If You're Feeling Tired and Distracted, Listen to This
In this episode, we're tackling burnout and attention overload with Professor Gloria Mark from UC Irvine. Ever feel like you’re drowning in distractions—from Slack messages and emails to the endless scroll of social media? Professor Mark helps us break down the science behind why our focus is constantly slipping and what’s driving us to the brink of exhaustion. We dig into everything from the myth of multitasking to why our attention spans are shorter than ever. Plus, we get some practical strategies to reclaim your day, your mental clarity, and your energy. Don't miss this one—it's time to reset, refocus, and finally take control.
Professor Mark's Book: Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.
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FWNTT_GloriaMark_RS_Mix1_FULL.mp3
Juna If you're feeling tired, distracted and burned out. I have some great news for you. We are finally doing an episode just to help you.
Eddie That's me, honey. Finally, you picked a topic for me.
Juna Eddie. Actually, I picked this topic for the both of us. Okay. Okay, let's face it. Burnout is an all too common problem these days. I feel like everybody's burnt out between social media work, email, slack. It just feels like interruptions are everywhere and everything is distracting us constantly.
Eddie You know, I hear from so many people, they say, I say, How are you doing? They go like other than running on empty, I'm actually pretty good. Like I'm trying to juggle all without even refilling the tank. Like, how do you do that?
Juna Even in the past eight years, I feel like my attention span has gotten so much worse between Tik Tok and scrolling from my Instagram to my email back to my tick tock, back to my Instagram, back to my email. I feel like literally I cannot focus for more than five stories.
Eddie Where we say, yes, attention, yes, attention. You know, you know, I think I just want to add three kids into that.
Juna My goodness.
Eddie My lasting memory is just constant interruptions for the best of reasons. But just years off like that. And I like, can I get your attention? You just did.
Juna My goodness. I don't know how you've done all the things I love. Okay. Well, on today's episode, what is draining our attention besides our kids? Why do we often feel so tired and burned out at the end of the day, besides our kids? And most importantly, what can we do to fix it? I'm Unit Yatta.
Eddie And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna And you're listening to Food. We Need to Talk. The only health podcast that has been scientifically proven to re-energize you just by listening.
Eddie Yes.
Juna First we want to shout out our favorite review of the week. Eddie, are you ready to do the honors? You're going to love this one. Yes.
Eddie It's called Great Podcast and it's from Melissa B Dixon. That might actually be the person's name.
Juna Yes. Thank you, Melissa. Be Dixon.
Eddie And just for those listening, understand, this is only a four star review. Melissa know this. This is how high the bar is. All right. This has become one of my favorite podcasts. The hosts do a great job talking about health, food, fitness and mindset in a way that doesn't feel stigmatizing. Therefore, Mac is engaging and not filled with fluff. They get straight to the topic of the day and their guests all have interesting topics. Thanks for spending the time doing this, guys. Wow. Imagine if she wrote a five song.
Juna But what could we have possibly done to earn a five star review? Well.
Eddie Well, let's keep on striving and then we'll. Okay, that. Thank you, Melissa.
Juna I'm going to be honest, Melissa. I thought that actually potentially you chose four stars by accident. It was like a slip of the finger, which is why I still chose this review because it's a really nice review. And I was like, This does not sound like a four star review.
Eddie I thank you for the kind words. It's encouraging.
Juna Yes, it is encouraging. And for you listening, remember that reviews really help us out. It helps other people find the show. So if there is one thing that you could do for the show, it is leaving. Yes. A kind review because it makes us happy and helps other people find us.
Eddie And can I add one more thing? You know?
Speaker 3 Yeah.
Eddie Let's say you're listening to this show. Yeah. I don't know. You might also be doing something else. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. Like you're driving your garden and you're taking care of your kids, your wife, writing your dog, all of the above. And you say to yourself, I wish I'd written that down. I'm learning so much, but there's so much to take in. Well, we've got great news for you. We have launched a newsletter who every time we release a new episode, we'll send you a breakdown with links to the studies and practical tips on how to apply what you've just learned. There's no spam. It's free and hopefully we think it's fine. You'll tell us you can go to food. We need to talk.com/email to sign up now.
