Anyone who has been up all night with an infant (or reading health reform regulations), knows how foggy you feel the next day, and how hard it is to even complete simple tasks.  A new study in Science shows that the condition of being poor causes a cognitive drop similar to pulling an all-nighter.

The authors, researchers at Harvard and Princeton, found that being poor consumes so much mental energy that people struggling to make ends meet often have little brainpower left for anything else.  If you are poor, you are not just coping with a shortfall of money, but also with a shortfall of cognitive resources. Trying to pay your rent while figuring out where your next meal is coming from tugs at your attention so much that it reduces the brainpower of anyone experiencing it, regardless of innate intelligence or personality.  One of the researchers compared the way poverty sucks up brainpower to a “computer that has some other process running in the background”.  He recently told the Los Angeles Times, “Poverty creates this nagging background process and that could itself have an effect on actual cognitive capacity.”

The research makes a strong case for reducing paperwork, inconvenient appointments, and the need to make extra financial decisions when designing programs for people with low incomes.  Filling out long forms, preparing for a long interview, deciphering new program rules, considering whether they can pay a premium or co-pay, all use scarce cognitive resources.

These are important findings to keep in mind as we all continue to encourage state and federal policymakers to simplify and streamline enrollment and renewal processes.