Best Of: Tired? Distracted? Burned Out? Listen to This.

so we are off this week but I wanted to replay a couple of episodes that have been on my mind at this particular Moment Like A lot of people I can feel my attentional habits slipping in this election I'm looking at my phone more refreshing social media more feeling like I got to be on top of everything and feeling more tired more distracted more all over the place in January I had a conversation with Gloria mark one of the really eminent researchers of attention about how our attention works and how to refresh it when it becomes exhausted I hope you enjoy from New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein [Music] show hello and we are back from the holiday break so before we begin today we have a couple of open jobs on the show One a researcher role which will be Central in our political and policy coverage in 2024 which is going to be a big politics and policy year and an associate engineer role who will be helping to engineer the show making this whole thing happen making it into actual audio that sounds good if either role seems up your alley you can find the links to them in our show notes but today I like to begin every year by doing some shows not on resolutions which I don't really tend to believe in but around some questions that I am thinking about and trying to work on as we enter into New Year and foremost in my mind right now is attention and I think it's foremost in my mind because it is literally foremost in mind whatever you're paying attention to is what is foremost in your mind and I am so convinced that attention is the most important human faculty that at the end of your life what was your experience of your life it was the experience of the sum total of the things that you paid attention to and yet we treat our attention so poorly we dissipate it amid so much garbage and the modern world is simply exhausting for it and yet for all of the specificity we have when we talk about how to get stronger or how to run a marathon or how to work on our sleep hygiene I actually find that there is very little good information about attention there's a lot of lamenting it there's a lot of feeling bad about it but really good scientifically grounded information about how it works how it functions and what we can do to build it to replenish it to attend to it is rarer but rare is not the same as non-existent and there are people who study this and study it really deeply one of them is Gloria Mark a professor at the University of California at Irvine she is one of the foundational most significant researchers in the attention field and the author of the book attention spam as always my email ASR cow n times.com Gloria Mark welcome to the show thanks for having me you make a I think pretty important move very early on in the book and you say this isn't really a book about productivity that we tend to bucket attention as a faculty of productivity and when we don't have enough of it we worry that we're not being productive enough right I think you know the first time people begin to hear about attention is whether they're paying enough attention in school and the problem might be that they're not paying enough attention in school but you want to think about attention as a factor of well-being tell me a bit about that Beyond productivity how does attention affect our well-being oh it affects it a lot I'm trying to reframe the conversation so technology was created to enh our capabilities you know we can write faster we can connect with people faster we can produce more a lot of the work what formerly had been done in face- Toof face interaction in meetings or going into people's offices it's now being done at the desktop through email or through Zoom or slack there were some studies done in the' 60s '70s s 80s where the researchers followed people around and tracked the percentage of time they spent at their desks and this was you know roughly about 30% of their day in 2019 I did a study with colleagues and we found that people spent nearly 90% of their time at their desks so on the one hand we might think it's more efficient but there's a cost to it and the cost is our well-being the cost to stress and extended use of tech without breaks can even lead to burnout and so I'd like to turn this conversation around and think about how we can focus on wellbeing and there's a psychological theory it's called the broaden and build Theory that showed that when people experience positive emotion they actually produced more they were more creative and so the upshot is that when we experience positive well-being we can produce more I'm going to be honest about my motivations in this conversation I don't want to produce more and I don't want to be more creative I think I produce enough and I'm sufficiently creative for my my own personal needs I would like to be less tired that is what I would like in my life and it was interesting reading your book from this perspective because you do talk about the way in which being tired can lead to a reduction in intentional capacity how people who are more tired if you track their computer usage the next day they'll be on Facebook more they'll be messing around more they'll be more easily distracted I see all that in myself but I also see it the other way that the more I have to pay attention the more tired I become particular without breaks and I really noticed it in parenting that on the weekends particularly when I'm spending a lot of time watching my kids I'm not doing anything physically that active I'm often sitting at a playground I took them to the store we went for a walk I made breakfast