From How to be indistractable | Psyche Guides view
Distraction has become the norm. We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most.
As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel. A trigger that once sent you to Twitter can perhaps lead instead to 10 deep breaths.
Here’s one strategy: I found the fun in whatever I was doing. Yes, I know, this is where you roll your eyes, but hear me out. I learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by looking for and finding the mystery embedded in my work. I wasn’t ‘writing’, I was ‘exploring’. I wasn’t Ernest Hemingway; I was Scooby-Doo. Research indicates that even the simple act of thinking of something that you don’t enjoy as fun can have a powerful and real effect on your brain’s interpretation of it. ‘Fun,’ writes the game designer Ian Bogost in his book Play Anything (2016), ‘turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.’
Critics argue that these digital platforms are capturing our attention, wrecking our relationships and hijacking our brains. However, there’s little scientific proof that social media ‘permanently reduces attention span’ – that claim and many of the other wilder accusations about social media are founded on little more than opinion. One of the most interesting contributions related to this topic that I read this past year was from the British psychologist Amy Orben, who took a deep look at the other studies published on the links between social media use, digital technology and wellbeing. To my surprise, and to the surprise of many others, she found unreliable research methods, exaggerated claims and bad data throughout this research field.