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MixedNuts comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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What do you mean by "cognitive load"? I read the Wikipedia article on cognitive load theory, but I don't see the connection.
For me, the being-watched part is about embarrassment. I often need to stop and examine a situation and explicitly model it, when most people would just go ahead naturally. Awkward looks cause anxiety.
The concept I'm talking about is broader than the concept that Wikipedia talks about; it's the general idea that brains only have so many resources to go around, and that some brains have less resources than others or find certain tasks more costly than others, and that it takes a while for those resources to regenerate. Something like this idea has come up a few times here, mostly regarding willpower specifically (and we've found studies supporting it in that case), but my experience is that it's much more generally applicable then that.
And, if your brain regenerates that resource particularly slowly, and if you haven't been thinking in terms of conserving that limited resource (or set of resources, depending on how exactly you're modeling it), it's fairly easy to set yourself up with a lifestyle that uses the resource faster than it can regenerate, which has pretty much the effect you described. (I've experienced it, too, and it's not an uncommon situation to hear about in the autistic community.)
Yes! It does feel like running out of a scarce resource most people have in heaps. I don't know exactly how that resource is generated and how to tell how much I have left before I run out, though.
Fortunately, the latter at least seems to be a learnable skill for most people. :)
There is evidence linking people's limited resources for thought and willpower to their blood glucose, which is another good reason to see a doctor to find out if there's something physiological underlying some of your problems.
Does thinking about having less of that resource than other people tend to consume it?
That's a good question. There is a correlation between running out of it and thinking about it, but it's pretty obvious that most of the causation happens the other way around. Talking about it here doesn't seem to hurt, so probably not.