Juna And now to the episode. Today we are going to be joined by Professor Gloria Mark, who is chancellor professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine. So, Professor Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 Thank you so much for having me.
Juna So the first thing I want to ask you is that your research shows that attention impacts our overall wellbeing, not just our productivity. And I think a lot of us think of it as a productivity thing. So how does attention specifically affect our health and our emotional wellbeing?
Speaker 3 So there is a strong correlation between shifting our attention, in other words, multitasking and experiencing more stress. And the faster you shift attention, the higher is your stress. Now, let me say a little bit about multitasking. Because that's what multitasking is. It's shifting your attention between different things. People tend to think of multitasking as doing things in parallel. And humans are just not wired to be able to do two or more things in parallel that require any kind of cognitive effort. But we can do two or more things in parallel as long as one of them is automatic. So you can walk and text at the same time because walking is automatic. As soon as a car starts, you know, heading towards you, then you start paying attention to that and you stop texting. So the walking is no longer automatic. So this process of constantly switching our attention, it requires effort. And it's that effort that causes us to be stressed. And much of the day for many, if not most information workers, involves switching their attention rapidly between different things. And so, yes, people get stressed.
Eddie So the phrase multitasking that came out of the computer world, is that correct?
Speaker 3 That's right.
Eddie But a computer can seamlessly switch from one task to another.
Speaker 3 Yeah, that's.
Eddie Right. And if I understand that right, the computer is not actually doing two things at once. It's just much better at switching than we are.
Speaker 3 That's right. yeah. There was this idea of parallel processing in computing, but it actually yes, in computer science, the tasks are switching very fast. And that's what people are doing for the most part.
Eddie And even if you're doing a as you described, an automatic activity like walking, I'm going to think that if I'm looking at my phone while I'm walking, I can't therefore walk mindfully. Is that right? Is that okay? And then, Gloria, this show is food. We need to talk. So we always kind of like lapse back to that. And if you want a really common automatic activity, I'm going to shout out to eat it.
Juna My God.
Eddie So now people, I guess routinely eat while fill in the blank.
Juna Working, scrolling, ticktalk.
Eddie Texting, texting.
Speaker 3 News, reading, social media.
Eddie Okay. And I'm already learning that when we try to encourage our listeners to maybe try eating mindfully. They would need to do that as the sole activity. Does that follow?
Speaker 3 I would agree with that, because when your attention is on the news these days, a lot of people's attention is on the news or it's on social media or it's on a shopping site or it's on your email. You're not paying attention to what you're eating, right? So all your cognitive resources are invested in that thing that you're reading. So the eating then becomes more of an automatic activity. Okay.
Juna I have so many questions for you. First of all, I'm sorry. I'm an atrocious multitasker. I'm, like, constantly multitasking. And I've heard the research before that you're not actually getting things done faster. But for some reason, to me, it does feel like I'm getting things done faster or like I am being productive or I don't know. But can you talk about the whiteboard analogy that explains how humans switch between tasks, which is different than how computers switch between tasks?
Gloria Yeah. So I like to use the analogy that we have an internal whiteboard in our minds. And so every time you do a task, you have to summon up information that you need to be able to do that task. So if I'm writing an article, I have to bring up information in my mind, you know, what am I writing about? What's the topic? What's my train of thought? Right. And so I write that down metaphorically in my internal whiteboard. And then I suddenly sweat and I switch to say, Read the news, because I'm doing that a lot these days. And so then all of a sudden, I have to quickly erase that internal whiteboard and I have to bring up new information that I need to make sense of the news. Right. I need to know what the context it's. And, you know, of course, a lot of people are thinking about the election. So I have to bring up all that information noted down in my internal whiteboard in order for me to make sense of what I'm reading. And then I switch again and I switch to email. So I'm erasing that internal whiteboard and I'm bringing up the information I need to be able to deal with my email. And every single email, it's a different sender. And it requires, you know, some different task on my part. So sometimes you can't erase the whiteboard completely in your mind. Just like in the real world, if you have a real physical whiteboard, you might erase it. And sometimes you just see markings that just can't be erased. And it's the same thing in our minds that we can have interference that stays with us and affects our ability to focus on the next thing we do. So imagine you read something in the news that's horrific. It stays with you, and then you try to go back. I try to go back and write my article, but that topic is still on my mind, and it's creating interference and it's preventing me from using my full set of mental resources to be able to work on that task at hand. So that's one reason why multitasking doesn't make you more productive. But there are other reasons you won't hear about the other reasons? Because I thought you would. So. So one of them is that people make more errors when there is shifting their attention more to multitasking. You're trying to do multiple things at once, but you're really switching your attention between them. There are decades of research studies that show that when people are trying to do two things at the same time, they just make more errors. And this might be interesting for you, but there was a study that was done a few years ago with physicians, and it was actually was an observational study. People were shadowing physicians, noting down all the multitasking they were doing, because physicians do a lot of asking, especially when they're in the hospital. They're constantly interrupted by, you know, nurses, patients, pagers, other clinicians. And this study showed that physicians made more prescribing errors when they were switching their attention to different things. And the third reason why you're not more productive is that there's what's called a switch cost. The switch cost is that the extra time it takes to reorient to this new task? And. Course, I would say the nail in the coffin is that multitasking causes stress. And it's not just a correlation, but we actually know it causes stress. We did do a study a few years ago where we actually cut off email in an organization for a workweek. So we measured people's stress during their typical work. And then they worked for a week without email and their stress went down. Lord. And their focus, their length of focus was longer.
