Distracted by Multitasking? Try Mindfulness

Sean’s coworkers used to be impressed with how he could scan through sales data and compose an email message while talking on the phone about an ad campaign with someone from marketing. They wondered if multitasking could help them get more work done. Then, they noticed Sean didn’t hit his performance goals.

Are multitasking pros more productive than the rest of us?

No.

That’s the answer from Clifford Nass’s research at Stanford. In 2009, Nass and his colleagues found that multitasking reduces our ability to concentrate. That was bad news for all of us who spend our days barraged with information.

Good News: Ten Minutes Makes a Difference

Now, recent research has an antidote: Just ten minute sessions of mindfulness of breath, three times a day, reverses the degradation in concentration common in media multitaskers. Thomas E. Gorman & C. Shawn Green, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that multitaskers perform better after completing a short meditation exercise in which they sat quietly counting their breaths.

Gorman and Green’s research shows, again, what I’ve known for years: training attention pays off in practical ways. Mindfulness is the basic move of noticing your mind has wandered and bringing it back into focus. And, just like building muscles by repeating exercises at the gym, you can build the “attention muscles” in your brain through the practice of mindfulness.

Applied Self-Awareness

Mindfulness is applied self-awareness, the foundation skill in the emotional intelligence model. I have argued that we should help kids strengthen this muscle of mind in schools. It’s the basis for cognitive control – the key to goal focus, ignoring distractions, impulse control, and delay of gratification. These are all core mental skills for learning, leading, and life. Cognitive control has been shown to be a better predictor of financial success when someone is in their mid-30s than childhood IQ or wealth of the family in which they grew up.

In past research, my friend and colleague, Richard Davidson at UW-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds has shown the benefits of following a guided online mindfulness meditation exercise. Simply counting their breath produced greater self-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood and less distraction.

It’s Not Too Late

Feeling overwhelmed by the flood of information coming at you? This new data on mindfulness and multitasking is good news for us all. It’s never too late to build attention. I’ve been a meditator since my college days, did research on the benefits of meditation while at Harvard, am writing a book about the strong new research on mindfulness and other kinds of meditation, and still meditate daily. I created a series of guided exercises for honing concentration in Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence if you want to give it a try.

Oh, and what about your kids, if you have any? There’s Focus for Kids and Focus for Teens.

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Supplementary reading available at More Than Sound:

Develop a Healthy Mind: How Focus Impacts Brain Function

Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills with Richard Davidson

Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence

Brainpower: Mindsight and Emotional Intelligence in Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Daniel Siegel

The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights