Wandering versus focusing: how to provide psychological safety for yourself?

Mind wanderings are some of the fiercest foes to our psychological safety.

As a coach and HR Director, I appreciated this TEDx on stress management and psychological safety brought to us by Dr. Amit Sood, and thus I invite you to watch it. I quite often find myself quoting Simon Sinek and his theory on how one's psychological safety within an organization increases one's ability to compete outside of it. It seems evident that fostering an environment of cooperation and emulation instead of conflict within your company will help your team focus on its objectives. However, we all have other sources of stress; our own internal voices and conflicts. According to Dr. Sood’s work, we spend 50 to 80 percent of our time mind wandering, this distribution can often generate stress and result in a lack of focus.

Happy Brain: How to Overcome Our Neural Predispositions to Suffering

Why is mind wandering our default mode?

According to Dr. Sood our brain is designed as a giant network of about 86 to 90 billion neurons arranged in smaller networks. These networks collaborate to create two modes of the brain. The first mode of the brain is the focused mode, the second one is mind wandering. The focused mode engages when you process something very interesting, very novel, very meaningful. From focusing to experimenting the immersed flow state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the separation is faint. Mind wandering is our default mode and we must learn how to rely on and use more our focused mode which is healthier and does not increase our risk of anxiety and depression. Within the modern and complex world, our mind tends to open too many tasks at the same time which feeds our mind's wandering mode. Mind wandering is also supported by our tendency to deal first with threats and imperfection as part of our survival mode. Other biases, like the hedonistic adaptation described by Dr. Amit Sood, can also increase the portion of our time allocated to mind wandering..

How to train our focused mode and weaken our mind-wandering mode?

Dr. Sood talks about a few practices to, as Dr. Cherie Carter Scott would say, be in the driver seat of our life.

1. Expressing gratitude and being present for your loved ones,
2. Muting our judgemental inner voice,
3. Reframing our life’s challenges using higher-order principles. (I am not sure the 5 principles proposed are accurate for all of us, but, daily centering ourselves on what is important is certainly a good practice.)

What about our working life?

I think those 3 steps can also be used in our professional life and translated by:

• Being present for our team players, peers, and colleagues
• Prohibiting our internal judge from speaking first during professional meetings
• Focusing on our higher priorities to prevent any disturbances from being triggered

Coaching and active learning will support us and help us develop our focused mode as well as monitor our mind wandering mode. I would be delighted to hear your feedback or get your tips on how to stay more often in the focused mode, so do not hesitate to share them by commenting on this post.