Juna Okay. So a couple of things. First of all, is stress being measured with high cortisol levels or heart rate or like how is it being measured?
Gloria So we have measured stress using heart rate monitors. Okay. We've also used wearables. We've tried it with cortisol. The problem with cortisol is that you have to be really precise. You have to know exactly the time that the person wakes up. And you have to measure that cortisol at just the right time in order to get a good measure. And our participants were just not very compliant in that. You know, they delayed a little bit in getting to the study or they brush their teeth right before, which you're not supposed to do that. That affects the collection. Or drinking coffee.
Juna Right, right, right, right.
Gloria The cortisol levels. So it was just not very clean. In theory, it could work very well. Right. It has to be really controlled. And I study people in real working in bars. No, I don't study them in the laboratory.
Eddie Here's a real world thing which is getting on an airplane. And I've had more than one boss like chairs of departments who said, if I want to write a grant, which takes sort of, you know, send me to California. And what they were saying was, give me six hours on an airplane without my access to my email and I can actually get something done.
Juna Okay. But to push back on that, yeah, I recently started a new job. Professor Mark and I have never been on Slack. I have like, avoided Slack so, so vehemently for the past, like, eight years.
Eddie Inspired a little jargon alert. So slack is a way of communicating. It's not for slack.
Juna Like it's like texting for your job. It's like, okay. Bridget has group chats and, you know, they can text you work things, and there's this like little click, click, click sound that your laptop makes from somebody slacks you. And I've just been around all my friends that have real corporate jobs, you know, and always trying to love to go, click, click and they have to run their laptop and see what somebody said anyways. Very stressful. And so I tried new job and I didn't want to go on Slack. But, you know, I said, everybody has to have slack. I downloaded it. I kept my notifications off because I was like, I don't want to be bothered by notifications all day. And I mentioned this to someone and she said, no, no, you have to have your notifications on. And so I feel like there's a lot of things at work where it's like, my gosh, you can't actually choose to be off your email. You can't actually choose to be off Slack because they don't let you because it affects company proceedings.
Eddie Where you need the flight to California.
Juna If you can't afford flights to California anyways. So what do you do if like these are just parts of your job you have to attend to?
Gloria Yes, This is the dilemma. This is where an organization needs to come up with some good policy. I have used Slack and the nightmare message that I hear is when someone says, you know, look, we're starting a project and someone says, good, let's start a new Slack channel. And and that adds to my 63 other slack. Yeah. Yeah. And there is an expectation with Slack because it's text that you're number one paying attention. And number two, you're going to respond fast. And it's, you know, at least email buys you a little bit of time. Yeah. Before you respond. But with Slack, there is this expectation that, you know, everyone is just on Slack and responding.
Eddie Is it meant to mimic kind of the office setting more meaning, you know, when you're physically with people? If I see you, I say, hey, Gloria. Like, I had this idea and you go.
Gloria Well, it could, but if you were in a face to face setting, people can read facial cues. Yeah, social cues. And you're not going to continually be interrupting someone, especially if someone looks like they're working right or if they're on the phone, you're probably not going to be calling their name and interrupting them. The thing about Slack is we don't know what people are doing right. We don't want to have those kinds of social signals.
Juna And it shows when you're active and not active. So you also feel pressure to be active all day because your company can. See if you're away from your slock.
Gloria That's right.
Juna So it's like your slack is constantly on. My.
Eddie Gosh.
Gloria That's right. It's it's documenting when you're working. But, you know, there's got to be better ways to do it than just through slack channels.
Juna So also, when you were talking about multitasking, it also made me think of another behavior of mine. Like, I feel like I truly am a guinea pig of the modern social media slash work environment. But something that I really noticed is that I am incapable of doing a task without simultaneously doing another task. For example, if I'm doing laundry, I have to be watching tech talks or be on the phone or listening to a podcast or listening to music. If I'm going on a walk, same thing. So it's like if my headphones are broken, I literally just won't go to the gym. Or like or like, okay, if I have to go brush my teeth guys, I will take 15 minutes trying to find a tik tok. I want to watch so that I can go brush my teeth while watching the tik tok so that I don't brush my teeth while doing nothing. I feel like it's just gotten worse because I definitely was not like this in high school, but I think there was Tik tok like I was in high school or like podcasts were not a thing. So anyways, long story short, I don't know what my question is, but is that like a document that I like because I feel like my sisters are like that too, and my friends are like that. Like we're constantly consuming content all day long and like doing two things at once.
Gloria It's a habit. So you've developed a habit, you know, you've conditioned yourselves that every time you brush your teeth, you have to have this tech with you. But it's getting in the way of brushing your teeth and doing laundry because you're spending more time looking for that Tik tok to entertain you. And you know, if you were to just load the clothes in the laundry to get it done with.
Juna But what do you think is being lost in not having your mind just wander? Like my mind. Your mind. You've lost my mind. But like my. I never. I don't sit with boredom. And I keep hearing people say that boredom is important.
Eddie Boredom is where the creativity I know.
Juna And that's what that's that's my problem.
Gloria Well, it's yeah, it's not. I mean, boredom is when you're not challenged and you're not engaged on something. That's how I define it. And boredom is not bad. If you're engaged in something and you're not challenged and you're doing something really easy. We call that rote activity. That's also not a bad thing because it can settle the mind. And sometimes people come up with great ideas when they're doing these easy, simple, repetitive tasks. Case in point is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who liked to peel potatoes. That's a road test, right? Doing the same thing. But, you know, you have to be engaged a little bit or, you know, he would cut his hand, right. He said he got great ideas while he was peeling potatoes. So, you know, just doing something to calm your mind, let your stress settle. It's not a bad idea.
Eddie So take me through starting to reconstruct my day or unies day so that we have maybe less switching going on and less attention. Drag. What can we offer the listener or not? I mean, the other thing is that while they're listening to this, we already know.
Juna I know they're doing other things.
Eddie They are. They are cooking, pushing a baby.
Juna I know what you're doing right now.
Eddie Walking a dog, working all of the above.
Juna Okay, guys, keep listening. Don't turn off.
Eddie So take us through just maybe some first steps.
Gloria First of all, let's think a little bit differently about the idea of how to schedule your day. You know, typically what people do is they write down a to do list. Here's a list of things I'm going to accomplish. And they usually write a time by it. So, you know, 9:00 I'm going to be working on this article, 10:00 I'm going to be doing this report and so on. But it turns out that people's attention works rhythmically. So every person has their own personal rhythm of attention. So sometimes you have peaks of attention when you're really alert and you're at your best, and then sometimes you're in a valley and you're a little bit tired, and that's affected by things like your chronotype. If you're an early type, your peak is going to be earlier. If you're late type, it's going to be a little bit later. Since you talk about food, it certainly affects, you know, if you need to eat and get some energy, this can affect your attention level. You know, if you're not taking breaks, if you're getting mentally fatigued, if you're focusing too long without a break, that's also not good. So instead of doing a to do list, what I would like to invite the listeners to think about is designing their day. So first you have to understand when your attentional peaks and valleys are. Now, we've done this study in a workplace. And it turns out that most people, their peaks are mid-morning. They have a peak mid-morning.
