Hey everyone, it's Dr. Sahar Youssef here, your guest host for the week.
Welcome to Radio Headspace.
As you know, this week is all about how to have better focus so you can be more productive and get more out of life.
As a cognitive neuroscientist, I've studied all the ways that our phones can be distracting and how they steal our precious attention and energy, especially when we're scrambling to get things done.
I'm sharing some simple tips on how to improve your relationship with your phone and how to keep your phone as a tool that you use, versus a tool that uses you.
Our phones have truly been designed to steal your attention and keep you coming back for more.
Because every single time, my mind wanders to looking at my email, checking a text message, and then I redirect my attention back to, let's say, my document or the thing that I'm trying to focus on.
Guess what?
It doesn't come for free.
You pay for it.
It is simply going to take you sometimes up to twice as long to get the same amount of work done, and you will be more exhausted by the end of the day if you allow yourself to work in a way where you're allowing yourself to be constantly interrupted.
So really taking a hard look at our relationship with these devices is going to be of utmost importance if you do want to bring your A-game to your productivity so that you have more time and energy for your actual life.
The number one change that I would recommend, as it relates to our notifications and our phones hurting our productivity.
Do an audit off almost all of your notifications.
The only reason a notification should be allowed to actually interrupt your train of thought and interrupt your day is if it has one or both of these qualities.
It is more important or more urgent than what you are choosing to do in this moment.
You're sitting down in a meeting with your manager.
You shouldn't be getting any notifications.
Why?
Because presumably, maybe that conversation is what you're choosing to focus in on and that you have deemed is the most important and urgent thing in that moment.
You're talking to your kid in that moment.
Maybe that is the most important thing that you need to be focusing in on.
But honest moment.
Life is messy.
Life is complex.
Life is full of fires.
So the notifications that come through the filter, the notifications that push through your defenses, those are the ones that are more important or more urgent than what you are doing in that moment.
So, for example, maybe it's your kid's school calling, maybe it's the daycare, maybe it's your boss, your boss's boss.
Go into your settings not just for your phone, also your email and figure out who your VIPs are the names, the emails, the phone numbers, all of it.
Put it in your settings so that those VIPs can still come through the filter.
You can also set up a double call, so if somebody calls you twice in a row, obviously it's an emergency, so that it'll come through and you'll actually get notified.
Otherwise, You're minimizing the number of mistakes and you're making the process more efficient.
You will get your work done faster than you otherwise would with less energy spent.
As I mentioned before, everything about our phone the way it looks, the way it feels has been designed intentionally by slightly evil versions of people like me.
These are cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral neuroscientists that understand how addiction forms in the brain.
So if you make the device less neurologically stimulating, Then what you're able to do is make the device potentially less addictive.
Easiest biohack here is to go into what is called grayscale.
Essentially just means black and white.
You do this by going into settings and going to displays.
And yes, it's different for iOS versus Android, but there's always a way to do it.
You are making the device less neurologically stimulating, the device might start actually looking a bit dead to you.
And when you do this, you will be less likely to spend a lot of additional time on the device.
When you take that brave brave and I will be the first to admit hard step of re-evaluating your relationship with your phone, oh my goodness, you'll have better focus, you'll have more energy, but mental health, that quiet, that presence will start to come back.
And you'll say, oh, oh, hey, it's me.
Oh, hi, old friend.
Nice to see you again.
And that's what I hope for everyone.
All right, that's it for today.
I'll share some fun and simple ways that music can help us gain focus.
So until then, thanks for listening and I'll see you back here soon.
