You and I have time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but some people always want to pick up the pace. New technologies have increased productivity, but with it, the fast-paced pace of life has also made us feel stressed.
You must have a cell phone, right? But no, your boss can find you quickly when you leave work. Does your phone have internet access? That's good, you must have a lot of emails to deal with. Plus, you can update your files at any time... Whether you're casual or working, you're always plagued by constant orders and always-on electronic devices. Accepting multiple tasks at the same time seems to be the trend now. It's hard to tell whether this is better or worse, but we're constantly feeding the brain a lot of information, a phenomenon known as "continuous partial attention."
The reason for the lack of concentration in the digital age is that human stimulation and anxiety have now reached a new level. Information on the Internet is like a blowout every day, and we need to absorb this information quickly. The staggering amount of information leaves us with no time to process them in a timely manner. Weekends aren't just days to rest, they're also good times for us to organize information and catch up. In today's information explosion, the original method of maintaining attention has completely failed.
Mastering Attention: Defeating Distraction and Anxiety, by Lucy Joe Palladino, translated by Miao Na, Chinese Min University Press, January 2022.
How does inattention get you into trouble in the digital age?
Keeping your attention focused in the digital age, everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. What are your habits? Do you always feel idle or anxious? Or is it hovering between the two? Or do you always go to extremes and schedule your time to the fullest, with no leisure time? Take a moment to ask yourself what your habits are.
Is it difficult for you to concentrate?
Most people swing each day between idleness and anxiety and tension. Check if you have done the following:
After buying a new book at the bookstore, I turn a few pages at home and put it down, never finishing it.
· The fashion gadgets I bought recently, played with them when they were fresh, and then put them on the shelf, and ended up with the books that were not finished.
Interrupt what you're doing to reply to an email, but there are several more half-written messages in your draft box.
・ I have agreed to go to the appointment, but when it comes to the appointment, I find an excuse to break the contract, just because I failed to complete the task at hand.
Ambitiously want to try new dishes, but the prepared ingredients are always left in the refrigerator until they spoil.
Are you confused enough to make decisions?
Some people feel that they are more inclined to the confused type. They are fickle and always unable to stick to their goals. They spent a lot of time studying the investigation, but in the end they hesitated. Would you be like this:
Go to the bookstore, look through a few books, it is difficult to decide which one to buy, and when you get home, you will never forget one of the books, but when you return to the bookstore, you will find that the book you want has been bought.
Always hesitant to buy the latest high-tech products, and finally put it on the shelf after the purchase, until others install and debug it.
There are more than six unfinished emails in the draft box.
・I have agreed to an appointment and am looking forward to it, but whenever I start preparing, the result is always late.
Started thinking about new dishes a few weeks ago, looking for recipes online, and then pasting them on the fridge, but after a long time there was no action.
Are you one of the types that can quickly shift your attention?
Some people always pursue speed and intensity. They like to change in a flash. Would you be like this:
Only go to bookstores with Wi-Fi so that you can surf the Internet at any time.
Always be the first to have the latest products, do not hesitate to buy the next generation of new products, and each new gadget has a different purpose.
Always check your emails and always reply to them immediately in the shortest language possible.
I have agreed to an appointment, but then I find that there is something more interesting, so I push off the previous appointment.
Even if you need to lose weight, you will still eat a lot of things, and do not forget to add more spices, a good reason is to eat these things quickly to lose weight.
We are often in a state where we have only partial concentration
My interest in attention began when I graduated from school in the mid-1970s, when I was preparing my phD thesis, and it was not easy to finish it. When my neighbors were partying next door, I had to sit at my desk, read dry professional publications, and carefully search for topics and write papers. I remember when I took the first draft for my mentor to check, he said, "Lucy, you wrote with passion. When I was proud, he continued: "But this is a scientific paper, what is needed is calm." ”
Stills from the movie The Wonders of Benjamin Button (2008).
