Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children’s attention problems, told Hari that we need to ask if we are living in an “attentional pathogenic environment,” one in which tasks that require deep focus—like reading a book—are becoming more and more like running up a down escalator. Professor Barbara Demeneix, a French scientist, told him, “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.”

But Our Brain Can’t Be Normal Anymore

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

Individual changes will help, but they will only get us so far. At the moment, it is as though we are all being covered with itching powder, and the person pouring the itching powder on us is saying, “You know, you might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation does have value, but we need to band together and collectively take on the forces pouring this powder on us, and stop them.

How We Can Respond As A Society

There’s a precedent, as the <a href="https://nextbigideaclub.com/conversation-the-father-of-virtual-reality-on-how-facebook-is-messing-with-your-mind/18641/">technologist Jaron Lanier </a>has pointed out. In the 1970s, we learned that the lead that was found in our paint and our gasoline was damaging our children’s brains. So, we banned the lead. We still paint our homes and drive our cars—but without lead. We now need to do the same with the factors that are ruining our attention today. This requires a shift in perspective. We need to stop asking for tiny tweaks.

There Was Once Another Poison That Is No More

The first, as one of Britain’s leading nutritionists, Dr. Dale Pinnock, explained to Hari, is that our diet causes huge energy spikes, and then energy crashes—which leave us with brain fog. Imagine, for instance, that you eat white bread or Frosties for breakfast; that releases glucose really fast, giving you a rush of energy. But then your blood sugar crashes, and you slump at your desk, feeling drained and unable to think clearly. It is, Pinnock said, “like putting rocket fuel into a Mini. It would just burn out and bust very quickly—because it can’t handle that.

Ways Processed Diet Affects Focus - Energy Spikes And Crashes

Hari learned that there is scientific evidence for 12 factors that can degrade our attention—and many of those factors have been rising dramatically in the past few years. In other words, your attention didn’t collapse; it was stolen by these big and powerful forces. You haven’t become weak. You’ve been hacked. Interestingly, tech—which is normally the first cause we think of—is playing a significant role, but it isn’t the biggest of the causes. To get out of this crisis—to get our brains back—we need to first understand these 12 causes, and then deal with them one by one.

Our Brain Has Been Hacked 

But it gets worse still. Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are interrupted, it takes you an average of 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before you were disturbed. So if your screen time shows that you spend three hours a day on your phone, you are losing much more. Yet we are surrounded by apps like Facebook that are designed to interrupt you and get you to pick up your device and start scrolling.

And Then It Hits Rewind

But this phenomenon isn’t limited to bear attacks; any stressful situation will trigger greater vigilance. This is why stress—at work or at home—so often causes a huge increase in attention problems. As Dr. Jon Jureidini, a leading child psychiatrist in Adelaide, Australia, told Hari, narrowing your focus is “a really good strategy in a safe environment, because it means you can learn things and flourish and develop.”

The Greater The Vigilance, The Lesser The Focus

A new field of science has emerged in the past few years called “nutritional psychiatry”—the study of how what we eat affects how our brain works. By interviewing some of the leading figures in this field, Hari learned that the unprecedented shift in the Western world toward eating mostly processed foods has seriously affected our ability to focus, in three ways.

The Biology Behind Struggling To Focus: (Hyper)Processed Diet

“I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”

Imagine that, one day, you are attacked by a bear, and you survive. In the weeks and months that follow, your attention will shift, involuntarily, from focusing on the things in front of you—say, your emails—to scanning for dangers all around you. You will find it harder to focus on more everyday concerns because you are primed to spot unexpected threats. Now imagine that, just as you start to feel safe, you are attacked by a bear again. You will then flip into a state called “hypervigilance,” where you are constantly scanning for risks, and find it impossible to focus.

The Psychology Behind Struggling To Focus: (Hyper)Vigilance

Thirdly, our current diet contains dyes and chemicals that act on our brains like drugs, amping us up. A study in Southampton in Britain took a group of kids and divided them in two. One was given a plain drink, and the other was given a cocktail of dyes and other chemicals that are found in the candies kids eat every day. The kids given the cocktail were significantly more likely to become wild. We already knew the Western diet was making us obese, but it is also ruining our focus.

