Recognize that cognition, encompassing attention, memory, decision-making, emotional regulation, and empathy, is foundational to addressing global challenges and personal well-being. This broad understanding should be prioritized for optimization in your life.
Understand that multitasking is a neurological impossibility as our brains can only focus on one thing at a time, leading to doing several things poorly and degrading cognition. This degradation can negatively impact memory, perception, decision-making, relationships, sleep, and increase anxiety.
Develop meta-awareness about your technology usage, understanding how your behaviors with devices influence your life. This awareness is a crucial first step in shifting habits towards healthier engagement.
Take personal responsibility for how you use technology, rather than handing over control to its powerful influences. Make conscious decisions about your engagement and form new, healthier habits.
Create specific phone-free zones or times, such as not bringing your phone into children’s rooms, during family dinners, or after a certain evening hour. This prevents distraction and enhances the quality of your experiences and relationships.
Actively modify your environment to reduce the accessibility of distracting information sources, such as putting your phone in your trunk while driving or not having multiple tabs open. This encourages sustained focus on your current task or interaction.
Prevent your attention from being constantly pulled away by the constant ringing and pinging of your phone, even when monotasking, to maintain focus and reduce interference.
Engage in concentrative meditation, such as breath-focused meditation (e.g., 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week for six weeks), by holding your attention to a subtle stimulus and gently bringing it back when distracted. This practice can improve your ability to control and sustain attention.
Spend time in nature to restore cognitive control and alleviate cognitive fatigue. The strong bottom-up influences of the natural world allow your top-down attention to relax and recover.
Take regular breaks from high-intensity, top-down cognitive activities to prevent fatigue and performance decrement. Recognize that your brain, like your body, needs recovery.
Choose breaks that truly restore cognitive control, such as meditation, relaxation, physical exercise, or nature exposure. Avoid switching to other high-intensity or stress-inducing tasks like checking email or social media.
Apply a ‘cognitive nutritional index’ to the information you consume, making conscious decisions about what you engage with, similar to how you choose food. Prioritize high-quality cognitive input over low-value ‘doom scrolling’.
Actively engage in rhythmic experiences, such as music or dance training, to ‘fine-tune’ your brain. Becoming more rhythmic can improve working memory and reading fluency by enhancing neural communication and synchrony.
Recognize that your brain’s ability to process information is limited, its filtering of irrelevant data is imperfect, and its capacity to sustain attention is finite, making cognitive control vulnerable to interference.
Engage in introspection about the impact of your multitasking behavior on yourself and your environment. Awareness of its negative consequences (e.g., guilt, sleep issues, disrupted work) can be anxiety-provoking and motivate change.