In order to overcome this difficulty, I carefully considered how to concentrate myself on the tedious work. This incident gave me an inspiration: Why not write a paper on how to improve concentration and restrain distraction?
At that time, psychologists were just beginning to use cognitive therapy to help people resolve negative emotions, so that people dared to face setbacks, reduce anxiety, control anger, and improve lifestyle habits. Cognitive therapy is a way to change a person's feelings and behaviors by transforming their minds. I was wondering: Is cognitive therapy suitable for cultivating a person's attention? So I made it my research direction—using cognitive strategies for self-control, using self-teaching to combat distractions.
I recorded a tape with distracting sound effects, including small talk, rock 'n' roll, small comedy, and funny comedy sounds. I'll start by testing whether these sounds distract other people. After the news of the test came out, college students lined up outside my office to volunteer for the test.
In order to do a good job, I tested 60 students one by one. I asked everyone to do some work checking for typos while listening to tapes with distractions. Through the one-sided mirror, I watched the movements of each of the subjects and watched them mark the errors in the books. Behind the one-sided mirror, three counters with stopwatches recorded the number of times the subject "deviated from the task," including the number of times the subject looked left and right, stopped working too long, or held the pen but did not move the pen.
Before the test, the students were randomly divided into five groups, and I told each of them to use 4 different cognitive strategies to do the test: (1) Silently saying "no, I shouldn't listen" to myself when I was distracted, or simply saying "no" to myself. (2) Injection form - the same method of using thought stopping during practice is nothing more than using a small to large voice to remind yourself. (3) Targeted self-guidance – silently saying to yourself, "I can continue to work," or simply saying "work" to yourself briefly. (4) Blocking strategy – muttering silently. As for the fifth group of subjects, I did not train them in any way and left them to their own control.
The four groups of participants who underwent arbitrary cognitive training all tested much better than those who had not been trained. They put more time into the work of checking for typos, deviating only occasionally. Although this may not seem to have anything to do with the cognitive strategies they are taught, they are much better than those who have not learned any strategies. If I hadn't adopted a self-awareness strategy, I might still be writing the introduction to my paper.
Since then, I have embarked on theoretical research and practice on attention. I found that the vast majority of improvements in human attention were due to the psychology of movement, so I decided to improve my knowledge and skills by making friends with an Olympic sports psychologist.
I've learned from sports psychologists that when it comes to keeping an eye on it, good athletes always face two challenges: long, boring workouts, and high-risk, high-stress events. To develop strategies to address both of these challenges, athletes tend to use inverted U-shaped curves.
At one end of the curve, they are always not active enough, in other words, they are always not meeting the level of concentration required for training, which usually occurs during the months of training before the game. As a result, they need to excite themselves through cognitive strategies. This usually happens during races, especially when they are anxiously waiting at the starting line. At the same time, they also need to calm themselves down through cognitive strategies. In the middle of the curve, the athlete achieves the best state of being able to control his or her attention. At this point, they use tactics to check themselves to make sure they are in a "let down guard" state.
The inverted U-shaped curve is consistent with the results of my PhD research. All the strategies I instilled in my subjects worked because they prevented overstimulation. The subjects' attention was improved because they filtered out distracting noises. By limiting the intensity of the stimuli of the interference sounds to themselves, the subjects stayed in their attention zone.
The inverted U-shaped curve also explains the distractions that people encounter on a daily basis today. Our culture has become more flexible and fast-paced, and technological pressures, information explosions, and media saturation are making us unconsciously drift away from our attention zones. We have seen the following phenomena as commonplace: staged depressive action and excessive excitement for action. We are often in a state of only partial concentration, opportunities slip away, and quality of life suffers.
Live in an era of short attention
If I'm still working on my PhD today, I think I'll definitely add distracting videos and not just voices. Each of us has an eternal circuit in our own minds that places our own internal tapes of interference. For example, you are reading this book, and maybe at the same time you are thinking, whose call should I reply to today? Did I check my email? Is my phone charged? What time is it? Whose turn should it be to cook today? You may have just glanced at your phone to see if you've received any new messages. Do you have any of the above thoughts and actions?
