Mindfulness
Multitasking is a myth. Even if you could do multiple things at the same time, you couldn’t give each of them your full intelligence. When you try to multitask, it is like you’re taking your IQ and dividing it by the number of tasks you’re doing. Unitasking is the opposite of multitasking. It means giving your full attention to one task at a time, so that you bring all of your intelligence into each task. The best way to practice unitasking is to plan in advance what you will be doing, so that you can be sure to do just one thing at a time, in the right order. We call that sequential unitasking.
You can practice sequential unitasking anytime. Imagine that you are folding the laundry. Perhaps you’d normally do something else at the same time, like talk to a friend on the phone, or watch TV. But what if you gave each piece of clothing your whole attention? You might try to pick up each item more deliberately, feeling the texture in your hands as you did so, then gracefully introduce the folds, and carefully set it into an ordered pile.
This is what we mean by “mindfulness.” Mindfulness, as the term is used in behavioral therapy, simply means paying close attention to something you are currently experiencing, like folding the laundry. It’s what we practice when we bring sequential unitasking down to the simplest tasks; it is the simplest form of unitasking. You can be mindful of anything you are feeling — even sensations you aren't currently aware you have, such as the temperature of the air on the back on your neck. Being mindful of a sensation means deliberately feeling it.
Here’s an example. Take the fingers of one hand, and touch the tips of them to the back of your other hand. Do they feel like five things, or like one thing? For most people, unaccustomed as we are to the sensations on the backs of our hands, they just feel like one thing — at first. With even the shortest practice feeling the back of your hand, you’ll start to feel all five fingers, and you’ll even start feeling the difference between fingernails and fingertips. Your brain will shape itself to quickly make you get better at anything you practice! The richer the mindful experience is, the greater the changes it makes to your brain. The richest sensation of all is the sensation of the breath. That’s why focusing on your breathing is the most typical form of mindfulness practice.
The best way to understand mindfulness is to experience it, which takes only a few minutes. You can follow along with these instructions for focusing on your breathing right now.
- Start by finding a comfortable, upright posture, and try to stay completely still. Focus all of your attention on the sensation of your breath moving through your nose. See if you can notice how the air is cooler going in, and warmer going out.
- Continue for 5 breaths.
- Now open up as fully as you can to the sensation of your breath in your chest, feeling your chest inflate like a balloon and then deflate. Use no effort while exhaling.
- Continue for 5 breaths
- Keeping your attention wholly on your breath, start following a rhythm with your breathing: 4 seconds in, rounding gently at the top and holding for 2 seconds; then 4 seconds out, rounding gently at the bottom and holding for 2 seconds.
- Continue for 5 breaths.
- At the top of the inhale, as you hold for 2 seconds, see if you can feel your heart beating. Try the same at the bottom of the exhale, as you hold. See if you can feel your heart speeding up as you inhale and slowing down as you exhale.
- Continue for 5 breaths.
One of the best ways to assess how habitually mindful you are is to see if you can feel your heart beating. The practice of mindfulness has an amazing capacity to bring your awareness into the present moment so you can become aware of sensations as subtle as your heartbeat. Hopefully you just experienced this!
Let’s back up a bit and consider some recent developments in neuroscience. Neuroscientists describe two distinct forms of attention, associated with two different networks in the brain. The first, called task attention, focuses entirely on the present moment; the other, called default attention, predicts what you’ll do next, so that your memories and associations will be ready for you when you get there. The more you slow down and mindfully unitask, the more you will shift your attention to task attention, and you’ll experience silence in your mind.
If you disengage yourself from the task at hand and let your mind wander freely — or if you rush and try to multitask — you’ll activate your default attention. You might experience this activation as thoughts, words, and images cropping up in your mind. These won’t necessarily relate to your task at hand; instead they’ll likely relate to unfinished business. If that unfinished business has a negative emotional charge, the activation can become intense: you’ll start worrying about the future, or ruminating about the past.
The best way to tell how active your default attention is right now is to observe your mind in silence. Does your attention continually jump to what to do next? If so, you can activate your task attention by focusing entirely on the sensation of your breath. You’ll notice that your default attention gradually calms down, and the silence in your mind grows stronger.
The exercise of mindfulness has the potential to clear your default attention of all content and put it to rest. It’s a powerful help in preventing your default attention from pulling you off-task once you start working.
Mindfulness also makes you much less likely to get snagged by distractions by helping you gain a new awareness of your thoughts. Suppose you’re writing a paper and just as you finish a paragraph, the thought pops into your mind: “I need to check my email.” Such thoughts can attract your task attention with an almost magnetic power. If your attention fuses with the distraction, you’ll be likely to give in and automatically check your email.
Mindfulness prevents this kind of fusion by improving your ability to notice thoughts as they emerge. Instead of being caught off guard by the thought, “I need to check my email,” you will instead notice it arising. You may experience this as, “Interesting — I am having the thought, ‘I need to check my email,’ and I can feel it pulling me.” Mindfulness practice will increase your ability to de-fuse your attention from these distractions, thus giving you the freedom to shape your actions amidst distracting thoughts.
With mindfulness, you'll have more energy as the need to fight distractions disappears, and you’ll have more peace as you learn to silence your mind. But the greatest effect of being mindful is that you become fully able to engage the present challenge. As we will discuss later, this ability to engage challenge in the present moment is an essential part of entering into flow at will.
Reframing is the first step of being open to a present challenge. Through reframing, you discover how the challenge is an opportunity for growth and practice. If you’ve been dreading something, you know you’ve reframed it when you can say, “Bring it on!” Mindfulness continues this openness to the present challenge by helping you say “Bring it on!” to the present moment. Reframing is an intellectual discovery; mindfulness is an attentional experience. They work together perfectly to help you engage the present moment with your whole mind, so that you can give your best, in work and in life.