but I can't ever look away and the kind of sleep I end up needing to take sometimes in the middle of those days is like no nap I've ever taken as an adult before it is completely drained completely exhausted and it it feels to me like an intentional form of exhaustion I get that sometimes from work from really trying to focus on something so I wanted to hear you talk a bit about that side of it the ways in which overusing or poorly using attention just leads to exhaustion which of course then leads to worse attention but but let's focus on the first part first yeah so when we use our attention a lot like like when you're trying to focus on your kids we're expending our limited and very precious cognitive resources and the way to think about it is that we we start our day with a tank of cognitive resources you you can think about it as attentional capacity and there's things we do during the day that deplete our attentional capacity like watching kids or focusing for a very long time in the computer or multitasking shifting our attention fast there's other things we do that can replenish our resources such as taking a break taking a nap meditating exercising taking a walk in nature I'm a big proponent of that and so when we don't replenish these resources they're just drained and that's why we feel so exhausted and there's a part of the mind that's called executive function you can think of it as the CEO of the mind it helps us make decisions helps us filter out distractions helps us stay on track but when we get tired when our cognitive resources drain executive function doesn't work as well as it can and so we get into this cycle this downward cycle of getting more exhaust exhausted our executive function can't do the work it should we become more susceptible to distractions we try harder to stay on track to stay focused and the end result is we get ourselves exhausted I think the metaphors in this conversation are important so over the past year I've been taking weightlifting more seriously again and one thing you notice when you get into a real gymrat community of weightlifters is the unbelievable specificity of their language and their thinking around recovery around exertion around varying the kinds of things you do right you know you might think naively you know if you want to get stronger you go in and you just weightlift as many hours a day as you can and do it again the next day and the next day and the next day and like the answer is no you don't do that you need rest to differ the kinds of stimuli if you want to make yourself stronger right like all these different ways of sleep and recover and eat gummy bears after your work out and all these things and it really struck me how thin our vocabulary and our teaching around attention is if if we do have these cognitive resources that get exhausted that have rhythms that need rest that need to be varied and the kind of stimulus you get we almost have no way of talking about that it's like well you kind of get tired and maybe when you get tired you should sleep if you can but if you can't you should just keep looking at your computer and it struck me throughout the book that you were sort of framing cognitive resources as more like physical resources that actually have many of the same dynamics of rest and rhythms and so on so I wanted to hear first if that's a reasonable read I think it's an excellent analogy so you know I I gave a talk not too long ago and at the end of The Talk this person who sat in the back of the room asked me a question and she said can our minds become injured if we exert mental effort for a long time the same way that when we lift weights for a long time our bodies can get injured and I thought about it and I said yes yes we can our minds can get injured it's called burnout and it's a really extreme form of mental exhaustion it's when we experience chronic stress for a very long period of time and in the same way it takes our body's time to recover from lifting weights too much or using the elliptic C too much we also need time for our minds to recover from burnout when you use burnout there's a colloquial usage of burnout right people say this all the time I'm so burnt out I think you're saying something different but what is the difference what is the difference between saying at the end of a day I'm tired and burnt out and what you're talking about a kind of cognitive injury yeah I I really am talking about something more than just the colloquial sense of oh I feel burned out when people are burned out there's certain symptoms that they experience they feel exhausted they tend to feel cynical about the world they feel just powerless and it's very hard for them to pick up any kind of energy to do work it's really quite a serious condition it's when we just don't have the cognitive and social resources to deal with the demands in our environment and so when you're really experiencing burnout you just can't deal with work with social life on a day-to-day basis we we just don't have the resources available to do that what strikes me about that is it reminds me of a line that was very popular online for a while maybe is not as much now but but people say it all the time like I just can't I can't even I feel like that's a cultural signal of burnout right when that becomes such a knowable feeling I just have no energy to give this even if it is an important thing that it becomes a bit of a meme or cliche and so I want to go back to what that person asked you when they said can our minds become injured I want to ask are our minds injured I think one way of looking at the world we live in is we live in a in an