The brief attention of the digital age abounds. In 1971, the average American was exposed to about 560 advertising messages per day. Excluding spam and pop-up ads, this number has increased to 3,000 per person per day by 1997 and is rising. Research from the University of California, Berkeley shows:
Every year, the world produces enough printing materials to fill 100,000 Libraries of Congress.
The number of superficial websites, the kind that everyone can see at any time, is increasing at a rate of 7.3 million per day.
There are more than 30,000 television stations in the world, with an average of 4,800 hours of programming per unit, resulting in more than 150 million hours of programming each year.
There has never been a time when we needed to control our attention as much as we do now. Everyone has too much to do, but there is very little time. The downtime has all but disappeared. The ringing of the phone or the noise coming from the screen grabs your attention and allows you to shift your attention elsewhere faster. We need more sleep time, but less time is being spent sleeping. So we used coffee and sugar to stay awake, but the double-edged sword destroyed our attention.
My first book, Dreamers, Discoverers, and Generators, was originally titled The Qualities of Edison, and was written for parents and teachers. One night, at an exchange meeting, a mother stood up and said, "Dr. Palladino, it's not just the children who are not concentrating, it's us— their parents. Adults are the first people to need to change this bad problem. ”
This mother can be described as a word. "Mirror neurons" are one of the most important discoveries in the field of human brain science. Each of us has a mirror neuronal system that observes our own actions, or the same actions of others. "Mirror neurons" are also known as "role model neurons". When your child sees that you are less focused, her mirror neuronal system suggests that she should also be absent-minded. If she sees that you are preoccupied, her mirror neuronal system suggests that she should concentrate too. In other words, unconsciously, your behavior affects your child's behavior.
The great psychologist Carl Jung once said, "If we want to change our children, we must first look at ourselves to see if we can better change ourselves." Children's minds are as malleable as plasticine. If you're a parent, the ways you can increase your attention yourself are often great examples of what works for your child.
How attention is created by us
Attention is a force. If you want to see this power, try to keep a child's attention, provided his siblings are in the same room as him! In today's world, as the amount of information grows dramatically, the value of attention is increasing. Introducing the "attention economy," business experts Thomas Davenport and John Beck point out that "the companies that will succeed in the future are not those that manage their time, but those that practice attention."
Stills from the movie "The Wind and Rain harvard road" (2003).
Attention is the only creativity each of us has in our waking moments. We can use it at any moment to reward ourselves and other people for their actions. The behavior being rewarded is repeatable. When parents and teachers stop focusing on their children's destructive behavior and instead find their shining points, dramatic differences are seen. One spouse can also influence the other's behavior by choosing their focus and neglect.
Learning to direct your attention can fill you with strength. The more effectively you can control the need for attention, the less that need affects you. You control your energy and decide what you need to put in and what you need to ignore. The Spanish philosopher Ortega Gasset once said, "Tell me what you focus on and I'll tell you who you are." ”
We know ourselves through what we focus on, and wherever we turn our attention, it's a journey of growth. An old Indian, while teaching the children a ceremony of etiquette, said: "A terrible war is unfolding in my heart, and it is a war between two packs of wolves. One pack of wolves represents fear, anger, greed and ruthlessness, while the other represents faith, peace, truth, love and reason. The war between two packs of wolves also unfolds within you, and they represent the two selves in your heart. The children thought for a moment, and one of them asked, "Who's going to win?" The old man replied, "The one you feed." ”
This article is excerpted from "Controlling Attention: Defeating Distraction and Anxiety", which has been abridged from the original text, and some subtitles are not owned by the editors. It has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
The original author 丨 [United States] Lucy Joe Palladino
Excerpt 丨An also
Editor 丨 Zhang Jin
Introduction Proofreading 丨 Lucy