This is one of the most overlooked aspects of developer burnout. We talk so much about physical hours worked, but it’s the mental gymnastics of navigating tightly coupled code, poor documentation, and fragmented tools that actually drains engineers. The best teams treat reducing cognitive load as a first-class citizen—whether that's through strict architectural boundaries, automated linting, or just writing clear READMEs. If you have to hold the entire system architecture in your head just to fix a bug, the system is failing you.