Ways Processed Diet Affects Focus - Abundance Of Additives

There are two levels at which we need to respond to this crisis. The first is as isolated individuals, by making changes in our own lives and our children’s lives, to protect ourselves from the forces invading our attention. Hari learned many different techniques, which he goes through in the book. To name just one that really helped him: he bought a K-Safe, a small plastic safe that will lock away your smartphone for however long you tell it to. So he imprisons his phone and gets x hours of undisturbed time every day.

How We Can Respond As Individuals

When neuroscientists studied this simultaneous multiple following they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually—as Miller explained—“juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness. But what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task—[and] that comes with a cost.”

So It Acts Like A Switcher

Hari names, unsurprisingly, the social media.He claims that as long as social media companies profit from interrupting and distracting us, they will find ever-more sophisticated techniques to do it. We need to force them to adopt a different business model.

Who’s Pouring The Itching Powder? 

Professor Earl Miller, one of the leading neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Hari bluntly: “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” Yet the average young person now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.

Our Brain Is Not, By Nature, A Juggler

When your brain is switching back and forth “your performance drops, you’re slower—all as a result of the switching.” It feels like a small effect, but it degrades your attention and thinking by a startling amount. One study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to take a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30%

First, It Does The Tape Stop Effect

We are now living in a serious crisis of attention—one that is analogous to the obesity crisis, or the climate crisis. The average college student now spends just 65 seconds on each task. The average office worker spends just three minutes. Even the average Fortune 500 CEO only gets 28 minutes of uninterrupted focus a day.

We Are Living In A Focusless World

Most of us are responding to this crisis by blaming ourselves. “You’re weak, you’re lazy, your willpower isn’t strong enough.” Hari has spent three years traveling all over the world, interviewing over 200 leading experts on this subject. What he learned from them is that this is, in fact, a systemic crisis—one that is happening to all of us—and it requires systemic solutions.

We Are Blaming Ourselves For Our Inability To Focus

Secondly, our current diet deprives us of key nutrients that are necessary for our brains to fully develop and grow. A Dutch study assigned children to a diet where they had to cut out most of the synthetic, processed foods we normally eat. 70% of them experienced an increase in attention—and the average improvement was of 50%.

Ways Processed Diet Affects Focus - Lack Of Nutrients

“But if you are in a dangerous environment, selective attention [where you focus on just one thing] is a really dumb strategy. What you need instead is to evenly spread vigilance around your environment, looking for cues for danger.” In short, deep focus is something you can only really do when you have achieved safety. So, nobody should blame themselves for struggling to focus during a pandemic.

So, What Deep Focus Really Requires Is Safety

Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and other newspapers. His TED Talks have been viewed over 70 million times, and his work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan.Below, Johann shares key insights from his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can. 

Acclaimed journalist Johann Hari shares 5 key insights from his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

mentalhealth

Mental Health

problemsolving

Problem Solving

timemanagement

Time Management

Stolen Focus: Why We Can’t Pay Attention—and How We Can Think Deeply Again

No. Hypocrisy involves a contradiction between a person’s supposed principles, beliefs, or character and who they really are or how they behave. Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant mental state that may result if someone really does have certain beliefs but thinks or acts in a way that contradicts them.

Is Cognitive Dissonance The Same As Hypocrisy?

Psychologist Leon Festinger published the book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957. Among the examples he used to illustrate the theory were doomsday cult members and their explanations for why the world had not ended as they had anticipated. Many experiments have since been conducted to illustrate cognitive dissonance in more ordinary contexts.

Who Created The Concept Of Cognitive Dissonance?

When someone tells a lie and feels uncomfortable about it because he fundamentally sees himself as an honest person, he may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. That is, there is mental discord related to a contradiction between one thought (in this case, knowing he did something wrong) and another (thinking that he is honest).

What Is Cognitive Dissonance?

There are a variety of ways people are thought to resolve the sense of dissonance when cognitions don’t seem to fit together. These may include denying or compartmentalizing unwelcome thoughts, seeking to explain away a thought that doesn’t comport with others, or changing what one believes or one’s behavior.

How Do We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance?

When one learns new information that challenges a deeply held belief, for example, or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image, that person may feel motivated to somehow resolve the negative feeling that results—to restore cognitive consonance. Though a person may not always resolve cognitive dissonance, the response to it may range from ignoring the source of it to changing one’s beliefs or behavior to eliminate the conflict.

When Cognitive Conflict Resolution Goes Wrong

Not necessarily. By bringing attention to the inconsistencies in our minds, cognitive dissonance may present an opportunity for growth. People who feel it could realize, for example, that they need to update their beliefs to reflect the truth, or change their behavior to better match the person they want to be.

