Cognitive load is the amount of information, thoughts, and experiences your mind has to process at any given time.
Our minds have a limited throughput for information processing, and we cannot ourselves always decide what we want to process. Our subconsciousness contributes to our cognitive load. Especially when we experience things that must be processed. These include:
Understanding cognitive load is a useful concept for developers and anyone who has to process a lot of information in their day-to-day work. When your job requires a great deal of your cognitive bandwidth, cognitive load coming outside work will affect your job performance. It is tempting to believe you can ignore the load and perform your best. Unfortunately, this is not possible.
Your mind needs the time and space where it can recover both mentally as well as physically. Mental recovery requires time. You can boost physical recovery by deep breathing and exercise. If you continuously feed your brain new stimulus like work-related thoughts, the screen of your mobile phone, movies, games, Twitter tweets, you might experience cognitive overload.