If I had to name one thing I am troubled by today's society, it's that we're so distracted all the time. I find that in a given day, I am very seldom focusing on just one thing and one thing only. I'm always trying to multitask and get a lot of things done at one time, even though I know that the more productive option is to focus on just one thing, do it well, and then move on to another. Even while working, I'm listening to music, and checking the stock market, which separates my mind from what it's focusing on at that exact moment. There's just too much stimulus in our lives, convenience of information and access to everything with the iPhone that paradoxically creates more barriers to actually getting anything done.
I wish I could press "reset" on attention span and go back to a baby, just having a completely clean slate with no preconceptions, no random thoughts running through my head, no commercials, no regrets, no anxieties (I guess that's why some people use recreational drugs). The opportunity to do a partial reset is to wake up each morning, when my brain has cleared itself enough that I can focus on one thing for quite a long time as my brain is just "warming back up" and hasn't had a taste of anything else yet. I have to exercise extreme discipline not to look at facebook, news, messages, Youtube videos, etc., sports scores and statistics (not a problem during the pandemic) because that bogs down my whole day. After I feel like I've done about 3-4 hours of solid work or learned something substantial, I finally allow myself to check some other things, and then there's no stopping the brain from getting cluttered and succumbing to distraction after that.
I think of distractions like junk food, or processed food, for the brain. Just like the human body, the brain should only be processing healthy greens, a balanced diet that helps the brain grow and doesn't poison it or cause negative reactions, or cause it slow down, clog the brain arteries, but that's what the news is: most news articles, especially the ones shared on Facebook and social media without people actually having read the article, has been filtered down through various sources to highlight the points that give people the biggest reaction, or the news has been selected in a certain way by the algorithms to give the reader what it thinks the reader wants. Gossip, things that make people feel emotion, anger, they're all like processed foods: they look tasty and we want to eat them, and the more we eat the more we want to eat, but they're ultimately bad for us and cause long term damage to the brain and the way we think.
To combat these distractions, I always tell myself to turn off my phone or laptop for a whole day; give my mind a break. I never make it past a few hours. It turns out, very few things are as addicting as a cell phone in one's hand. I always lecture MJ and my sister about not using their phone all the time and getting distracted, but I should probably follow my own advice. One of the only things that had my 100% attention was dodgeball, and now I don't have that. This has been a really long pandemic (it feels like) and we're still a little shy of 3 months since we started. We need distractions like sports and entertainment and things that make us happy, but I'm not sure that's even enough anymore.
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