Need focus? How to quit multitasking for a clearer mind
Multitasking is one of the leading causes of brain fog or scrambled thinking. For a clearer mind, try focusing on one thing at a time.
Brain fog is often a sign that you’re overwhelmed, exhausted, or stressed. It’s a little warning signal from your brain to slow down or take a break.
Sometimes, brain fog is caused by stress, anxiety, depression, or fatigue. But, often, it’s caused by something less obvious and far more widespread: multitasking.
Multitasking exhausts your brain. As one neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin, explains: “the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time.”
When you multitask too much and too often, your brain struggles to cope, resulting in that foggy feeling.
Normal – but not necessary
Multitasking is a perfectly normal response to living in today’s world, which is fast-paced and distracting.
From emails to social media to smartphones, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on one task at a time.
But, the more you multitask, the foggier your brain might feel – resulting in a vicious cycle.
So, what can you do to quit multitasking and clear your mind? Here are a few ideas.
Three ways to quit multitasking
1. Tackle ‘accidental multitasking’ first
For a quick win against brain fog, consider all the ways you multitask without even realising and see if you can improve your focus.
Examples of ‘accidental multitasking’ include:
Keeping your email inbox open all day, which means you’re distracted every time a new email arrives.
Try this: Check your emails at designated times, for example once every hour or make time to try the ‘Inbox Zero’ method and clear your inbox every day.Allowing social media notifications to disrupt your thinking at any given moment.
Try this: Turn off all social media notifications when you’d like to focus or when you feel brain fog coming on.
Browsing the internet while speaking on the phone. Try this: Focus on listening to the person on the phone, instead of getting distracted by what’s in front of you.
Can you think of other ways that you multitask by accident?
2. Chunk your time
Time chunking = focusing on one task (or one group of related tasks) at a time.
See if you can break your day up into chunks of focused time, instead of always bouncing from one task to the next.
For example, set aside 9 am to 11 am to focus on responding to emails and 1 pm to 3 pm to focus on returning phone calls. Minimise all distractions throughout that time and give the task at-hand all of your attention.
Time chunking works best if you allow for ‘reactive time’ throughout the day, i.e. periods of time where you have no set agenda and can respond to urgent requests and tasks as they come up.
3. Plan to daydream
Give yourself 15 minutes every couple of hours to daydream (and to stop any multitasking in its tracks).
Trying to cram every moment of your day with something ‘productive’ is a fast-track to brain fog. Allowing for pockets of time to gaze out the window and watch the clouds floating by will give your brain a much-needed rest, help to keep brain fog away, and help to stop you from trying to do too many things at once.
Even better, when you daydream, you give your brain a chance to digest everything you’ve been focusing on for the past few hours. That’s why your best ideas often ‘drop in’ when you’re doing absolutely nothing.
Other tips for reducing brain fog
Multitasking is a major cause of brain fog, but it’s not the only one. Here are some other tips for reducing brain fog.
Get enough sleep.
Take a walk in nature.
Take regular breaks from screens, even just for a few minutes.
Stay hydrated by drinking plenty of water.
