Brain Health and Otherwise
A friend of mine inspired me to quit checking my phone while driving. By “driving” I mean looking at my phone at any point between turning the key in the ignition and turning off the engine. Before, I never texted while driving or checked emails or anything else. I did it at stoplights. I wasn’t driving, right? But a few times I misinterpreted what the cars around me at the stoplight were doing. I braked or accelerated when I should have been doing the opposite. Of course, I caught myself.
Then my friend posted a piece about her son being hit by a car. The child’s doctor said the family was lucky the driver was paying attention. Too often the driver’s attention level, the doctor said, made the difference between a very good outcome and a very bad one. Her family had a very good outcome.
My vow wasn’t easy to keep. I’d find my gaze drifting to my phone lying on the passenger seat. What I’ve had to do is put the phone out of sight. Zip it in my backpack. Tuck it in my pocketbook and snap the closure. Who knows, after I’ve done this for a while, maybe I will have broken a habit and it won’t be so tempting. In the meantime, ya do what ya gotta do.
Here’s another change I’ve made. I’m trying to quit multi-tasking. No more surfing the web while watching TV. Why not? I heard an NPR piece on your brain. You know what they said was the quickest way to weaken the brain? Multi-tasking.
To me, this is counterintuitive. The contrary seems true—look how strong my brain is! It can do lots of things at once! But the piece said multi-tasking weakens the neural connections on which a nimble brain depends. Deep concentration, on the other hand, strengthens the brain.
So I’m trying to break the habit of multi-tasking. Also to quit scanning an article, reading the first sentence of each paragraph to see if it might contain whatever attracted me to the article in the first place, and ignoring the rest.
This is all is quite hard. So much of TV doesn’t deserve your entire attention. So many articles go on and on and on. It’s boring driving thirty minutes out East and never checking my phone.
Hopefully it will be worth it.
brain health, deep concentration, neural connections, no texting while driving, stop multi=tasking
rdestefanis
Good article.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Thanks, Rick. Breaking habits is SO hard.
Maria
Breaking the multi-tasking habit is so hard! I’ve been working on increasing focus on one thing at a time myself. I’m hoping that will mean I will less often look up and catch myself somehow reading a Buzzfeed list on cats while I thought I was working on a story.
Marisa
(If I hadn’t been multi-tasking when I wrote that last comment, I might not have misspelled my own name.)
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Ha!
Ellen Morris Prewitt
I think we’re all permanently re-wriring our brains, and not in a particularly good way. But you and me will be ahead of the pack, the only strong-brain people left in a weak-brain world. 🙂
Luanne
I’m a born multi-tasker. One of my most visit 11-year-old memories is watching a TV (still see it happening on screen, but I don’t know the title), knitting, and reading. But what was ok in the 60s and 70s now seems dangerous and a pathway to chaos. I need to change.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Maybe your brain was trained early in those pathways and, for you, it’s not taxing. I have noticed a difference in my anxiety level when I’m not multi-tasking, even doing things I want to do like your 11-year-old self (which I’d call really impressive), so there is that.
Luanne
I need to get over being anxious if I can’t multi-task ;).
Ellen Morris Prewitt
🙂