How Sensory Overload Affects Executive Function and Cognitive Performance
TLDR: discomfort can impair your cognitive abilities simply by existing.
There’s a reason your best ideas arrive in the shower or right before bed. It is not the water or the darkness. It is that your brain finally gets a break from processing subtle discomfort.
This article explores how physical discomfort from clothing can quietly drain mental energy and reduce focus, not because it hurts, but simply because it exists for your nervous system.
The brain still listens to the body even when you’re busy.
You can optimise sleep, workouts, supplements, tweak every routine and still feel off. The missing 1-2% you are searching for might not be a new protocol or routine. It might be the clothes you wear every day.
Your brain constantly processes sensory signals: fabric against skin, temperature, background noise, light levels, posture, and smells. Every. Tiny. Signal. Most of this happens below awareness, but it still saps real cognitive resources.
Most people underestimate that discomfort doesn’t need to hurt; it just needs to exist.
A tight collar, a seam that rubs, binding socks, a waistband digging in, shoes pressing in the wrong place: none of these need to hurt to cause distraction; they just need to keep pinging your nervous system.
And every such ping is a tiny demand: check this, adjust that, suppress this signal so you can keep working. That background effort comes out of the same limited pool you use for thinking, planning, and decision-making, quietly costing you up to a third of your usable focus across the day.
Keep reading to learn more.
Neural Bandwidth And Executive Function
TLDR: Every bit of discomfort steals a bit of attention.
Executive functions are your brain’s management skills, like planning, decision-making, impulse control, switching between tasks, and keeping information in mind.
The prefrontal cortex, which is the control center for executive functions has limited bandwidth and it can’t focus on everything at once. [2]
This is called “capacity theory” of attention. [15, 16]
In other words, we have a finite amount of cognitive energy to focus on things at any given moment. When you’re trying to do a task, your brain uses resources to focus on it; however if you’re distracted by sensory overload (like from your outfit), those resources get used up by the distractions, leaving fewer resources available for the task at hand. [4]
So anything persistent and uncomfortable pulls processing power away from high-level tasks.
Studies using fMRI have shown that in these situations, certain parts of your brain start to become more active, and others less so. Namely, physical discomfort increases activity in areas that monitor internal sensations while decreasing activity in areas needed for work tasks. Your brain literally shifts from “work mode” to “discomfort management mode.” [4]
You don’t experience this as “my shirt is ruining my day.” You experience it as “I’m tired,” “my focus sucks today,” or “I guess I’m just not on it.”
Attentional Pull: Micro-Interruptions From Your Outfit
TLDR: You think better in comfortable clothes.
The human brain runs on about 20 watts of power, which is the same as a small LED light bulb. When a portion of that wattage is diverted to handling the persistent “something feels off” signal from your outfit, there’s far less available for things like making decisions, remembering things, and staying focused.
Your brain will try to ignore discomfort, and it will fail, repeatedly, creating what researchers call “attentional pull.” The term describes small, recurring irritations that keep tugging your mind away from what you’re doing.
Every time those slightly tight shoes send up a signal, your prefrontal cortex has to acknowledge it, dismiss it, and rebuild whatever train of thought just derailed.
Not-so-fun fact: It takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to full concentration after your attention gets pulled away. You don’t just lose a second. You lose the whole rhythm. If your clothes interrupt you multiple times per hour, you never actually reach peak focus.
What makes this particularly disruptive is that you barely notice it happening. The interruptions are small enough to slip under your awareness but large enough to fragment your thinking and reduce your output.
Studies using cognitive load tests show that small discomforts and sub‑threshold irritants from clothing can reduce your mental performance. They raise stress physiology, reduce alpha brainwaves, fragment attention, and impair performance, even when people think they are “used to it.” There is solid evidence that physical discomfort and musculoskeletal pain reduce concentration and productivity. The technical term is “resource depletion,” but you can think of it as your brain trying to read a book while someone flicks your ear every thirty seconds.
What Gets Harder When You’re Uncomfortable
TLDR: Answer: Every high-level function.
Your working memory leaks. Working memory is your ability to hold information in your head while you use it. It is closely linked to attention, and both could be compromised by sensory overload from clothing. When part of your brain is busy processing uncomfortable sensations, you have less capacity to follow multi-step instructions or keep track of what you were doing. You walk into a room and forget why. You lose track mid-sentence. You read the same paragraph three times.
