Finally, Words for What You're Feeling: Your Brain Is a Highway and There's a Traffic Jam

If you have ever felt completely maxed out but couldn't quite explain why, this episode is for you. In Episode 10, Imogen introduces the Traffic Jam Analogy — a framework she developed through clinical work with a client with an acquired brain injury and has since used with therapists, support coordinators, mentees, and parents. Your brain is a highway. Your thoughts are vehicles. And when you are running too many trucks, hitting too many potholes, or navigating roadworks, the traffic banks up. This episode breaks down each element of the analogy — from government vehicles to lane openers — and applies it to clients with complex disability presentations, community therapists carrying full caseloads, and honestly, anyone whose brain has to think. Which is everyone.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Cognitive Capacity Chat. This is the podcast for the therapist ready to think beyond the therapy room. I talk about our cognition as our foundation, not just for our clients, but for ourselves. Because the way we think, organise, and live directly shapes our clinical work, our capacity, and longevity in this profession. I'm Imogen, an OT, here to bring you practical conversations that fit into real life. This podcast is for the therapist who wants more depth, more clarity, and more life. Welcome. Hello, welcome back to Cognitive Capacity Chat. Today I want to reintroduce, I think would be the right term, but maybe it's introduce an analogy that I think lands with a lot of therapists. And it's a framework I use constantly, both in clinical and in my coaching. And I have not talked about it on here by myself. But if you have listened to either of my podcasts that I have been on, I have mentioned this analogy, and I think it's a really good one to articulate how we are feeling as therapists in the community, how our clients are feeling in the community, and potentially the stakeholders that we work with as well. And that is the traffic jam analogy. And I'm not talking about sensory traffic jams. I have no idea what that is. I am talking about the analogy of the thoughts running in your brain. So I want to take you back to a client and the origination of this concept. I was working with a client a few years ago and they had an acquired brain injury. They were young and were working prior to their brain injury, plenty of risk-taking behaviors, but they were very much a meaningful occupation to them. Post injury, their life was very complex from a social standpoint, from the funding body needing to do lots of different rehab, lots of different assessments, independent assessments, conversations around lots of different legal opportunities and just so much. And the therapy was just not landing. They would actually come to every therapy session wanting to understand logistics, wanting to understand when they had their physio, wanting to know when their EP was or their neuropsych. And this was true for every therapist. Every therapist they would spend the first half of the session just working out logistics and then almost getting overwhelmed. And so their therapeutic goals were just not progressing. No therapist actually had any opportunity to engage in the work that needed to be engaged in. And you could just tell they were having a really difficult time with grasping the concept of I really want to rehab and improve my function, but I'm also really overloaded. And my role was actually to set up compensatory strategies that met their cognitive barriers through a cognitive load lens. And then educating every therapist on their team about what was happening and why that mattered. And because of how they presented, we really needed that team approach to implement and reduce the overall the overarching cognitive load. And you can't just keep giving new information to someone whose cognitive capacity is already so limited and expect them to act on it. So we weren't really able to hit the mark with this concept until we had a shared language for it rather than a clinical language. I think that cognition and cognitive capacity can be really broad with understanding that concept, particularly as the brain is not an easy, tangible thing to understand. But putting it into the traffic germ analogy really helps highlight and articulate and put into words what people are experiencing in their brain. And what I determined after working with this client, trying to make it more tangible for them, more digestible. This was true for our clients, this was true for my mentees, for me, for every person. This was true for this, how we managed, how much we were thinking, how much our brain was able to hold, and how much we were actually able to move to the next step or understand or make those high-level thinkings. And so the analogy works like this: your brain is a highway, you have neurons firing throughout your body, firing through to your mouth, to your arms, to the frontal lobe to make a decision. You need those neurons to fire every single time you make a decision, do a task, engage in an occupation, need to recall information, need to remember an appointment, need to, you know, every single thing. Like the idea of getting up and out of bed and having to brush your