You know the rhythm. A document open on one screen, a thread you owe a reply to on another, a meeting you are half in, a message that just lit up with the words "got a sec?" You move between all of it without missing a beat. People say it about you like a compliment: nothing falls through the cracks, you can hold it all at once.
You have probably started to wear that as a badge. The person who can juggle. And here is the uncomfortable part. The skill you are proudest of may be the exact thing wearing you down.
A study published in 2025 in Frontiers in Psychology looked closely at what multitasking does to the people doing it. The finding is quiet, and it is worth sitting with, because it does not flatter the way most of us have learned to work.
What the study actually found
The researchers surveyed 354 employees in the information technology industry, a group that lives in exactly the kind of work most senior professionals will recognise: rapid switching between platforms, messages, and parallel responsibilities, all day. They measured how much people multitasked, how much job stress they carried, and how they rated their own wellbeing at work.
The pattern was clear. The more people multitasked, the more job stress they reported, and the lower their workplace wellbeing. Multitasking was positively linked to stress and negatively linked to wellbeing, and the two were not separate stories. Job stress carried a meaningful part of the damage. In the language of the paper, stress partially explained why multitasking pulled wellbeing down, accounting for a little over a third of the effect.
Read that again slowly. Multitasking does not just feel tiring in the moment. It appears to lower how well you are doing, and it does so largely by raising the background level of stress you carry from one task into the next.
It is a tax, and you are paying it dozens of times a day
The researchers lean on a simple idea from psychology: some parts of a job are demands that draw down a finite pool of mental resources. Multitasking, they argue, is one of those demands. Every time you switch, your brain has to set down one mental arrangement and build another. The cost is small each time. The problem is that you pay it again, and again, and again.
You are not bad at focusing. You are being asked to start over, quietly, dozens of times a day, and then judging yourself for feeling frayed by the end of it.
This reframing matters because of how it lands emotionally. Most high performers do not interpret the afternoon fog as a workload problem. They interpret it as a personal one. Why can I not concentrate the way I used to. Why does a full day leave me with nothing left for the people I come home to. The study offers a kinder and more accurate answer. The fog is not a flaw in you. It is the running total on a tax you never agreed to pay.
Why it lands hardest on the people who look like they are coping
There is a cruel logic to who pays the most. The more capable you appear, the more parallel work you get handed. Trust flows toward the person who does not drop things, so that person ends up switching context more often than anyone around them. The reward for handling load well is more load.
So the people most exposed to this are rarely the ones who look like they are struggling. They are the senior managers, the directors, the leads, the ones running the room. From the outside the output is still excellent. On the inside, the switching never stops, and the stress it generates does not reset between tasks. It accumulates. It follows you to dinner. It is sitting on your chest at 6am before the day has even started.
If you want a sense of how much of this you are actually carrying, that is worth measuring rather than guessing. The free Cognitive Load & Bandwidth Index on this site was built for exactly this question. It gives you a concrete read on how much of your mental bandwidth is already spoken for, instead of leaving you to wonder whether you are simply being soft.
The one thing that actually buffered it
Here is where the study turns hopeful, and where it gets practical. The researchers did not stop at the damage. They tested what changed it, and one factor stood out: job autonomy. When people had genuine control over how and when they did their work, the link between multitasking and stress weakened sharply. Same amount of switching. Far less harm.
That is a significant clue. It says the deepest problem may not be the number of things you hold. It is the feeling that the shape of your day is decided by everyone except you. Two people can do the same volume of parallel work and end up in completely different places, and what separates them is how much say they have over the rhythm.
This is also why the standard advice, just do less, so often fails the people who need it most. You usually cannot simply shed the work. But you can often fight for more control over how it flows: protected blocks, the right to batch the small things, permission to be unreachable while you do the deep work, clearer ownership so you are not pulled into every thread. Autonomy is not a perk. The evidence here suggests it is a buffer against the very stress that multitasking creates.
Where autonomy is genuinely missing, the harder question is sometimes whether the role itself fits you. The Career Friction & Alignment Audit is the free tool on this site for pulling that apart, separating "I am overloaded this quarter" from "this job is structurally wrong for how I work." They feel identical from the inside. They are not the same problem, and they do not have the same answer.
What this means if you are the one juggling
None of this is an argument to feel broken. It is an argument to stop misreading the signal. The tiredness, the short fuse by evening, the sense that you are everywhere and nowhere, that is not evidence that you are not cut out for the job. It is what a finite mind looks like after a day of being split a hundred ways without enough control over the splitting.
The move is not to admire the juggling. It is to notice the cost honestly, measure the load instead of guessing at it, and then go after the one thing the research says actually helps: more authorship over your own day. Sometimes that is a conversation with a manager. Sometimes it is a harder conversation with yourself about whether the role can ever give you that.
That second kind of conversation is most of what coaching and counselling actually are. Not advice shouted from the sidelines, and not a productivity hack. A real conversation, with a real person on the other side, where you get to think out loud about what you are carrying and what you are willing to change about how you carry it. If your mind has been running too many tabs for too long, that is a good place to start closing some.
Common questions about multitasking and stress
Is multitasking bad for your mental health?
The research points that way. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that the more people multitasked at work, the higher their job stress and the lower their overall workplace wellbeing. Job stress carried a meaningful part of that effect, so multitasking does not just feel draining, it appears to drain wellbeing through the stress it creates.
Why does multitasking feel so exhausting?
Each switch between tasks asks your brain to drop one mental setup and rebuild another. Researchers frame multitasking as a job demand that quietly consumes a finite pool of mental resources. You are not weak at focus. You are paying a switching tax dozens of times a day, and the bill lands as stress and fatigue.
Does multitasking affect high performers more?
Often, yes. The people who are trusted with the most tend to be handed the most parallel work, so they switch context more often than anyone. The skill they are praised for, holding ten things at once, is also the mechanism that erodes their wellbeing the fastest.
What actually reduces the harm of multitasking?
In the 2025 study, job autonomy was the buffer. When people had genuine control over how and when they did their work, the link between multitasking and stress weakened sharply. The fix is less about doing fewer things and more about regaining control over the shape of your day. You can map your own load with the Cognitive Load & Bandwidth Index.