intentionally sick or stressful Society right we've developed a million different things to grab everybody's attention and speed it up from TV to Tik Tok more unnatural light all the time I mean we live in a very unusual attentional world for human beings kids are getting raised in it and we have a pretty high rise in mental health issues and I mean is there reason to believe that that we're already seeing a kind of collective attentional injury there is some evidence that suggests that so there was a survey done not too long ago of uh over 10,000 people uh it was done in six countries including the US and over 40% of respondents reported symptoms of burnout the symptoms I mention feeling exhausted feeling cynical Feeling Just powerless to do anything 40% that's a really high number and that suggests to me that you know this is something we really need to be thinking about there's of course a lot of reasons that are causing burnap but Tech use is is one reason that we can't ignore tell me a bit about that what is the actual evidence that Tech use is driving burnout or that Tech use is worsening our attention yeah so let's start with talking about how our scope of work has expanded with Tech use so before email Communications were a lot slower there were phone calls there were written Communications but now people have an additional workload on top of their other workload which is answering slack messages texting email in fact we find people check email on average 77 times a day which is quite a lot and we know that email creates stress we know this from studies I did one study some time ago where we cut off email in an organization for some people for a 5-day work week and without email people were less dressed and we measured this empirically with heart rate monitors we found that their stress went down we also found that people became more social they actually walked around and visited people in their offices and people reported enjoying this experience a lot more so we know that email causes stress it's not just correlation but there is causality there I've also done a a study with Physicians Physicians can get really exhausted and we found that Physicians averaged over an hour a day dealing with their email messages and they were uh wearables which measured their stress and we found a correlation that the more time on their inbox the higher was their stress so we know that duration of email affects stress you know another thing is that our devices allow us ubiquitous access to people and information and as a result many people work through the evenings many people have reported to me of checking their phones throughout the night people don't get a chance to psychologically detach from work and when you can't psychologically detach from work it's a lot harder to psychologically reattach to work the next morning [Music] [Music] you're one of the few people who's actually measured the way and length on which people pay attention to their computers going back now I think 20 years or so so tell me how that's changed so so usually what studies do is they ask people to self-report how much time you spend and and people are just notoriously bad at estimating time so we followed people around with stopwatches in the workplace and 20 years ago we found that the average attention span was 2 and a half minutes and then came along a very sophisticated computer logging software and we found 20 years later that attention spans averaged 47 seconds on any screen and this was replicated by other people as well one study found 44 seconds another one 50 seconds but it all averages about 47 seconds I'm caught between two reactions to this data which is one that it is frightening and the other which is who are these people you're studying who manag to stay on one screen for a whole 47 seconds before clicking over to their email or dis like or to social media well first of all remember it's an average so sometimes people spend longer a lot of times they spend shorter and if we look at the midpoint of the data the midpoint is 40 seconds so that means half of all of our observations were 40 seconds or less one of the things that struck me in the work you've done is that you looked not only at how long we stand one thing but but the path back to that thing and in your book you say the good news is that we do typically come back to whatever it was we were working on looking at when we get distracted when we take a an intentional detour we come back but we don't get off the highway and get right back on we make a couple stops along the way tell me a bit about that side of things yeah that's right you know people tend to think you know they're interrupted they do something and then they come right back back that's not how it works so people experience a a chain of interruptions you can think of these as nested interruptions so you get interrupted then you get interrupted from that and interrupted from that and people are working on different tasks different projects before they return to that original thing so from our statistics we find it's an average of about two and a quar interview in projects that people work on so imagine that you have a whiteboard in your mind and for everything we do for every task we need to have a mental model of that task we need a schema and so you've got this scheme about the task you're working on right now and then you suddenly switch your attention it's like erasing that whiteboard and writing the new information you need the new mental model then we switch again and we keep doing that now I'm not talking about switching between word and email and slack which might be within the