Juna Like an Amazon thing or not, usually.
Gloria About 10 a.m. for most people. And then they have another peak mid-afternoon. So usually 2 to 3 p.m.. Yeah. And so. These are the times when you should think about doing the work that requires the most creativity and the hardest work. And the last thing you want to do is waste these times doing email or looking on social media or reading the news. But these are really important times because you're at your peak at your best, and that's when you should be doing your most important work. Now, you know, some people have their peaks much earlier if they're early types. We find that most people, when they come to work, they actually don't start in doing these hard tasks. People, for the most part, require a little bit of time to ramp up to getting into that, you know, the zone, that frame of mind where they can really devote their highest mental effort. But they usually start off doing smaller things, which is not a bad idea because if you don't take care of these small things or things like email, it can target you during the day and that can distract you. And if you interrupt a task that's called there's a garnock effect when you start doing something and then you interrupted, it's going to stay with you.
Eddie And is that a proper name? I'm missing the word.
Gloria Bloom as I garnock. I was a psychologist about 100 years ago. She worked at University of Berlin, and she discovered this. The fact that people tend to remember those tasks that they haven't finished. They remember them better than tasks that they've finished. Because when you finish something, it's off your plate. Yes, it's out of your mind.
Juna So true. That's why I write things down at the end of the day for my to do is the next day. Because if I write them down, I'm always terrified I'll forget them. So I just keep thinking about them all day. I'm like, I'm going to I'm going to forget I had a question for you. So I know we talked about the downsides of multitasking, but I also feel like if I have different types of tasks to do, like for example, one might be writing a script and then another one requires a very different set of skills. So maybe it's like researching or something that I'll hit like a wall after, I don't know, maybe an hour at most of working on something. And then I feel like I have such diminishing returns from my effort being put in. So I switch to a different type of task that uses like not creativity, uses something more, I don't know, more science based or something, and then I'm able to do that task really well. And then I come back to the other one in an hour. So I feel like, I don't know, there's like a finite amount of creativity I can use or something, and then I have to go do something else and then I have to come back to it and it's much better. Is there any science behind that.
Gloria That's really interesting. There is science behind the idea of taking a break. And so that's really important to take a break and get yourself refreshed because when you get mentally fatigued, you know, you just can't be creative. So there is science in that sense in terms of mixing things up. This makes a lot of sense to me because it's like when you have a hard problem to solve, it's always good to do something else, put that aside, do something else, and that problem will incubate in your mind and it's going to kind of incubate in the back of your mind. And then when you go back to it, all of a sudden the solution seems very clear. So it's not a bad idea to put it aside for a bit, work on something else. And then when you come back, you're seeing it with fresh eyes.
Juna That makes a lot of sense.
Eddie I'm working at the VA hospital, and one of the things that we've instituted is that the. Our meetings that we have, we're following the wonderful example of psychologists and psychiatrists who long ago established that an hour does not necessarily have to have 60 minutes in it. So the our meetings now automatically and at 50 minutes and the half hour meetings and the 25 minutes. So first, just very simply, now you have a chance to get up and get some water and go to the bathroom. And for me, I am just miserable and I'm glad I'm miserable at trying to sort of like send an email in the middle of the meeting. Right. Because, Gloria, there's this article you have to read. And and so many people are able to send it in the middle of the meeting. But I just do it after. So I've run down the hall, go to the bathroom, get my water, send you the email, and then I still have a minute before the next meeting starts. And now I can actually get there early and say hello to people before, you know, someone bangs the gavel and kind of gets things going. Where does all that fit in and am I by doing this with my colleagues? Are we just giving ourselves is it just simply the break that you're talking about or is there something more going on?
Gloria That is so important what you're doing now. You're talking about face to face meetings.
Eddie This is actually like Zoom meetings where the whatever we're using now, teams or Zoom, you could set it for your our stuff 50 minutes in.
Gloria It is even more important to do that with Zoom meetings because people, you know, you remember during the pandemic, we have meetings scheduled on the hour throughout the day and there was no break, there was no transition. And it's so unhealthy because at least when we had in-person meetings, you had to get up and walk to the to the meeting room. So there was a little bit of exercise and then there was a little bit of informal interaction before the meeting took place so people could kind of relax and socialize on Zoom, you know, at least during the pandemic. And a lot of that practice has carried over till now. There are no transition times between the meetings. It's not very healthy because being on a computer, having a meeting on a computer can be very stressful. It's very hard to focus, right? It's very different than if we're face to face. We're, you know, you see all kinds of social information that's being communicated that keeps you interested. Things like facial expression and gestures and body position and all of those things help maintain interest. But in a Zoom meeting, you know, it's much more formal. So it's so great to have that break in between the meetings. Get some exercise, move around, get yourself refreshed, and then you can come back to the meeting. And I would even say, and I've seen this, that for some Zoom meetings, they spent the first 5 or 10 minutes doing informal interaction. And that's that makes for a healthier workplace in terms of bonding more with your colleagues and having less stress.
Eddie Speaking of taking a break, you and I think we should take a break. A little chance to refocus our attention.
Juna Love it.
Eddie We'll dive back into this fascinating topic in just a moment. But before we do, if you're enjoying this episode, please share it with someone who you think would benefit. Hopefully everybody I.
Juna Know you'll.
Eddie Be the judge may be someone who's glued to their slack or feeling burnt out. We'll be right back. And we're back with Professor Gloria Mark from the University of California, Irvine. I think that's who we were talking to, right? I got stuck.
Juna You got distracted? Well, I think the break was just to help you, not hurt you. Welcome back, Professor Mark. We wanted to ask you about attention spans and whether or not they have shortened the past two decades. I feel like my attention span personally, anecdotally, I feel like it's shortened in the past decade. But is there a trend that actually attention spans are shortening?
Gloria There is a trend and we've documented it. So, you know, we started measuring attention spans on screens back in 2004. And at that time, we found it that they averaged about 2.5 minutes. This was for information workers. And let me say that when I do these studies, there are always in a real workplace or a real environment. You know, psychologists for years have brought people in to laboratories. And I think if you really want to understand tech use, you have to go to where people are. So I create living laboratories and use various kinds of sensors and I go to where people are and measure things like attention spans. So 2004, we found they averaged about 2.5 minutes. In 2000, 12 attention spans went down to about 75 seconds on average. This is using computer software to log attention switches on screens. And then from about 2016 through 2021, we found that the average about 47 seconds. And so.
Juna I'm like.
Eddie Can we go negative here?
Gloria So there's my work. And this was also replicated by others as well. And so we find measures like 47 seconds, 44 seconds, 50s, 48 seconds, all of them together average to 47 seconds. So, yeah, on screens, our attention spans have shortened.
Juna And what can we do, if anything, to fix that?
Gloria I think there are things we can do. So first of all, let me start out by saying people think it's horrible to be distracted and it's human to be distracted. Right? We're humans. Our minds wander all the time. The part that's not right is when we go down rabbit holes and we can't control our attention. Right. And since you talk about food, and I'm going to guess that that's right. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I would guess it's okay to snack forbidden things every so often. Yes. Right.
Eddie Hey, man.
Gloria You know, have some ice cream once in a while. Or I have a chocolate once in awhile. That's human. And that's fine. The part that's not fine is when we can't stop that. Right. We can't stop eating that ice cream or that chocolate or potato chips. And it's the same with our attention, Right? So it's. It's okay to be distracted. It's okay to check the news or check social media. But we need agency. We need control over our attention to be able to pull ourselves out and to be able to do the things that we ought to be doing. And I would say it's not good for people to be on social media all day or play mindless games all day. So there are things we can do. So first of all, one of the first steps is to gain an awareness of when we're being distracted. And it turns out and we find from our research that half the time people self interrupt half the time. Distractions come from within us. These interruptions are not just from notifications or text chimes or telephone calls. They're coming from within us. It's our urges, our memories to send an email or to check something in the news. That's what's causing us to shift our attention half the time. So it's really important to gain an awareness of when we're doing that. And so I have learned to recognize when I have urges to check the news. And that's, you know, I'm a news junkie and I stop myself and say, okay, do I have to do that right now? And usually I don't. And so then I can stop myself in my tracks. But if I need a break or if the time is okay, I might go ahead and do that. But then after a few minutes, I probe myself again and say, okay, if I can adjust. What's here. And if so, okay, time to leave and go back to work. So it's about gaining an awareness, what I call meta awareness of what we're doing as it's unfolding, because so many things we do are automatic. And, you know, it's just like eating that bag of potato chips becomes automatic.
