When there's too many options we end up doing nothing.
Imagine you have a field and you want to build a castle. Every day instead of going to work on your castle you put a little bit of wood at one spot to build a house, and then a little bit more in another place where you build a cabin, you put in time on the spa and the pool. At the end of the day, you put one brick in the castle. How fast do you think you're going to build that castle?
When we multitask, there are many things happening; we burn our working memory processing which is very important for decision making. We teach your brain spastic thinking. That is completely the opposite of focus.
As hunters and gatherers for over 1 million years, we were biologically design to focus on our preys when we hunted. Even if there are differences in the brains of men and women on that level because of the task that we evolved with, our brains have difficulties to handle multitasking. And when we do, we basically jump from one thing at a time to another more than true multitasking. This becomes disturbing for the brain and our nervous system. By doing so we lose our power of focus.
When we would hunt, we would need tremendous focus. Focus on sounds, on visual information, on smell, with all our senses, and for our own survival. When we were gathering berries or any other kind of food, we also needed to focus to pick them end handle them, organize and carry them to the tribe safely. This is how we built our brain’s biology.
We are made to focus.
I'm sure there's some good things about multitasking as well, but science seems to prove us that it’s just plain unproductive. And we already know that focus benefits our brain’s much more than any multitasking.
In a paradoxical way, if we hyper-focus, it’s actually even worse than not focusing. When we only see one thing, we loose the bigger picture and overall state of things, something that we also need. Again, when we would hunt, we would use focus, but also our peripheral vision to stay safe, something we seem to loose today as we get stuck in our computers and tasks that pull us away from our surrounding reality.
In a way, multitasking pushes us in ‘singular’ repetitive activities so fast that we have no time to build a solid ground in each of them. Forcing us to hyper focus receptively, making us loose our peripheral vision of things.
When building your dream, your castle, knowing where you are going is important. That is focus. On the other hand, being aware that there might be things that can bring us there or that can help us along the way, is keeping an open mind and staying connected on the larger path.
Simply put, like a camera, in order to focus on something you need a point of reference. In dream making, this point is reality.
Options
One great lie that we were told when we were kids that; we can do anything we want in life we can become anything we want. The problem with that thinking, is that it creates the idea that at any time in our lives we can do whatever we want, or we can undertake as many projects as we want.
Sure we can do everything we want in life but not all at the same time. In order to achieve anything meaningful we need to focus.
Besides when there's too many options, many times we can end up not taking any decisions. Our choices are blurred.
A student choosing a profession in the 1950s add very different choices than a student choosing one today. Today there is so many options many more types of career that you can choose from.
There's also the fact that in those times, people didn't have all these things of our modern age to create inner confusion. Today we are pulled from every side whether it's social media, our phones and commercials are everywhere in our environment, everyone’s trying to grab our attention. This adds to the fundamental noise that the brain is saturated with when it comes time to make any decisions. If you would tell someone from the 1950s that your phone was a source of stress, they might've not have understood what you’re talking about back then!
Our grandparents add much less stress than us in their lives in general. When their workday was done, they would experience satisfaction. They would shut off and move on to something else. Many of us today don't ever have this chance to shut off. We jump from one thing to another, it's seems it never ends. The stimulation can go way beyond your regular 8 hour workday. Aside from creating stress, it puts in immense pressure on working memory inhibits our decision making process.
When we would do something in a natural habitat, we would feel the sense of accomplishment to kind of close the event that we were undertaken. So we get a sense of gratification, pride and satisfaction. Even happiness and joy about completing something. This sense of ‘’work well done’’ is very important for us human beings. It creates a sense of gratification that our life is going somewhere that we are doing something, that we have accomplish something in our day.
When we multitask instead of completing one thing at a time, the things that we take on might take more time to complete. So the sense of satisfaction might come in a much later time and even worse, never comes because the things that we multitask just keep building up one on top of the other, pushing away all of the other things that we have taken on.
On Working Memory
Consciousness is directly linked to our working memory. It is the capacity to remember short term activity that we are actually doing in the present moment. I believe it's also link with self awareness and true consciousness.
Multitasking just floods the brain with so many choices that it saturates the circuit of our working memory. Making it difficult for us to make some choices because we don't remember the elements the differentiates them in order to do so.
Research show that it affects our memory but also our IQ and might potentially damage a region of the brain. A study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they'd expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child.
Read Forbes article here; https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2014/10/08/multitasking-damages-your-brain-and-career-new-studies-suggest/?sh=160c679c56ee
Researchers at the University of Sussex in the UK compared the amount of time people spend on multiple devices (such as texting while watching TV) to MRI scans of their brains. They found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.
On the longer-term how would this affect us in our power of making choices? Do you have difficulty making decisions at times when you find yourself saturated by media streams or the things to do?
In order to make our dreams come true, we need to keep this great ability of making choices. Of being in the present moment, and very importantly, have an efficient working memory.
Ways to re-establish our power of choices and short term memory;
When we multitask, the brain has to switch from one element to another. There is a time gap before the energy start circulating in all these new associated neural pathways with that new task. This time gap should be used to relax in order to consolidate the short term memory before going on the new task at hand.
When you're pone as a message or notification, wait 1 minute before checking. This allows you to stop reacting to your device and being in a spasmic reactive slavery mode to your phone! Then try to remember you add a notification after that minute, this will have your working memory in action.
Brain games like the ones from Neuronation, luminosity etc… Will help in many different areas of your brain but will specifically help to re-train your power of choice and working memory.
Everything that has your brain working like; reading, sudoku, word games, chess or other board or card games, or even something simple as remembering what you add for supper last evening can help work it out. But keep in mind, one thing at a time…
Meditation. Get to know yourself.
If you can’t and you have to jump from one thing to another, try stoping a few minutes in between.. Look at the trees outside or a simple landscape or an object for a bit of time and breathe a bit. Just too slow down the brain’s ‘non-stop’ activity.
You have been brainwashed by the world. You have to retrain your brain!
It's really just a matter of creating a new habit, that is opposed to the speeding process of thoughts implemented somehow with our modern life.
When we focus we reinforce our power of decision making and choices. It's easier to make choices when we focus on things we can more clearly defined for what they are, and be in a better position to choose.
How is your castle coming along? Are you focused or are you lost in multitasking?
Ref:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Human_multitasking
https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2014/10/08/multitasking-damages-your-brain-and-career-new-studies-suggest/?sh=160c679c56ee
Don’t wait another day, start making that dream come true! Embark on this quest with a coaching program and plan to start truly living, TODAY!
Steeve
www.todaydreams.live
Comments