same project and if we're switching screens within the same project then we're talking about every 47 seconds switching but when we're thinking about a larger project then it comes to about 10 and a half minutes but the point is we switch our attention a lot and this whiteboard analogy I I find to be very very useful and the reason is because sometimes when we switch our attention we might get really caught up in something like the news you're you're looking at the news and you read about some horrific event you know or these days political news and then you switch back to your project and that event stays with you it's a resid do and it's just like with an internal whiteboard it leaves a residue sometimes you can erase that whiteboard in real life completely right you see traces of what was written on it same thing happens in our minds and that residue can interfere with our current task at hand this metaphor of the Whiteboard and this idea that not all distractions not all diversions not all detours are equal is one of the things in your book that is really stuck with me and I've been paying attention to in myself ever since and so I want to reflect some of it back you to see if I I understand this right but also to dig a bit deeper into it which is so okay let's say I'm at my desk I'm preparing for an interview with noted attention researcher Glory Mark and then somebody comes by and says hey do you have the time and I look down at my phone I give them the time and in my experience I can get back pretty quickly from that it doesn't really bother me that much but if I flick over over to my email and over in my email and this did happen I have a long and complicated and somewhat confrontational email about an Israel Palestine show I just did to say that calls up in my head it's like I load the whole mental Israel Palestine program and then I look over at my text messages and there's one from my kid school about them needing flu shots and I load the whole Logistics and all the things I need to get done program and then when I try to get back to reading your book I'm still thinking about that I'm still composing my response on on the Israel email I'm still thinking about when the flu shots are going to happen this idea of whether or not you are taking breaks that lead to the loading of new what you call schemas and whether you don't seems quite important and in the past couple days I've been really trying to make sure I take breaks that don't load these new programs and I feel like it has been really helpful for me I feel like it is a pretty big difference being intentional about when I move my attention onto something else trying not to pollute it too much I'm so glad to hear that and you're exactly right so there are different kinds of interruptions some can be very disruptive like you talked about reading an email that brings up a lot of emotional content and that can stay with us for a long time as opposed to you know someone interrupting me asking for my signature on something right I can go right back to work because there was no emotional content that was raised but you know reading this email on the Israel Hamas conflict just raises so many associations in your mind there's the emotions and then you're making all kinds of connections to other ideas and it's really hard to Simply cut off and break away from that and go back to your original task the idea that email is stressful that some of its modern variants like Slack are stressful I think is pretty intuitive and yet something I noticed in myself is that the more stressed and tired I am what I do is I check my email and I do so knowing that if something is in it I am reasonably likely to be more more stressed by it than not and something is always in it but it'll be some terrible news about the world or somebody mad at me or somebody who needs me to do something and I'm curious about this Behavior because I do think other people have something similar and I've talked to them about it why when we need a break psychologically do we look at things that are not a a break what do you understand is happening there in that kind of addiction to stressful things as a way to relieve stress it's a great question so first of all this um notion of random reinforcement every so often when you check the email you you might get a really really important wonderful email like an invitation to give a keynote talk and it may not happen very often and it certainly doesn't happen for all our emails but it happens enough that it it has created a kind of condition behavior for us to keep checking that inbox and this kind of you know random reinforcement conditioning is actually the hardest Behavior to extinguish in Psychology if you have reinforcement on a regular schedule like every other email is going to be some really uplifting email and then the email those uplifting emails stop you're going to stop checking but when you know that these emails will appear randomly then it's really hard to stop that behavior because you keep thinking yes at some point that invitation is going to come so I'm going to keep checking my inbox I want to talk about the idea of interruptions and and why they happen and one of the studies you did separated interruptions that are external right somebody comes over and asks you for something and what's called self- Interruption I'm on a task and I decided to switch over to my email to my text messages to whatever and you found an interesting and to me surprising stability in the total number of interruptions no matter whether they were internal or external in their origination can you talk a bit about that research yeah was very