Emotional control breaks down. Constant low-level irritation from clothing keeps your sympathetic nervous system slightly activated, which means elevated cortisol that fogs your thinking and makes tiny annoyances feel bigger than they are. You snap at a colleague or loved one and think you’re mad at them, but part of the irritation comes from a brain running low after dealing with discomfort all day.
Motivation drains away. Dealing with persistent discomfort is tiring. The brain is biased toward conserving effort; if it is already working hard just to tolerate your clothes, it will resist taking on extra cognitive load. So, it starts avoiding tasks. This creates a loop: discomfort → stress → worse brain function → avoiding work → more stress. Tasks feel harder than they should. You procrastinate more, not because you’re lazy, but because your system is already overloaded.
Switching tasks becomes harder. When you are already distracted by uncomfortable sensations, adapting to new situations or changing what you are working on costs extra energy. Adapting to new demands, switching from one task to another feels harder than it logically “should.” You get stuck, dig in on suboptimal ideas, or keep scrolling instead of moving.
So the more your nervous system is preoccupied with your body, the less room there is for flexible, creative, problem-solving thought. [13, 14]
Some Brains Are More Expensive to Interrupt
TLDR: People on the autism spectrum, with ADHD, and SPD are more vulnerable.
Some people are more sensitive to clothing textures and tightness than others. This is common in neurodivergent individuals, people on the autism spectrum, with ADHD, and Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). [13, 14]
For these brains, a filter for “ignore this sensation” is not available. Something as simple as a clothes tag is not background noise for them, it is more like a neighbour practising beginner trumpet at 6 a.m. Their sensory filters let more through, so discomfort and executive function compete for the same limited prefrontal resources.
Research shows a strong correlation (~0.7 on a scale of 0 to 1) between sensory overload and executive function problems. Translation: the brain cares a lot more than you think. Why?
As we have discussed in the first part of this post, that’s because both, sensory overload and executive function, rely on the same part of the brain – the prefrontal cortex.
If that area is busy managing discomfort, it struggles to run everything else.
Your Outfit Is Part of Your Workspace
TLDR: Your clothes are part of your productivity.
Comfortable clothing is not a luxury add-on. It is essential for accessing full cognitive abilities. It belongs in the same category as good lighting, a quiet workspace, or a decent chair.
When your body is not firing off constant complaint signals, your brain is free to do what you actually want from it: notice patterns, solve problems, generate ideas, and make connections that didn’t exist a moment ago.
The most interesting thing about comfortable clothes is that they allow your brain to perform at its best, achieving the clarity and focus you often seek through various protocols, tools, caffeine timing, and other (bio)hacks. And a bonus point? Comfortable clothes feel good!
When you remove sources of sensory discomfort you free up real cognitive capacity.
The good news? You don’t need a new 12-step protocol or a new guru.
You can:
- cut out clothing tags;
- loosen collars, waistbands, and cuffs;
- swap scratchy or rigid fabrics for softer, breathable ones;
- choose shoes that don’t create hot spots or pressure points.
Treat your clothes as part of your cognitive environment. Because they are.
Sources:
- The Impact of Chronic Pain on Cognitive Function
- The role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and executive function
- A multisensory perspective of working memory
- Clothing Pressure Alters Brain Wave Activity in the Occipital and Parietal Lobes
- Working Memory as Internal Attention: Toward an Integrative Account of Internal and External Selection Processes
- The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress
- The effect of musculoskeletal problems on fatigue and productivity of office personnel: a cross-sectional study
- The Impact of Pain on Subsequent Effort and Cognitive Performance
- Sensory Processing and Executive Functioning in Autistic Adults
- Can ADHD Cause Sensory Overload from Clothing?
- Neural mechanisms of selective attention in the somatosensory system
- Cognitive and perceptual load have opposing effects on brain network efficiency and behavioral variability in ADHD
- The Relationship Between Sensory Processing and Executive Functions in Adults with and without Neurodevelopmental Disorders
- Comparative Analysis of Executive Function and Sensory Processing in Adults with and Without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; Their Impact on Participation: A Cross-Sectional Study
- The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: an individual-differences perspective
- The central attentional limitation and executive control
You may also like: