![]() ![]() We live in an apparent paradox - many of the things we need to do our so obvious: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. When we sleep better, a lot of problems get less. You’re much less clear than you could be. When we’re in a hurry, we’re all impulsive and easily irritated. We are so accustomed to being sleep deprived, everyone around us are exhausted, and we try medicate (with coffee and other stimulants). Only 15% of us wake up from sleep feeling refreshed. The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. We have a choice between two profound choices - fragmentation or flow. We need to strip out our distractions and replace them with sources of flow. Gaining focus is not a case of removing all your distractions, that will create a void. And thirdly, doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, not beyond them.įlow states are very fragile and easily disrupted. You also have to be doing something that is meaningful to you. The Crippling of Flow Statesįlow can only come when you are mono-tasking - where you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing. The ‘bouncer’ can’t filter like he used to, he’s overwhelmed. Now there is lots of noise from open-plan offices, sleeping in crowded cities and tapping away in coffee shops. Your prefrontal cortex, is like a bouncer, who’s job is to filter out most of the stimuli hitting you at any given moment. Because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories and if you are spending energy on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.ġ36 students sat a test in a study, the ones who received intermittent texts, instead of having their phone off, performed 20% worse. your mind given free undistracted time will automatically think back to everything it’s absorbed and start to draw links between them in new ways. Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial.Ĭreativity drain. You start making more errors as you have to backtrack to figure out where your brain left off. Switch cost effect - your brain has to reconfigure and remember what you were doing before. Slowness nurtures attention, speed shatters it. ![]() If you go too fast, overload your abilities, they degrade. Because you have to shrink the world to fit your cognitive bandwidth. ![]() When a person focuses on slow activities, like yoga, a broad range of scientific studies have shown that they improve your ability to pay attention significantly. Our phones are with us all the time are the easy thing to do, not the important. But what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a bit difficult. In general, we want to choose the easy option. The more you flood the system with information, the more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it. Things are faster to reach peak popularity, and then faster to drop again. Studies have found that topics are discussed for a shorter time period - in 2013 the average was 17.5 hours. Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering We need to deal with our attention problems before we can try achieve other sustained goals. If you want to do what matters in any domain, any context in life, you have to be able to give attention to the right things. Something similar may be happening to the changes in our attention and focus. The way we live changed dramatically - our food supply changed and we built cities that it’s hard to walk and bike around - and those changes in our environment led to changes in our body. Obesity is not a medical epidemic, it’s a social epidemic. ![]() This is not because we have suddenly become more greedy and self-indulgent. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is an endemic in the Western world. If we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. There are powerful external forces driving the attention crisis. This book allows you to explore some of the reasoning behind that and how we shouldn’t feel so frustrated and at fault. We can all understand and see our focus drift. This was top on my ‘to read’ list given Lost Connections and Chasing The Scream had such an impact on me. Johann takes you on a wonderful journey across the world, with his own personal experiences with technology and focus, to interviews with the most renowned scientists and experts in the space. Johann is one of my favourite authors, his books challenge your thinking on ideas that you didn’t realise needed challenging. Our attention and focus is fundamental to a good life, well-functioning democracy and solving difficult problems. The solution is deeper than individual action. Our focus has been deteriorating for centuries, and has been super-charged by social media and technology. Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari □ The Book in 3 Sentences ![]()
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