surprising you know we would be shadowing a person and they might be working on a Word document and then for no apparent reason they suddenly stop what they're doing and they switch to email or they switch to pick up the phone that's a self- Interruption an internal Interruption and we found when the number of external interruptions went down in 1 hour the number of internal interruptions went end up in the subsequent hour it was as though people were just determined to maintain short attention spans so that if the interruptions aren't coming from some external Source people will self- interrupt to keep that rhythm of interruptions going but is the issue here our innate ability to pay attention or is the issue here a habituation to interruption or or to novelty or maybe another way to ask it is do you think that in the sort of pre digital era people had the same number of interruptions or do you think that our desire for Interruption has actually increased and so now we are self- interrupting more because we have become addicted in a way to that kind of feeling of our attention moving to something more novel so you know objectively the number of interruptions pre internet has not been measured so I I can only speak about my own sense of what I think is going on I do believe that people do experience more self-interruptions since the internet came about why is because you know people have access to more information and more people than they've ever had before the big thing that came along in 2007 was is the smartphone and the smartphone allows us to check for information for messages from people really in a ubiquitous way wherever we are and so that's another reason why I I believe we self- interrupt more now Interruption is a pretty negatively coded term and I would say that a big part of your book is trying to understand it more neutrally and trying to and trying to put forward the idea that interruptions are not created equal and that there are good reasons for interrupting and some Interruption can actually be good so tell me about that side of it the positive side the healthy side of interruption yeah you know some interruptions can be very positive if our minds are just tired and we need a break an interruption can be good it can allow us to replenish you know stand up walk around go outside that's a really great form of interruption sometimes we need social interruptions if you've been working by yourself all day sometimes we we just need to interrupt ourselves to be with other people sometimes interruptions can allow a tough problem to incubate so you know if you're struggling to find some solution walk away for a bit let your mind take a break and some sometimes when you come back the answer just appears it seems self-evident so there are reasons there are good reasons why we should interrupt and that interruptions can be beneficial this gets is something you talk about quite a bit which I found intuitive when I thought about it but I hadn't thought about it much before which is this idea that attention has a rhythm and the rhythm is different for different people could you describe some of that research and work people tend to think of attention as being a binary State you're focused or you're unfocused but when I was studying this I realized that people can be engaged with things in different ways you you can be engaged with writing a paper which is can be challenging or you're reading difficult material you can also be engaged with watching a YouTube video or playing a game like Candy Crush what I call rot activities you're not exerting cognitive effort it turns out people are happiest when they do Road activities and so these are very different forms of Engagement and so we did a study where we asked people throughout the day for the thing you were just doing how engaged were you and how challenged were you this enabled us to disent tangle these different kinds of Engagement and we find that if we look at those times when people are engaged and challenged we find rhythms we find that there are certain peak times during the day generally we find two peaks for people there are individual differences depending on your chronotype if you're an early type or a late type but you know most people have a peak focused time midm morning and then another Peak Focus time midafternoon and this corresponds with the E and flow of our cognitive resources it shows that it's just really hard to have this continuous Focus for many hours throughout the day instead we we see Peaks and valleys of focused attention and so let's talk then a bit about healthy breaks or interruptions and and less healthy ones because in terms of things that changed in my thinking and reading the book I think it made me more attentive no pun intended to the way in which I try to replenish my attention or give it a break in ways that are pathological if you're working on a a difficult project right you're you're focusing and you're trying to focus and your goal for that day is to spend a lot of time in that deep focus right doing that difficult work but you feel your attention flagging what should you do and what shouldn't you do at that point well the thing you should do is take a break you know when you start reading and rereading the same sentence and it's just not making sense or you're you're trying to write something it's just hard to come up with the phrasing it's time to step back take a break and there are different kinds of breaks if a person has the luxury to go outside and take a walk in nature that's the best break of all because research shows that even just 20 minutes in nature can really replenish people but