teeth, cognition. And so when I think about um the brain and the neurons on their little highway, I picture them as cars. And so driving along our highway, we can have lots of cars if we're doing a task that takes a lot of effort from a cognitive lens. And for cars, for any car to drive well, we want traffic that is moving, the cars are flowing, we don't have any stop signs, we don't have any potholes, we don't have any road works. And so when we have a clear highway, when our cars and our thought aka our thoughts are able to go along this highway, we're able to action those cars. So different tasks take different amounts of cars or different um have different levels. So, for example, the toothbrushing example probably is a very small car because you do that every day. You have to think about it, you have to send the car on the highway, but you don't necessarily have to truly think about what you are doing. Take into account needing to write a functional capacity report where you have to take in all the considerations of the person, how they function, what solution might resolve their problems, their barriers, plan hold a lot of pieces of information in your head while you write your functional capacity assessment. That is obviously going to send more cars along your highway. And when we have more cars on our highway, our traffic can slow down. But you can also think about it in a concept of if our highway is blocked as well, we're going to find we have some barriers too. So when we experience a traffic jam, when we have too many cars on our highway, or we have roadworks on our highway, we're experiencing that traffic jam, which just like a true traffic jam, you can get you're really quick to get frustrated, you want the radio is too loud, the kids are screaming at the back, you are sensory sensitive, you have a difficult time making a decision, or you just decide you don't want to get to the day destination and avoid and do a U-turn. And all these things are true when our brain feels this way, too. So, this is how I like to talk to cognitive capacity. I'm gonna dive into it a little bit further because there's lots of different aspects to this traffic jam. But the concept is that we want a cognitive highway that is free-flowing, can manage a lot of cars, and there's no disruptions to sending those cars. So there's firstly different size cars. So you could have just an ordinary car, a truck, and trucks are typically the big sustained load sources. So things that take a lot of effort, so your functional capacity assessment that might be a truck. But when you think about your early career therapist, um, uh just a plain occupational therapy assessment could have also been a truck for you. Trucks, you they have to go on your highway, but you might need to create a little bit more space for them, they might take up a few lanes, and if we've got lots of trucks on the same road, that can be really tricky for cars to get through. So let's say, for example, you have a really big clinical day, you've got a lot of complex assessments, and then when it comes to deciding what you want to eat, that can be feel really tough. That's because you've got lots of trucks on your highway, and then your little zippy car to decide what to eat can't get through. We also have government vehicles, so government vehicles they're gonna come through with their flashing lights and siren no matter what. They are gonna come through, they are important to you, they need to happen regardless of your highway situation. So for me, that's Evie. Evie comes in, she comes in both in this analogy and in real life with lights, sirens, and she needs to be attended to straight away. So that's the concept of your thoughts, right? And then there's the highway itself. So the highway can has different lanes. So you may, if you have chronic fatigue or if you have any health-related concerns or a poor night's sleep, we're gonna have less lanes than what we normally operate on. And things can open up lanes and things can close down lanes. So going for a morning walk for me opens up my capacity, opens up additional lanes. A engaging in the gym regularly opens up lanes for me. We want to do activities that open up lanes so that we have more capacity for cars, vehicles, whatever they are. It gives us more brain space, more road surface to send vehicles through. Then we have what impacts the road. So we have our potholes. So potholes are small friction points that slow everything down, even though the traffic volume looks manageable on paper. So you think about it, you have a pothole in your road on your way to work. I anticipate that you are going to avoid that pothole, or you might choose to drive over it all day every time you get to work. And so potholes are things like that we do at work or we do in our life that we're constantly driving over and getting slightly annoyed about. It's reducing our capacity a little bit, but it's not impactful enough for us to highlight it. Now, potholes are those really small things that we can change that actually improve our drive. They don't look like much from the outside, but they actually cost more capacity than you would think. So, a common one is email notifications. So when we're sitting with our client, we have an appointment and an email notification