to work. Dan, who normally reads three books at once, can't manage to open a single one. Adi can't even make it through a movie on Netflix.

They — meaning we — tend to blame the recent stretch of nights with almost no continuous sleep, and rightly so. The downward spiral of daily life plays its part too. But these processes aren't abstract. They have a physiological basis, and maybe even a slightly humbling one: the sustained stress we've been living under ever since we came down with a national autoimmune syndrome is wearing down our cognitive capacity.

The brain's narrow bandwidth

Many of the people who share this feeling with me are angry at themselves. They feel like they're slacking, disappointing people, being negligent. But unlike the difficulty of sticking to a diet or a budget during a time like this, this isn't just a matter of depleted willpower. It's a matter of overload on our cognitive bandwidth.

Studies show that when the brain is preoccupied with survival, or with coping with a systemic threat, our effective IQ — the one we actually display in real time, even if our baseline ability is higher — can drop by 13 points. A 2013 study, for instance, published in the journal Science and led by researchers including Prof. Eldar Shafir, showed that the mere cognitive preoccupation with financial hardship consumes attentional resources and impairs performance on thinking tasks, even ones that have nothing directly to do with that hardship.

So what does that make us? When the brain has been preoccupied with crisis both while awake and while trying to sleep, on the immediate scale — will I manage to shower — on the medium scale — will my daughter's bat mitzvah party actually happen — and on the distant scale — will we manage to prove that Rosenstein is actually a Portuguese name — there isn't much cognitive bandwidth left over to manage daily routine.

Picture an old internet connection that someone's now trying to download a heavy game on. There's no bandwidth left for a Zoom call. And that metaphorical Zoom call is, unfortunately, also your actual Zoom call at work.

A study published in 2026 in the Indian Journal of Information Sources and Services found a connection between chronic stress and a clear impairment in cognitive function, and showed that the cognitive variables damaged by stress account for a significant share of the variance in academic performance. Day to day, it feels like a traffic jam on a highway that heavy trucks keep endlessly merging into from the right.

The ordinary cars are our ordinary cognitive tasks — disputing a fine, filing tax paperwork, scheduling a doctor's appointment. And then, all at once, an endless convoy of heavy trucks merges in from the side, demanding priority. We're not becoming less intelligent. The brain is simply prioritizing overload and survival over complex thinking.

When the cannons roar, the brain falls silent

None of this is gentle or abstract. It's a concrete, aggressive state, as far as our poor brains are concerned. Chronic stress doesn't just bother us. It actually changes brain activity, and among other things, it impairs the functioning of the hippocampus, the region tied to memory. This wear and tear makes us slower, and also less patient and less generous toward the people closest to us.

You've probably noticed this yourself, even if you didn't realize just how biologically direct these processes are. When we snap at our kids or lose patience with our partner — even now, when things have supposedly calmed down — it's not only because we haven't exercised enough, or because we started drinking again. It's also our nervous system, sitting right at the edge of its capacity.

There's an old saying that "when the cannons roar, the muses fall silent." It turns out that even once the cannons quiet down, the muses aren't in any hurry to come back. Today it's clear that this isn't just a poetic image about the difficulty of finding inspiration in wartime — it's a fairly precise description of our actual biology.

After a prolonged period of constant vigilance, the brain shifts from a reflective mode, capable of deep thought, into a reflexive mode, geared toward rapid response. What's called, in the research, "allostatic load" is the debt the body accumulates when it's forced, again and again, to adapt to an abnormal situation — a debt that doesn't simply vanish the moment the threat eases.

In this state, the amygdala — the brain's center for emotion and fear — takes up more space, while the prefrontal cortex, responsible for judgment, planning, and organization, functions less efficiently — even after the immediate threat has faded. The result is a narrower capacity for thought. Who would have believed, back in the '90s, that "speed" would one day turn out to be a not-bad-at-all allegory for what's happening inside our brains.

Admitting the retreat

The matter gets even more complicated because our brain is a poor witness to its own condition. A little like in dementia-related processes, it can't honestly report on itself: processing power is down 20 percent. Most of the time we don't feel less intelligent. We simply experience reality as harder, without understanding why. We stare at the blinking cursor on the screen and wonder how a ten-minute task suddenly turned into climbing a mountain.

This lack of awareness might make it possible to keep pushing forward, even now, when routine has supposedly returned — but the price is steep. It shows up in a whole range of behaviors, from excessive self-criticism to confusion over who's actually responsible for the situation.

There's something humbling about admitting to a cognitive retreat, certainly for a nation that loves to take pride in the "Jewish brain" and the "Start-Up Nation." But that recognition is essential. It may be the most painful evidence of the price we pay when we worship "resilience" and the ability to "carry on as usual," instead of asking what it actually takes to live, and not merely to survive. And we haven't even begun to measure that price in our children yet.

Originally published in Haaretz on April 9, 2026.