you know person can also contemplate or meditate you can have a conversation with someone but it's also okay to do Road activities you know people have reported to me different kinds of Road activities some people knit some people do play simple mindless games one person I talked to said in his office he has a screen and he just likes to throw that ball on the screen and it just kind of allows him to kind of reset and relax so the great poet and writer Maya Angelo talked about her her big mind and and her little mind and her big mind was what she used for her deep thought and her creativity and so that's what I would call focused attention right where you're really being focused and challenged but she also talked about being able to step away and use what she called her little mind she did crossw word puzzles or you know she did small tasks which kind of allowed her attentional resources to fill back up in the tank one thing this made me think about was the ways in which the illusion of productivity is highly prized in today's office culture in a way that doesn't really make a lot of sense that you know if I'm at the times and I'm tired what I'll probably do is look at the front page of of the times or I'll start looking at social media or I'll be in my text messages or something but but these are all things that if my editor happen to wander behind me not that he is watching me like this but it would kind of look like I'm working or doing things that are akin to work whereas if I turned on you recommend the game two dots which I actually downloaded and did find to be a lovely attentional break if I turned on a puzzle game and began playing that for a while that would look like I'm goofing off at work if I go out and take a walk nobody will stop me but if I said it people might think it's a little bit weird that it seems to me we've sort of been taught that what we then want if we can't be maximally productive for a period is to be minimally productive as opposed to being nonproductive to actually create a break and that this is actually a little bit toxic it means you're never really recovering I think that you've nailed it we've created a culture where we feel very pressured to always be on so you know when people are sitting in front of a computer that signals to their managers and colleagues that they're working and it's very important to convey that signal that we're working hard and it's a badge of honor to be able to work longer than everyone else and to pull ourselves away signals that we're not working I read that vidin claimed that he loved to peel potatoes because he came up with his greatest ideas while he was peeling potatoes and someone looking at Vicken Stein would say okay this guy is not working he's not thinking right he's not sitting in front of a pad of paper and writing but that was his way to kind of help his mind wander and think of creative ideas but doesn't this suggest that in a way that is a little bit hard to explain from an economic perspective that we have really screwed up modern workplace culture it seems to me that we imagine productivity almost as if we were watching somebody be productive in a movie we've created this pressure to always look like you're working even though we know that is not how at least creative work happens that seems a little difficult to explain given that in theory workplaces want people to do their most creative work and yet it seems very very prevalent it's everywhere then we've added slack and email I mean these constant interruptions and this to me is a pretty consistent puzzle about you know modern industrial organizations why are they so poorly built to furnish like healthy attention and deep creativity and focus yeah it's it really is a a great question um I think that managers and decision makers need to be educated that it's so important to consider employees well-being and I think that that's missing from what they're thinking about that you know it's really important to give people permission to be able to take long breaks when they need them to take walks outside uh to have social interactions with other people to create a culture where people are not penalized for not answering electronic communications after work hours and before work hours to give people a chance to really detach from work to restore themselves it's just not in the mindset I think of managers and decision makers managers are delegating work to us without considering that people might be exhausted and they they need to understand that sometimes less can be more that you know taking good breaks healthy breaks can actually lead people to be more creative and productive if a CEO of a large company were coming to you and saying what one thing could I do that would be better for the attention of the people who who work here what would you tell them well I would say that they should Institute a quiet time when electronic communications can't be sent so this resets people's expectations knowing that email is not going to be sent out gives people permission to be able to work for for um you know period of extended [Music] [Music] time it's a new year and a lot of people in the new year they decide to go on a new fitness plan they start a new diet they tried being vegetarian whatever it might be and on a lot of these there is a lot of good advice out there for how to have a holistic plan right if I want to figure out how to run a marathon there are no end of marathon training programs I can become part of but if what I want to do is have a higher attentional well-being what does that plan look like what are the components you would tell somebody to focus on if