comes through, or maybe we're walking back to the car and we check our phone and we have six emails there. That is just a pothole because we're causing friction with our attention going towards our phone rather than going towards the cars of that appointment that we just had, of that thinking that we and that processing that we need to absorb, consolidate that information, analyze that information, then make sense of it in our own mind. Then there are bigger tasks like road work. So they are a big disruption. They might be something that causes you to truly slow down your work. It could be a big life event, it could be you needing to step away from your workspace for a period of time. And road works don't last forever, but they do close down a line. And so you're going to be able to tolerate less thoughts, less cars, less vehicles because of those roadworks. So when you think about that concept and that analogy, if you have a road work, say you are experiencing grief and you are a therapist and you continue to work through, you have no idea how you're going to manage these emotional considerations, but also keep up with your caseload, that is so massive. And you're expecting yourself to continue to work at a capacity that you were when you didn't have a whole lane shut because you're experiencing this life thing. Now, I use this with my clients a lot, and we can talk about, I'll I'll dive into that a little bit as well. But using this language and this analogy is important to everyone. I've used it with support coordinators before who are trying to organize everything with the client. And I think they're in a really great place to help organize a client. Like being able to sit and manage someone's cognitive load with the person with a disability. I think it just really helps with articulating what they're feeling about that complexity of a funding body, having people in their home, having medical considerations, having to track their medication so their GP knows what they need to change. Considering it's showing them it's okay that they feel overloaded because they've got a lane close, because they're experiencing a pressure injury, because they've got substantial amount of cars because they've got so many support workers coming in. Or maybe they're having difficulty with that one support worker, and that's a pothole that they keep driving over the top of. And as therapists, we can help open up lanes, we can help increase their capacity so that they have more capacity for just engaging their ordinary life. Or we can add to the complexity or the cars in and actually just cause more of a traffic jam rather than helping them achieve what they need to achieve and what they want to achieve. And this analogy applies to any person who has to think. For many of my therapists that I work with, we are parents. And when you think about needing to manage your schedule, your work schedule, your personal schedule, your kids' schedule, your parenting schedule, your time to do household work, but also have time for yourself, but also manage your child's needs and all of the invisible logistics that come with that. Just talking about it feels like a traffic jam, right? You are not disorganized, you're not bad at managing your time, you've just got so much on your highway. You have so many cars, trucks, government vehicles, all those kids, they've got their lights and sirens. And different problems have different solutions. And the complexity comes with this traffic jam. And no wonder why you're feeling sensory sensitive or frustrated or just why am I even doing this? It's because you've got you're experiencing a traffic jam in your brain. And additionally, comes with that because the therapists are listening. As community practitioners carrying complex caseloads, you hold emotional load, you hold clinical decisions under pressure, you hold report writing, you need to advocate for clients, manage funding bodies, and then also be present in the room. Your highway is going to get full too. Really big, right? And I don't think anyone ever taught us how to manage this. And it's so frustrating. But we were trained to be clinicians. I am here to help you, and we can create capacity. If you are listening to this and you are loving this analogy, I actually have a Notion workbook that you can. I'm more than happy to share with you. Just DM me Traffic Jam Workbook and I will send it to you. And you can independently assess your highway, map it out. And honestly, it takes five minutes and see what's actually taking up space in your load. It's a really great way to understand and critically analyze your cognitive capacity. And then we can also see what you actually need to work on. I would really encourage you if you identify some potholes, how can you quickly action that? I am really excited to say that I am working on something really great that's releasing in July. I have a couple of spaces left for one-to-one mentorship. But if you are interested in connecting with me or if you resonated with this episode, I would love to hear about it. I feel like I just went on a tangent, but I really love this stuff and it's something I'm really passionate about. So, any questions, let me know because I'm more than happy to do another episode on this as well. Thanks so much, guys. Bye.