{"id":6645,"date":"2016-06-17T16:01:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T13:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/?p=6645"},"modified":"2016-06-17T16:01:12","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T13:01:12","slug":"distracted-by-multitasking-try-mindfulness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/distracted-by-multitasking-try-mindfulness\/","title":{"rendered":"Distracted by Multitasking? Try Mindfulness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sean\u2019s coworkers used to be impressed with how he could scan through sales data and compose an email message while talking on the phone about an ad campaign with someone from marketing. They wondered if multitasking could help them get more work done. Then, they noticed Sean didn\u2019t hit his performance goals.<\/p>\n

Are multitasking pros more productive than the rest of us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the answer from Clifford Nass<\/a>\u2019s research at Stanford. In 2009, Nass and his colleagues found that multitasking reduces our ability to concentrate. That was bad news for all of us who spend our days barraged with information.<\/p>\n

Good News: Ten Minutes Makes a Difference<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, recent research<\/a> has an antidote: Just ten minute sessions of mindfulness of breath, three times a day, reverses the degradation in concentration common in media multitaskers. Thomas E. Gorman & C. Shawn Green, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that multitaskers perform better after completing a short meditation exercise in which they sat quietly counting their breaths.<\/p>\n

Gorman and Green\u2019s research shows, again, what I\u2019ve known for years: training attention<\/a> pays off in practical ways. Mindfulness is the basic move of noticing your mind has wandered and bringing it back into focus. And, just like building muscles by repeating exercises at the gym, you can build the \u201cattention muscles\u201d in your brain<\/a> through the practice of mindfulness.<\/p>\n

Applied Self-Awareness
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Mindfulness is applied self-awareness, the foundation skill in the emotional intelligence<\/a> model. I have argued that we should help kids strengthen this muscle of mind in schools. It\u2019s the basis for cognitive control \u2013 the key to goal focus, ignoring distractions, impulse control, and delay of gratification. These are all core mental skills for learning, leading, and life. Cognitive control has been shown to be a better predictor of financial success<\/a> when someone is in their mid-30s than childhood IQ or wealth of the family in which they grew up.<\/p>\n

In past research, my friend and colleague, Richard Davidson<\/a> at UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds has shown the benefits of following a guided online mindfulness meditation exercise. Simply counting their breath produced greater self-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood and less distraction.
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It\u2019s Not Too Late<\/strong><\/p>\n

Feeling overwhelmed by the flood of information coming at you? This new data on mindfulness and multitasking is good news for us all. It\u2019s never too late to build attention. I\u2019ve been a meditator since my college days, did research on the benefits of meditation while at Harvard, am writing a book about the strong new research on mindfulness and other kinds of meditation, and still meditate daily. I created a series of guided exercises for honing concentration in Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence<\/em><\/a> if you want to give it a try.<\/p>\n

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Sean\u2019s coworkers used to be impressed with how he could scan through sales data and compose an email message while talking on the phone about an ad campaign with someone from marketing. They wondered if multitasking could help them get more work done. Then, they noticed Sean didn\u2019t hit his performance goals. Are multitasking pros […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5142,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[427],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-427","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6646,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6645\/revisions\/6646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seragpsych.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}