Your morning starts by checking your emails and flipping back and forth to the addictive, never-ending stream of Instagram images, often before getting out of bed. Does that sound familiar?
How about this scenario? At work, your attention jumps to every email or tweet that pops up, and along with each comes a gnawing sense of anxiety that you must reply immediately.
If that didn’t register, this one will definitely get you. You’re finally home, crashed out in front of the latest Netflix series, yet your mind is still wandering. One eye on the screen, you send a text to your friend, jot a few things on your grocery list and take another little look at Instagram.
This is you keeping up to date and in control, right? Not quite. According to the neuroscientist and author, Dr Jack Lewis, each little distraction comes at a cost. Every twitch of the attention takes a few pennies from our mental reserves until our funds are too depleted to master the important things like, you know, your entire marketing strategy.
“We’re multi-tasking ourselves into concentration oblivion,” Jack told his audience of senior marketing leaders at the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum in September.
“Being reactive can make you feel on top of things but the problem is, if you switch your attention from one task to another and then back, there will be a ‘switch cost’. It will take you a while to get back to where you were mentally… For some people that can be 10 or 15 minutes.”
This applies at all levels of life, and is having a particular impact on workplace productivity. “There is a limit to what a human can do,” says Jack. “People work so hard now it’s not possible for them to do their best work – they’re too overstretched to dedicate the time they need for creative problem solving.”
Why multi-tasking isn’t good for youA study conducted by Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, found that people who regularly flip through their social media and emails are less able to maintain focus on other tasks. The study found that these ‘social media multi-taskers’ can handle two distractions, but when that rises to four their performance falls. Get to six and it plummets. This is not the case with people who don’t use social media frequently. The study also suggests that chronic social media multi-taskers have lower performance, even when they’re not multi-tasking.The solution: Based on this, Nass advises that you limit the number of things you work on to two at any time. Another tip is to spend at least 20 minutes dedicated to a task before switching to another.
Prioritising your downtime
So how does a neuroscientist start his day? Jack begins by meditating, surrounded by virtual reality projections of an alpine lodge.
Those who aren’t Googling ‘VR alpine scene scape’ in a multi-tasking frenzy of article-reading-meets-online-research are probably finding Jack entirely unrelatable.
But before you fall too heavily on either side, let me get to my point. Jack’s VR fir trees really are just the wallpaper – the important bit, as he would tell you, is that he has prioritised downtime. He’s found a space, virtual though it is, to unpack his mind from the deluge of information. (And on the side, he’s proven you really don’t need to be a hippie technophile to try a bit of mindfulness.)
Jack believes that leaders and their teams are much better served by postponing the ‘to do’ list until after 10-15 minutes of mindful meditation – a practice scientifically proven to improve physical and mental health, plus cognitive performance. It can even help to quieten the mind sufficiently for those ‘Ah ha!’ moments of innovation to rise up into awareness.
Take the infamous ancient Greek mathematician and inventor, Archimedes. He resolved the problem of how to measure the volume of an object when he stepped into the bath and watched the water level rise by the same volume as his body. This ‘Eureka’ moment didn’t come to Archimedes when he was deep in thought (which he had already tried very hard at), but during a restful state.
That rest might come through meditation as Jack prefers, or a bath like Archimedes – regardless, there is one thing to remember. “The most important feature of the brain is that it adapts and responds to the environment around you,” says Jack. Treat it like it has the attention span of a goldfish and it will begin to behave like it.
The neuroscience of meditationYi-Yuan Tang, Britta Hölzel and Michael Posner mapped the physical effects of meditation on the brain. Using 20 different studies they found that the anterior cingulate cortex – the region associated with attention – changes in shape and activity in those who meditate. The practice also engages fronto-limbic networks, which regulate emotion and reduce stress. Source: The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation, published, in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2015.
Neuroplasticity
Virtual landscapes aside, it’s not an unfamiliar story. In fact many businesses, from large corporates to small start-ups, have invested in the likes of mindfulness training and lunchtime yoga initiatives. But has it really seeped into how employees live on a daily basis? Or, have workplace demands, social media and (oops, shall we go there?) life’s constant stream of marketing burrowed a little deeper into the collective psyche?
These three things are effectively a form of brain training, it’s just that it’s the wrong kind. “It’s happening whether or not you know or want it,” says Jack. “Anything you do regularly and intensively over long periods of time has the potential to lay down new synapses in the pathways dedicated to performing those functions. That creates faster and more efficient communication between the parts of the brain that need to work together to get things done. The trouble is, all that multi-tasking may well be reinforcing pathways that make us hyper-alert to new information, but at the expense of those that help us focus.”
The great thing, of course, is that by changing your habits you can retrain your brain and become increasingly better at the things that matter most to you. To build positive new behaviours means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit each day, not just once a week. Even then, you need to keep up the good work. “It’s no good doing it every day for a month and then giving up as the brain won’t change. Or if it has, it’ll change back,” says Jack.
If meditation is not your thing Jack has provided two other practices that can improve attention, performance and the ability to tap into creative solutions (see: Henri Poincaré: Structure your hours of work and Thomas Edison: Tap into your hypnagogic state)
Neuroplasticity in practice
Brain scans of taxi drivers before and after doing ‘the Knowledge’ – the drivers’ map of London, which includes 20,000 routes and 25,000 landmarks – showed they had enlarged the hippocampus, the brain area associated with memory.
What can we learn from the great creative thinkers?
Let’s look to history’s greatest creative thinkers, to find working patterns and techniques that boosted their cognitive functions.
Henri Poincaré: Structure your hours of work
French mathematician and theoretical physicist Poincaré worked under very structured hours, dedicating two hours, twice a day to complicated mathematical calculations. Absolutely no distractions were allowed during this time. He spent his evenings ‘freestyle’ reading on diverse subjects to build his general knowledge.
Easy alternative: Set out of office notifications for the same time or day each week, so that you can work without distraction. Avoid spending your most productive hours, which are early in the morning, on low-level tasks like emails. Focus on the big things first – even if they’re the least appealing.
Thomas Edison: Tap into your hypnagogic state
Over his lifetime, Edison – famed for inventing the light bulb and motion picture camera – wrote 1093 patents, often using hypnagogia to aid his creative thinking. (Other fans include Salvador Dalí and the German chemist Friedrich Kekulé).
Hypnagogia is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, a time of deep thought processing. To access thoughts at that point, Edison caught himself at the moment just before falling asleep. To do it, he held ball bearings, which dropped to the floor when he fell asleep, waking him back up.
Easy alternative: Set an alarm for 20 minutes giving you enough time to enter a hypnogogic catnap and wake in time to capture your thoughts. Dig around in your ideas and scribble down anything that surfaces.
