“You start reading this article, but an Instagram notification comes up and you take a look. Oh, look who liked the photo. You go back to BDtechsupport, you skip ahead a few paragraphs and a sound on the TV catches your attention: What is this? A bad ad… Ah yes, one more paragraph, but someone walks into the room…” We’ve known for years that multitasking kills productivity, but unfortunately we can’t stop it.
That huge problem called multitasking. In recent years, research has not failed to confirm this: when it is not Stanford University The University of Sussex points out that multitasking can affect our cognitive abilities and cause memory failure It is related to all kinds of mental problems Such as depression, anxiety and stress.
inside A 2008 systematic review, Penn State researcher Cora M. Zubak concluded that the extra cognitive work produced by switching from one task to another wastes up to 40% of productive time. “A good part of the time is spent deactivating the previous task and initiating the mental processes necessary for the new one,” explained Zubak.
The silent inner voice. Interestingly, it is closely related to what is known as the inner “voice” or “single word”. Historically, inner loneliness has been considered a universal human trait, but in recent years we’ve discovered that about 10% of humanity doesn’t have this kind of relatively constant inner dialogue inside their heads.
Studying the matter, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder discovered that “internal monologue” played such a significant role in task switching that, if they suppressed it with various experimental techniques, Job switching costs have increased In a very significant way.
A potential tool. What Emerson and Miyake discovered The inner voice acts as an “internal self-guidance device” that allows retrieval and activation of cognitive representations of various tasks. The next question is whether we can train that machine to be more productive, improve in certain areas, or have a more meaningful life.
Ethan Cross, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, was convinced it was. “The inner voice is a multi-purpose tool, like a Swiss Army knife of life,” he explained to CNN a few years ago. “The problem is it doesn’t come with a user manual.”
Can our inner voice be trained? for the cross, internal monologue, like most things in psychology, has a genetic and a relational basis. That is, there are substantial differences between each of us. So much so that, as we have said, there are people who lack an inner voice altogether.
However, there are techniques to “program” our relationship with this “inner device” to improve. Three, in fact, these studies are the most studied by experts. Melinda Fouts, for example, is a psychotherapist in Colorado who has studied this professionally.
Fouts advises Start by changing Relationship with ourselves. What happens is that inevitably, as behavioral psychology has taught us, it also involves changing our environment.
How to do it? Although we sometimes feel that our thoughts drive our behavior and emotions, the truth is that the relationship between these three elements is much more complex. The brain often acts as an echo chamber for the outside world: one that distorts, alters, delays, or ignores the various stimuli around it.
Thus, According to Ibanez Tarin and Manzanera Escarti, perhaps a central component of what is known as “self-directed training”. That is, practice the conversations we have with ourselves in moments of stress that push us to multitask. It may seem trivial, even innocent: but the evidence tells us so Imagination training is very effectiveAlso in the professional field.
Picture | Jonas Leupe
In BDtechsupport | Work stress as a germ of depression: Work stress increases mental disorders