they wanted to spend three months trying to treat their attention better trying to keep their you know fuel tank from going as low attentionally and maybe trying to expand the size of that fuel tank such that it is um a bit bigger just in general where does somebody start what is your what is your program so the first thing I would recommend is sufficient breaks and there is this um expression in Japanese that I found so valuable it's called yohaku noi which is the the beauty of empty space and I I was really struck by it I I visited beautiful gardens in Kyoto it's a very famous beautiful rock garden and what struck me was it was not so much the the rocks that were beautiful to look at but it was also the space around the rocks it set the stage for the rocks and I I think of this Japanese phrase y yakobi as a metaphor for thinking intentionally about scheduling an empty space into your day which could be exercise could be contemplation meditation it's time when you're not doing your hard work but it's going to set the stage and prepare you for doing that hard work and we we tend to neglect that number two I would think about trying to understand your own personal attentional Rhythm so what what are the times that are Peak Focus for you um find out your chronotype most people know what their chronotype is if you're an early type blade type I happen to be a moderate type and instead of scheduling your day the the typical thing that people do is write a to-do list you know here's the things I have to do and here's the times that I'm going to complete them think about it rather as designing your date think about when those Peak Focus times are and doing work that requires the the hardest thinking the most creativity make sure you do work at those times that kind of work at those times because you'll perform your best and when you know you're going to be in an attentional Valley that's the time to step away and even schedule a walk outside or exercise during that time so intentionally design your day another thing I would recommend is to practice what's called forethought imagining how our current actions are going to affect our future selves when we think about our daily work what makes the most sense is to think about our future selves at the end of the day so you know if I'm really tempted to read news because there's so much going on in the news I will imagine what my end of the day is going to look like so so at 700 p.m. am I going to be relaxing and drinking a glass of wine because I've finished my work and I'm going to be feeling fulfilled and rewarded or am I still going to be up working on that deadline and so practicing forethought can help keep us on track in the moment the last thing I would recommend is thinking about our goals keeping our goals in mind now you know this seems self-evident of course we have to think about our goals but we don't and you know I I did a study at Microsoft research this was led by Alex Williams and we had people answered very simple questions at the beginning of the day what's your task goal for the day what do you want to accomplish what's your emotional goal how do you want to feel today and by thinking of these questions it brought their task and emotional goals to mind and helped keep them on track the effect didn't last very long and that's because goals slip and they're Dynamic and it's so important for us to keep reminding ourselves of our goals to help keep us on track how about for kids or maybe more to the point for parents of kids so something that I worry about is I think that the world my 2-year-old and my almost 5-year-old old are growing up in it's like designed to drive their attentional capacity to zero right the social media keeps getting faster Tik Tok and algorithms and it's only I think going to get worse in many ways with AI you know you talk about research in the book but I think we all know this that the cuts in movies and TV shows are quicker sometimes I try to turn on the old Mr Rogers for them and they look at it like what the hell is this and then you turn on PAW Patrol or something and I mean the speed of cuts and the vibrancy of colors and like they're just staring at it openmouth I'm not somebody who believes you can you know protect your kids or even should pull them out of all modern technology I'm not a no screen time parent but I do worry about how they're going to build a strong capacity for attention and a rich capacity for attention so that they can enjoy a lot of the things that can only be enjoyed when you can give them that kind of uh focus and that kind of energy so I'm curious if this is something you you think about or or talk about with people I mean what would it mean to help kids develop better attention and a better relationship to their own attention in the same way that we try to think about doing that for their physical health or for their you know knowledge of the dates of historical events I worry about this a lot so executive function that's the CEO of the mind it's not yet mature for kids and it it doesn't really mature till kids are around 10 years old and if it's not mature kids become even more susceptible to distractions uh especially when they're they're younger and there there was a longitudinal study done in New Zealand that found that you know kids who watched TV the the more of that they watched the more attentional problems they experienced later in life and so it's important to consider that our children's behavior is really a mirror of our own behavior and so it's so important that parents be role models for their children a few months ago I was in Riverside Park in New York and it was a