Is Cognitive Dissonance Always a Bad Thing?

It’s not clear. While cognitive dissonance is often described as something widely and regularly experienced, efforts to capture it in studies don’t always work, so it could be less common than has been assumed. People do not necessarily experience discomfort in response to every apparent contradiction in their thoughts and beliefs.

How Common Is Cognitive Dissonance?

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds. It offers one explanation for why people sometimes make an effort to adjust their thinking when their own thoughts, words, or behaviors seem to clash with each other.

The Lack Of Harmony In The Mind

Cognitive dissonance poses a challenge: How can we resolve the uncomfortable feeling that arises when our own thoughts or actions clash with each other? Some responses may be more constructive than others.

How We Deal With Cognitive Dissonance

A man who learns that his eating habits raise his risk of illness feels the tension between his preferred behavior and the idea that he could be in danger. He might ease this feeling by telling himself that the health warning is exaggerated or, more productively, by deciding to take action to change his behavior. If a woman reads that her favorite politician has done something immoral, she could conclude that the charges have been invented by his enemies—or, instead, rethink her support.

Examples And Responses

The minute we make any decision, we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative. Before long, any ambivalence we might have felt at the time of the original decision will have morphed into certainty. Cognitive dissonance explains why, when the facts clash with our preexisting convictions, some of us would sooner jeopardize our lives and everyone else’s than admit to being wrong. 

Cognitive dissonance is a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. The clashing cognitions may include ideas, beliefs, or the knowledge that one has behaved in a certain way.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

mindfulness

Mindfulness

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Cognitive Dissonance: Why We See The Obscure Positives of Our Beliefs And Blind Ourselves To the Prominent Negatives

The process of finding what is important to work on could be translated into this series of simple questions:
<ul>
<li>Do I truly have to do this thing now?</li>
<li>If the answer is Yes, is this “The Most Important Thing?”</li>
<li>If not, where does it fit in relation to the other tasks?</li>
<li>Is someone waiting on me for this?</li>
<li>If so, when do they need it?</li>
<li>Does working/not working on this now have long-term consequences that I am not aware of?</li>
</ul>

Daily prioritization check-in

“The Principle of Priority states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what’s important first.”

We live in a culture of urgency, constantly throwing our emotional energy into the latest public scandal, emergency, or cat video. Most of us work in always-switched-on companies where everything feels urgent. Call backs, emails, and meetings are wrought with peak energy. How quickly do you expect a response to an email or changes to a report?

productivity

Productivity

habits

Habits

Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting

Often we don’t understand it but an incorrect posture also can lead to shoulder and headaches. It is advisable to maintain a good posture<a href="https://www.eazyprep.com/improve-your-studying-posture/"> </a>while studying.To avoid this:<ol><li>Don’t face downwards while studying</li><li>Keep your spine straight</li><li>Study at a desk or table</li></ol>

5.  Incorrect posture

A lot of our headaches usually start with stress. Students have to sail through stress due to various reasons such as preparation stress, the stress of covering the vast syllabus, stress related to failure, and many more. You cannot move away from all this but you can surely control your stress level.

1.  Mental stress

In today’s world when the entire world is going digital, this problem is inevitable. Staring at mobile phones and laptops can wreak havoc on your headaches.

4.  Increased screen time

You also have headaches due to prolonged periods of studying. It leads to fatigue. <ul><li>Studying for a test and then not getting the desired result can also lead to frustrations that paves way for headaches. </li><li>Constantly thinking and studying can also lead to headaches. </li></ul>

2.  Fatigue and frustration

If your eyes water and you have headaches, maybe it’s time to get a checkup for your eyesight. To avoid this:<ul><li>Go for regular eye checkups and consult a doctor.</li><li>Read books for a distance of 25 cm. </li><li>Do not strain yourself by overstudying, it causes more pain. </li></ul>

3.  Weak eyesight

<ol><li>Take breaks frequently and use the time to stretch your body and do some light yoga.  </li><li>Avoid sitting and working for a longer period of time. It is advisable to not sit for longer than 20-30 minutes if you are studying from your laptop.</li><li>If your preparation requires you to stare at a computer screen, then make sure that during breaks or free time, you do not use any type of technology or screen. </li></ol>

Avoid screen-related headaches

Early Preparation: You must start preparing for any test or exam well in advance. Thus There wouldn’t be any stress pertaining to syllabus covering. Plan It Out: Be a planner freak if you wish to avoid headaches. Plan everything out by writing and studying according to the to-do lists. Do not fear studying: You must create your own routines and system to study. Try to make studying a fun activity by indulging in stationery, sticky notes, watching videos, and making colorful notes.