Juna Yeah.
Gloria So switching her attention to various things becomes automatic.
Juna I was just going to say, this is like when you get a craving for something and you ask yourself, like, Do I really want this? Do you need or.
Eddie Can you surf the craving and wait?
Juna Yeah. Can you surf the urge? And then when you have it, do I really need to eat all of this? Like, can I just have a couple of bites? It's very similar.
Eddie So I'm listening to you and dissecting my day. And earlier today I was seeing patients, and during the time I see patients, I really try to, as best I can, go deep and I'll put my phone on. You know, turn off the ringer and I don't have email notifications popping up. Or if they are, I'm not looking at the screen because I'm looking at the patient. And then after the half hour, 45 minutes, they leave. And what I really, really should do is just finish my note, put down all of my thoughts, write the most detailed physical exam that I can. But sometimes I. I don't know, either I'm bored or I say like, I have another obligation. I need to check the emails because maybe I missed something. Thank God I'm not on Slack from what you're describing, but I'm just trying to figure out is that a a skill or a capacity that I can expand? In other words, just discipline myself to say, let me just spend the next five minutes, finish the patient's note, and then transfer my full attention to my email. Help me out here, professor.
Gloria Absolutely. It is a skill that you can develop and it's like in the same way with practice, we can learn to lift weights heavier and heavier. It's the same kind of skill that we're developing. It's a skill of developing agency over our actions. And this idea of probing is just one technique. Another technique is practicing. Forethought and forethought is about imagining our future self. Now, you, of course, can imagine your future self. Five years from now, where do I want to be? You can also imagine your future self at the end of the day. And, you know, it's like the reward you're going after. What do you want to do at the end of the day? Well, I want to be relaxed. I want to be with friends or family. How do I want to feel? I want to feel fulfilled. That I accomplish something today. And the stronger the visualization is that you can bring to mind, the more powerful it is to help keep you on track. So try that. I'll try for thought.
Eddie I will do that.
Gloria I like that. Yeah. It's quite a powerful technique that you can use. And then, of course, another technique is to keep goals in mind. And, you know, you can start out with goals at the beginning of the day and attention is goal directed. So we pay attention to what our goals are. And if your goal is to finish, you know, writing this book, chapter, it, that's what you pay attention to. But goals are very slippery. They can slip away from our minds so easily. And so we need a technique to remind ourselves of our goal. You can write it down on a Post-it note. You can write it on your phone. Whatever works for you.
Juna Vision boards.
Gloria Vision boards, whatever can help you remember your goal. Now we're talking about task goals, but you can also come up with an emotional goal. Your emotional goal might be that you want to be happy or you want to feel fulfilled. You want to feel peaceful, whatever that emotional goal is. Keep that in your field of view. You know, if it involves writing it on a slip of paper and keeping it next to you, do that to help remind you what you're striving for. So again, attention is goal directed. So keep those goals in mind to help direct your attention.
Juna Professor Gloria, Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Her book is called Attention Span A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Get it wherever you get your books. And thank you so much, Professor Mark. This was truly a. An illuminating conversation.
Gloria Thank you so much for having me.
Juna Thank you so much to Professor Gloria Mark. You can find links to her work on our website. And if you want to hear our bonus conversation with Professor Mark, where we answered all your questions about burnout and what we can do about it. Go to food. We need to talk.com/membership. You can find us on Instagram at. Food. We need to talk. You can find me at the official unit on Instagram and Unit Jayda on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie Figuring out how to cancel those last notifications so I can just work and not be interrupted.
Juna That literally. It takes me so long. Why is it so hard to cancel?
Eddie Because it's because they want our attention.
Juna Food We Need to Talk is produced by me and Rebecca Sydell, and we are distributed by PR X.
Eddie Our mix engineer is Rebecca Sydell.
Juna We were created by Kari Goldberg, George Hicks, Edie Phillips and me.
Eddie For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider. To find out more, go to food. We need to tor.com. Thanks for listening.
