Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

by David Rock

These five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought.

Visual processes evolved over millions of years, so the machinery is highly efficient, especially in comparison to the circuitry involved in language.

We all often think about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.

One study found that office distractions eat up an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption, it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every 3 minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document. Microsoft

Can be used fot explaining impact of professional life

One of the most effective distraction-management techniques is simple: switch off all communication devices during any thinking work. Your brain prefers to focus on things right in front of you.

One reason for your wandering attention is that the nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting the trillions of connections in your brain each moment. The term for this is ambient neural activity. If

Each time you stop yourself from doing something, the next impulse is harder to stop.

performance was poor at low levels of stress, hit a sweet spot at reasonable levels of stress, and tapered off under high stress. The verb stress means “to emphasize,” and it’s not necessarily a negative thing.

you have intermediate levels of two important neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and dopamine, which relate to alertness and interest. You can consciously manipulate your levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in many ways, to improve your alertness or interest.

Practice being aware of your levels of alertness and interest throughout the day. Bring your adrenaline level up when needed with a small dose of visualizing a mild fear. Bring your dopamine level up when needed, using novelty in any form, including changing perspective, humor, or expecting something positive. Bring your dopamine or adrenaline level down by activating other regions of the brain other than the prefrontal cortex.

When you take a break from a problem, your active ways of thinking diminish. This seems to work even at the level of a few moments.

Knowing a problem too well can be the reason you can’t find a solution. Sometimes we need a fresh perspective.

With so many impasses each day at work, perhaps what’s needed are more thinking partnerships, where one person has a lot of detail and the other very little. Together they can come up with solutions faster than either can on his own.

focusing more intensely, as Emily tried to do by increasing her anxiety through picturing herself at the meeting, doesn’t increase insights. It decreases them.

The “insight machines,” those whom Beeman can pick based on brain scans before an experiment, are those who have more awareness of their internal experience. They can observe their own thinking, and thus can change how they think. These people have better cognitive control and thus can access a quieter mind on demand.

ARIA stands for Awareness, Reflection, Insight, and Action.

trying not to feel something is the best strategy for staying cool under pressure.

It’s the “stiff upper lip” approach.

brain has an overarching organizing principle, which is to classify the world around you into things that will either hurt you or help you stay alive. “Everything you do in life is based on your brain’s determination to minimize danger or maximize reward,” Gordon explains. ‘“Minimize danger, maximize reward’ is the organizing principle of the brain.”

Emotions such as curiosity, happiness, and contentment are toward responses. Anxiety, sadness, and fear, on the other hand, are away responses.

When you sense a strong emotion coming on, refocus your attention quickly on another stimulus, before the emotion takes over.

people will always pay lots of money at least to feel less uncertain. That’s because uncertainty feels, to the brain, like a threat to your life.

certainty and autonomy also appear to be individual issues. You can be stressed by a lack of certainty but still have a lot of autonomy, like Paul, who is his own boss but can’t predict his revenues until he closes deals. Or you can have a lot of certainty from a secure job, but a micromanaging boss may not let you make decisions.

Finding a way to make a choice, however small, seems to have a measurable impact on the brain, shifting you from an away response to a toward response.

Having an explanation for an experience reduces uncertainty and increases a perception of control.

Each of these four types of reappraisal—reinterpreting, normalizing, reordering, and repositioning—are techniques people use all the time. With

Watch for uncertainty creating a feeling of threat; practice noticing this. Watch for a feeling of reduced autonomy creating a sense of threat; practice noticing this. Find ways to create choice and a perception of autonomy wherever you can. Practice reappraisal early when you feel a strong emotion coming on. You can reappraise by reinterpreting an event, or reordering your values, or normalizing an event, or repositioning your perspective.

Reappraising your own experience is a powerful way of managing internal stressors; use this technique when you are anxious about your mental performance by saying, “That’s just my brain.”

Maintaining the right expectations in life may be central for maintaining a general feeling of happiness and well-being.

The phrase “seek and you shall find” may have a basis in neuroscience. Because expectations alter perception, this leads people to see what they expect to see, and not see what they are not expecting.

Fairness-generated emotions can run high in more mundane situations, too: the feeling of being “taken advantage of” by a taxi driver taking a longer route can wreck an otherwise great day, despite the relatively insignificant economic cost.

the reward circuitry is activated more when an offer is fair than when it’s unfair, even when there is no additional money to be gained,” Tabibnia explains. Fairness, it seems, can be more important than money.

Society values survival needs such as food, well before social issues such as fairness. As a result, someone planning a day-long team meeting might pay attention to ensuring everyone has a good lunch break, but forget all about people’s perception of fairness around how the day is organized.

Many arguments between people, especially those close to us, involve incorrect perceptions of unfairness, triggering events that activate an even deeper sense of unfairness in all parties.

person’s intent, being slightly mind-blind for a moment. The result can be an intense downward spiral, driven by accidental connections and one’s expectations then altering perception.

“Do as I say, not as I do” is a statement parents wish they could use, but kids are finely attuned to fairness, even from an early age.

Prefrontal cortex functioning tends to shrink briefly as teens hit puberty, which explains why a ten-year-old may have better emotional control than a fifteen-year-old. Prefrontal functioning recovers in late teens and reaches an adult state only in the early twenties.

So an increasing sense of fairness increases your levels of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. This generates a toward emotional state that makes you open to new ideas and more willing to connect with other people.

Organizations trying to increase a sense of engagement could do well to recognize that people experiencing a sense of unfairness may get as upset as being told they won’t get to eat for a day.

Organizations that allow people to take time on community projects are letting their employees be rewarded by a perception of increasing fairness.

Watch out for fairness being linked to other issues such as certainty, autonomy, or relatedness, where you can get intense emotional responses.

Along with relatedness and fairness, status is another major driver of social behavior. People will go to great lengths to protect or increase their status.

Status explains why people will queue for hours on a frosty morning to get a signed copy of a TV celebrity’s new book (a book they might have no plans to read). Status explains why people feel good meeting someone worse off than themselves, the German concept of schadenfreude. One brain study showed that reward circuits were activated when people saw others as worse off than they. Status explains why people love to win arguments, even pointless ones. Status explains why people spend money on underwear from a designer fashion store, when similar clothes are available for a fraction of the price. It explains, at least in part, why thirty million people today play online games with no obvious benefits except playing for points to raise their status compared to that of others. Status probably even explains how Google, one of the world’s richest companies, gets thousands of people to work for free, doing work that computers can’t do: they get people to compete with one another on tasks such as labeling a photograph.

Status is relative, and a sense of reward from an increase in status can come anytime you feel “better than” another person.

Studies show that you create a representation of your own and someone else’s status in the brain when you communicate, which influences how you interact with others.

Marketing departments use two main levers to engage human emotions through advertising: fear, and the promise of increased status.

the drive for status is behind many of society’s greatest achievements and some of its worst examples of needless destruction.

many people go to great lengths to avoid situations that could put their status at risk. This aversion includes staying away from any activity they are not confident in, which, because of the brain’s relationship to novelty, can mean avoiding anything new. This can have quite an impact on the quality of life. This is Gross’s situation selection working against you.

Being managed by a younger person may generate an automatic status threat if people don’t actively take another perspective (which means to reappraise), such as being interested in learning about a younger generation.

When you decide you are right, the other person must be wrong, which means you don’t listen to what she says, and she experiences you as a threat, too.