What's actually happening when your brain can't keep up during pre-planning week.
By Kim Lester
It's Monday of pre-planning week and you've already sat through three meetings. You're trying to set up your classroom, update your roster, learn a new platform, answer seventeen emails about bus duty schedules, figure out where the textbooks are, remember which students have IEPs, organize your filing system, and somehow plan the first week of lessons. All before any actual students show up.
And somewhere around noon, you hit a wall. Not a tired wall. A wall where your brain stops being able to process new information. You read the same email three times and still don't understand what it's asking. Someone asks you a simple question and you draw a complete blank.
You suddenly feel like you can't keep up and the year hasn't even started yet. You're wondering if this is normal or if something is wrong with you.
You're not imagining it. That feeling is real.
It actually has a name.
Cognitive overload.
This is what happens when your brain is asked to process more information, decisions, and demands than it can handle all at once. Your working memory gets full. Your processing speed slows down. You make mistakes, forget things, feel like information keeps coming and there's nowhere to put it. And you're supposed to just handle this, like everyone else, like it's normal.
Pre-planning is one of the most common times teachers experience this, though honestly it can happen anytime the demands stack up faster than you can process them.
Here's why pre-planning specifically creates cognitive overload.
Teaching is constant context-switching. Your brain has to do it all day.
During a normal school day, you're already switching between different classes, different students, different skill levels, different behaviors, different content. Your brain has to hold all of that at once. But pre-planning is different because you don't have the students there to anchor all that switching. You're building the system without knowing exactly what it'll need to hold.
Pre-planning asks your brain to hold two competing realities at the same time. The system you're building and the unknown variables that will eventually fill it. You're trying to be organized and prepared while also knowing that nothing works exactly as planned, nothing ever does, so what's even the point of planning if it's going to change anyway. But you have to plan. You have to try.
You're sitting in meetings where someone is explaining a new grading system and your brain has to follow what they're saying while also thinking about how it'll work in your actual classroom with students you haven't even met yet. You're setting up your classroom while trying to remember student information from your roster. You're learning a new technology platform while thinking about curriculum pacing. You're being told about new initiatives while trying to mentally carve out time to actually plan lessons. It's just layers on top of layers.
Your brain isn't being asked to do one thing deeply. It's being asked to juggle dozens of things at surface level all at the same time.
Add the pressure that this is supposed to be perfect. Getting everything right now means the year will run smoothly, and your nervous system knows it. Every decision feels critical. Every email that goes unanswered is a problem. Every piece of information you don't fully understand is something you should already know.
Your brain is trying to get ready for August while your body is still in Monday morning.
That's cognitive overload.
What this actually looks like.
You're on your third cup of coffee by 10 AM, and it's only Monday. You sit in a meeting and realize you've been staring at the same slide for five minutes without absorbing a word. Someone asks you a direct question and it takes you three seconds longer than normal to process what they're asking. You go to write an email and forget what you were trying to say halfway through.
Everyone else seems fine, taking notes and asking questions and looking calm. You're sitting there feeling like your brain is completely full.
You read the same paragraph in the curriculum guide three times and it still doesn't stick. You get home and realize you didn't eat lunch because your brain was too overloaded to remember your body needed food. You lie in bed that night replaying conversations, wondering if you understood the new system correctly, second-guessing the decisions you made during setup, thinking about all the things you still haven't done.
And it's only Monday. By Friday, you might feel okay for an hour or two, but mostly you just feel depleted. Not tired. Completely cognitively exhausted.
Why this matters.
Here's what I want you to understand: how you move through pre-planning sets the tone for how you move through the whole year. If you spend pre-planning feeling overwhelmed and behind, you often spend the year feeling like you're trying to catch up. You spend the year believing that this pace is just how it is, that everyone works at full speed all the time, that if you're struggling to keep up, then you're just not cut out for this.
But you are cut out for it. The pace is just too much. Pre-planning asks too much in too little time, and that's not a reflection of you or your capacity. It's a reflection of how the system is built.
When you don't name what's happening, you blame yourself. You interpret your brain's slowdown as a personal failure. You think you're not organized enough, or that you should be able to handle this, or you look around and think other teachers are managing fine, so something must be wrong with you specifically.
I want to tell you something directly: none of that is true. Your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's telling you it's overloaded.
Nothing is wrong with you.
Your brain isn't broken. Your capacity isn't too small. You're not behind or disorganized or incapable. You're being asked to hold multiple complex systems in your mind at the same time while new information keeps coming and you have to make dozens of decisions and prepare for a future that hasn't arrived yet. All before students walk in on Monday.
That's not a personal failure. That's just what cognitive overload is. And recognizing it, naming it, understanding it for what it actually is instead of what you think it means about you—that's where everything shifts.
Notice what is happening.
During pre-planning, when you hit that wall. When you can't focus or you're reading the same thing multiple times or you feel like you're drowning in information. Notice it. Don't push through it or blame yourself for it or assume everyone else is handling this better than you are.
Just notice.
"I'm experiencing cognitive overload. My brain has more information coming at it than it can process right now. This is normal for pre-planning week."
Name it for what it is. Not for what you think it says about you. Cognitive overload isn't a sign you're not cut out for teaching or proof that you're disorganized or evidence that you should have known this already. It's just what happens when your brain gets too much at once.
And recognizing it is the first step toward building a year that doesn't have to feel like you're drinking from a fire hose the whole time.
That's where understanding begins.
Once you name it, you have options. You can give yourself permission to go slower on things that don't need to be perfect yet. You can decide what actually matters this week and what can genuinely wait. You can protect your focus on one thing at a time instead of trying to hold everything at once, or you can take breaks when your brain signals it's full. Stop answering emails at a certain time so your mind has space to actually absorb what you already learned.
You can build pre-planning differently next year. Just because the system asks you to process everything at full speed doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Just because the year started at full speed doesn't mean you have to live the whole year that way.
Give yourself the same care you give everyone else.
— Kim 🩷🌿
If this resonated with you, there's a podcast for this. Teaching Without Losing Yourself explores what it actually takes to build a year with room to breathe. Not just surviving the pace. Choosing it differently. New episodes every week.
Know where you are.
Now that you can name what's happening, take the Stage Finder. Ten questions. Three minutes. You'll find out where you actually are in the framework and what to focus on this week.
Your stage shifts throughout the year. Come back when pre-planning feels different. The framework meets you where you are, not where you think you should be.