Avoid stress-related headaches

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Preferred time slot for studying: Always aim to have a preferred time for studying when your energy levels are at a peak. Try to cover the most important topics at that time to avoid developing headaches. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Try Pomodoro method</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Take frequent breaks</li><li>Reset from a slump: Whenever you fail, try to analyze why you failed and then get back without having any frustrations. I know it hurts a lot, but get back into the Do-it mode! </li><li>Re-energize with energy-dense snacks</li></ol>

Avoid fatigue/frustration-related headaches

Migraines are intense pain that occurs in the temples of the head, in the forehead, and also affect your shoulder and neck. There are mainly various triggers that lead to migraine pain. This type of pain can last up to hours and for some, it might be days. If you have an intense migraine, you might have to be injected with medicine to reduce it.

6.  Migraine related headache

<ul><li>Know the triggers: Some of the triggers can be chocolate, caffeine, any eating habit, or any stress-related issue. If you can detect the triggering factor, you can avoid it to reduce the migraine effect. </li><li>Avoid caffeine</li><li> Stay hydrated</li><li>Reduce stress: Reduce stress at all costs! Do meditation, journal your thoughts away, and reduce the stress. </li><li> Balanced lifestyle: Don’t just study but keep exercising and eat healthily. Have a positive attitude towards life.</li></ul>

Avoid migraine-related headaches

Headaches have become a regular occurrence for students and many of them feel vulnerable when dealing with this problem. Here are some steps you can take to avoid it!✨

Sick of getting headaches all the time? Here's everything you need to know to avoid headaches while studying.

health

Health

education

Learning & Education

Everything You Need To Avoid Headaches While Studying - Eazyprep

... organizations must value psychological safety, diversity, openness to ideas, and reflection time, all of which can hinder short-term results.

To create a learning culture

We have an impressive ability to learn, but our motivation to do so tends to decrease with age:
<ul>
<li>As children, we are naturally curious and free to explore the world around us. </li>
<li>As adults, we are much more interested in preserving what we have learned, to the point of resisting any information that challenges our views and opinions.</li>
</ul>

Motivation to learn

From peers, colleagues, bosses, and especially mentors. Some of the biggest learning opportunities are organic or spontaneous.However, this requires seeking the right feedback and being receptive to others’ suggestions, including criticism.

Learn from others

Be sure to have 'learning potential' as a key element when choosing a job.Your learning potential is partly dependent on your own personality, but your propensity to learn will be strongly influenced by the type of job, career, and organization you pick.

Pick the right organization

We can only develop new strengths by addressing our weaknesses, so if you want to acquire skills you don’t have, or develop new expertise, you will inevitably have to focus on what you don’t know rather than what you do know.

Ignore your strengths

When we can all retrieve the same information, the key differentiator is not access to data, but the ability to make use of it, the capacity to translate the available information into useful knowledge.

Access to information

It's essential that you own your own learning process, managing your professional growth and development.If you are waiting to be told what to learn, you are not being proactive about your learning.

Set aside time for learning

In this digital age, knowledge and expertise have been devalued.What you know is now less relevant than what you can learn, and employers are less interested in hiring people with particular expertise than with the general ability to develop the right expertise in the future.

Knowledge and expertise 

Executive Summary Today's jobs and careers often handicap our ability to learn, demanding consistent levels of high-performance and focusing our energies on attaining results rather than broadening our skillset. Instead of genuinely promoting a learning culture, most employers obsess over results, demanding higher and higher levels of efficiency and performance, which can be the biggest barrier to curiosity and learning.

Stolen Focus: Why We Can’t Pay Attention—and How We Can Think Deeply Again

Cognitive Dissonance: Why We See The Obscure Positives of Our Beliefs And Blind Ourselves To the Prominent Negatives

Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

Everything You Need To Avoid Headaches While Studying - Eazyprep

CURATED BY

Stolen Focus: Why We Can’t Pay Attention—and How We Can Think Deeply Again

Cognitive Dissonance: Why We See The Obscure Positives of Our Beliefs And Blind Ourselves To the Prominent Negatives

Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Everything You Need To Avoid Headaches While Studying - Eazyprep

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.