beautiful day sunny day people were sitting on the park benches and two people really caught my attention there was a toddler that was tugging on her mother to pay attention to her and the mother was just engulfed in her cell phone and also just recently I was in the supermarket somebody puts their child into the cart and pulls a tablet out of her purse gives it to the child I was in a bus as soon as the child sits down a smartphone is given to the child so children are learning that this is normal behavior so don't ever put your computer or phone don't ever put that first before your own child if your child needs your attention get off your screen and give your attention to your child and above all you know make sure that you are setting a good example and you're not on your phone on your screen Around the Clock because your your children they pick that up I would say this in a way connects to something we talked about earlier which is look I have young children and I am very well read in on not wanting to be on my phone all the time and worrying about my attention and worrying about the example I'm setting and I'm also often tired and overworked and probably burnt out and when that is true and the truer is the more likely I am to be on my phone so this is why to me the idea of attentional well-being and seeing this as a core part of well-being is important because if you're gassed out attentionally then just having been scolded by Gloria Markin as a client on a podcast but how you shouldn't look at your phone when your kid is asking you the same question for the 17th time at 5:45 in the morning and you had a terrible night of sleep like that's not going to do anything you're still going to look at your phone because you want to escape that moment and the way used to doing is looking at your phone and I do it all the time right the point is not to to push this outward but I do it less if I'm have healthy habits elsewhere if I slept enough and if I'm not overworking myself badly and so I think this is part of the importance of seeing it all holistically in the same way that if I'm you know lifting with poor form or you know getting a repetitive stress injury then it's really hard for me to pick my kids up no matter how much I know that they like to be picked up if I'm treating my attention poorly it's very hard for me to pay attention to them because I've injured my attention and so to me like this is why that that move you make of making this about wellbeing is important because it is part of living a good life having enough attention to give to the people and the things that deserve it is really important and when we're frittering our attention away on lots of garbage and lots of stuff we don't even really want to be paying attention to then what suffers are the things that we did not want to suffer right the things that we wanted to be present for absolutely you know the ship has sailed we're in a tech world we can't simply cut off from Tech you know you can't do a digital detox uh well you can but then you come right back to the tech use and you're doing exactly the same thing it's like being on a crash diet works for a while and then you come back and start with the same eating habits so I'd like us to think about how we can be more intelligent about how we use Tech so that we're we're not getting burned out and you know we need to think about preserving our well-being and you know ultimately I believe we're we're a lot more fulfilled by the relationships we have offscreen and you know let's not ignore those so then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience so my first recommendation is the Challenger launch decision by Diane vaugh so you know when we think about our behaviors in this digital age like checking emails 77 times a day or checking phones throughout the night or texting while having a conversation with someone or using your phone when your kids want your attention we've come to accept these behaviors as normal so Diane V is the person who identified the idea that we slowly accept non-normal behaviors as being normal so you know the this book is such a fascinating account and Analysis of the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986 and you know when I think of politics boy this idea is especially relevant you especially Trump's Behavior we have slowly expanded our bounds of what is normal so you know her book it's really a warning to us my uh second recommendation is the undoing project by Michael Lewis I love this book because it relates one of the greatest collaborations in the history of psychology between Daniel Conan and Amos tersi so Conan and tersi had very different personalities and it wasn't just their friendship but it was also their conflicts that just led to some of the greatest insights in the field of psychology and my third recommendation is the god equation by mitu Kaku I love this book because it conveys kaku's just sheer awe and wonder of physics and you know you learn about so many strange things wormholes and time travel and if I had read a book like this before I went to college I I might have wanted to study Physics Gloria mark thank you very much my [Music] pleasure this episode of the isra clango is produced by CLA Gordon back checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Mar locker and Kate Sinclair our senior engineer is Jeff geld our senior editor is CLA Gordon the show's production team also includes Roland who and Christen Lynn original music by Isaac Jones audience strategy by Christina siski and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is an RO ster and special thanks to Pat mccusker [Music]