Multitasking is our new normal, and our focus has never been more challenged. According to renowned psychologist Daniel Goleman, we’re constantly checking our emails, scrolling through social media, going through endless to-do lists, and even watching YouTube videos. , that it’s slowing us down in many ways.
According to Goleman, ways to improve our fast-paced lives can be found in a simple 10-minute exercise. He explains how practicing mindfulness daily can significantly extend your attention span, reduce the negative effects of multitasking, and help you stay focused and productive.
Goleman’s insights reveal how mindfulness meditation instantly reduces stress and calms the mind, showing potential benefits for people with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and challenging It has been shown to improve children’s concentration when faced with difficult environments. Based on cognitive science and recent research, Goleman offers practical advice for incorporating mindfulness into your daily life to improve mental clarity, emotional balance, and overall health. Offers.
Daniel Goleman: What’s surprising, at least to scientists, is that the benefits of meditation appear right from the start. For example, you can do mindfulness, which is a very popular form of meditation. Practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, or 10 minutes three times a day, can do wonders for your attention. And it has to do with the fact that we’re all multitasking these days.
On average, people check email about 50 times a day and Facebook several times a day, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have Instagram, we have phones, we have whatever needs to be done. And what this means for attention is that we are challenged and focused attention is an endangered species. However, you need concentration to do your job well. That’s really a problem.
And it turns out that meditation, to some extent, has the answer even at the beginning – it goes like this. When I’m so focused on what I have to do, what I want to do, the paper I’m writing or the project I’m working on, I think, “Oh, I should check my email.” And that leads to Facebook, which leads to phone calls. We call this multitasking.
In fact, the brain does not multitask, rather than doing several things in parallel at the same time, it works serially and switches from one thing to the next very quickly. Then you go back to that project or whatever it was that you were concentrating on, and before you started doing something else, your concentration was at a very high level, and now your concentration is much lower, and it’s gone up to that point. It takes time to do that. same level.
However, and this is very interesting, unless you’re doing, say, a 10-minute breath-focused mindfulness session, you’re just observing your breathing. I noticed when my mind wandered and brought it back. That is the basic movement of meditation. Then you’ll see that just 10 minutes of her practice will eliminate your concentration problems.
This works. For example, a person who practices mindfulness in the morning will see the benefits wear off during the day, but an additional 10 minutes at lunch and another 10 minutes during mid-afternoon break will reap the benefits. It helps you stay focused throughout the day. This is a very obvious tangible result from effective daily meditation for beginners.
There’s a lot more to dealing with stress, for example. I mean, we’re all stressed out these days. Beginners to mindfulness and other forms of meditation will find that they respond better to stress from the get-go. What that means is that this is a function of the brain, found in an area of the brain that responds to stress called the amygdala, which is the trigger point for the fight-or-flight response and the bite response. . It’s what makes us suddenly angry or suddenly anxious.
The amygdala becomes quieter and calmer in the face of stress, which allows us to be calmer in the face of stress. This is another benefit you’ll see right from the start. One area that seems promising is meditation for attention deficit disorder, as meditation has been shown to be highly effective for anxiety and depression, and perhaps PTSD, where it has been studied.
In a way, this makes sense, since all types of meditation are essentially retraining your attention. Attention deficit disorder is a problem with attention. Therefore, many studies are currently underway, primarily in children. That’s because ADD tends to show up first and helps strengthen your attention muscles.
I was in a classroom of seven-year-olds in Spanish Harlem. This is a very poor area of New York City. And those children live in housing projects and have very difficult lives. And some of them had ADD. In fact, half of the children in that classroom had so-called “special needs,” ranging from ADD to autism. I thought there would be chaos in the classroom, but the children remained calm and focused.
And the teacher said, here’s why. And they had a daily ritual of what they called “belly mates.” One by one, each child goes to their cubby, gets their favorite small stuffed animal, finds a place to lie down on a rug, places the animal on its belly, and then tapes it to guide its belly as it expands. I heard. Breathe in and fall into the breath out. 1, 2, 3 on the inhale, 1, 2, 3 on the exhale.
This is basically the beginning of mindfulness or meditation for kids. In cognitive science, this is called attention training. Therefore, even young children can do it and it will help improve their concentration. Attention deficit disorder is essentially an inability to control when the mind wanders away from what it is paying attention to. This seems very promising, because every time you see your stomach expand, then your mind wanders, and then you bring it back down to your stomach, you’re strengthening your neural circuits to help you focus and fight mind wandering. Masu. And early research and early pilots show that this may successfully address the challenges children face with ADD. And I’m very happy that there is a large-scale study underway. We are waiting for the results, but I think they are promising.
