Sensory overload at work

Jennifer | Sep 21, 2026Sep 25, 2026

LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this lesson are to:

• discuss sensory overload at work;
• watch a video about mental bandwidth and working memory;
• review advanced vocabulary related to focus and mental energy.

In this lesson, students discuss situations that lead to sensory overload at work and review advanced vocabulary connected to focus and mental energy (e.g. flood your working memory, mental bandwidth, shrinking attention span). They watch part of a video (from 01:10 to 04:53) about working memory and mental bandwidth and discuss its ideas and their own experience of information overload. Students also evaluate practical solutions to sensory overload and rewrite sentences using vocabulary from the lesson.

WARM-UP AND VOCABULARY

This lesson starts with a warm-up in which students look at photos of people experiencing too much sensory input, explain what the term means and discuss when people might experience it. Afterwards, they match sentence halves to review vocabulary connected to sensory overload at work (e.g. shrinking attention span, exhaust mental resources, mental bandwidth). Then, they say if they ever experience these challenges themselves. Moving on, students decide whether a set of everyday tasks require little energy, a lot of energy or lead to sensory overload, giving reasons for their choices.

VIDEO AND SOLUTIONS

In this part of the lesson, students watch part of a video and tick which tasks from the earlier exercise are mentioned. They then guess missing words in extracts from the video before watching again to check their answers. Students go on to discuss questions about the video. Moving on, they complete a list of practical solutions to sensory overload at work with one word each. Students then choose the three they think would be most effective for their own job. Finally, students read about problems companies face and possible solutions to them, discussing how effective these solutions are and whether they’d work in their own company.

HOMEWORK/REVISION

This lesson also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students rewrite sentences using a given word so that they keep a similar meaning. The task is available in the teacher’s version of the worksheet. You can print it and hand it out to your students. It’s also included in the e-lesson plan.

WORKSHEETS

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