Ping! A message arrives on your phone. And another Ping! Just in case you missed it the first time. You lift your eyes from your computer to the phone sitting beside you and pick it up. Oh, it’s the plumber confirming she can come next Thursday. You bring your eyes back to the computer and refocus on the article you’re reading.
A pop up appears in the corner of your computer screen ‘New message received!’. You glance up at it, just a message to one of the discussion groups you belong to. Nothing urgent, although actually now perhaps you’ll just have a look at the whole email, it looks vaguely interesting and relevant to your work.
Five minutes of email later, you’re back with the article. Now, what was it about again? Ah yes.
Ping! It’s your phone again. This time it’s a notification from BBC Sky at Night, letting you know what articles you can expect to read if you go to their website. You’re not sure why you get notifications from them as you’re not really interested in space, but it’s not obvious how to stop them coming and you’ve been getting them for over a year. You turn your phone down, you really don’t need the pings.
Back to the article. BUZZ!! Your phone is vibrating. It’s Candy Crush, telling you that they miss you and you haven’t played for a week. You swipe it away.
Briiiing. It’s the oven timer. Dinner is ready. The 15 minutes you had to sit down and read have gone. You feel frazzled, divided – and you haven’t managed to concentrate on anything for longer than a few minutes. You’re not sure quite how, but somehow the time is never there.
Sound familiar?
We live in a world of constant interruptions. Our attention is pulled back and forth, with Pings and pop-ups for all messages, no matter how banal. Little red circles draw our attention to the fact that one of our Facebook friends has posted a photo of their lunch. Notifications on our phone welcome screen tell us that our distant relatives are playing games and want to play with us. And we’re told that this is all for us, that it’s in order to make our life easier and more connected.
Perhaps particularly for those of us whose jobs involve helping other people, it’s all too easy to feel that we can never switch off. And now technology has evolved to the point to enable us to be always contactable, whether we are in the middle of a forest, on a train, or reading a bedtime story to our children. We are never, ever, free from the possibility of interruption – and that interruption could range from an urgent life-changing message, to the game Zombie Tsunami which regularly sends me messages claiming that ‘The Zombies Are Coming’.
There’s a growing body of research which shows the impact on the human brain of this constant stream of interruptions. A recent study found that just having their own mobile phone visible on the table – even if they didn’t use it – affected the working memory and cognitive performance of research participants, as compared to those who left their phone in another room.
We sign up for notifications, we may welcome them or think they are essential – but they prevent our brains from functioning at full capacity. Because we may imagine that we are multi-tasking, but in fact research shows that our brains are switching between tasks, and that this isn’t quick or easy. We know that each interruption disrupts our attention for far longer than the length of the interruption itself – some studies show that it takes 15-20 minutes to re-orientate ourselves after a brief interruption.
The cost isn’t just to memory and cognitive performance. Being constantly interrupted is bad for our mental health too.
The interruptions keep us in a state of hyper-alert, because when every little ping might be a life-changing opportunity or disaster you can never truly relax. It’s like being continuously poked – and that can leave us feeling jittery and stressed, even apparently when we have time off. Because you’re never ‘off’ from that possibility of a message arriving and needing immediate attention.
It leads to heightened anxiety and poor sleep, as well as poor concentration and jumpiness. And the paradox that I’ve noticed with myself and people I work with is that the more anxious we feel, the more we attend to our notifications – ‘just in case’, and the less we feel like we could turn them off.
Many of us have signed up for notifications without considering the negative impact on us; unsurprisingly since the apps and computer programmes themselves always focus on the positives. “Help us keep in touch’, they say. Or ‘Never miss out again!’. No one ever says ‘Sign up to be constantly interrupted!’ or ‘Give us permission to wake you up in the middle of the night!’.
So we end up with a stream of notifications without ever having made the conscious decision that this is the way we want to live our lives.
All is not lost – it’s possible to change your behaviour to give yourself some space again. But unlike getting into this, in order to take back control a conscious decision is definitely necessary. Here are four steps which I’ve found helpful with people I work with, to help them reclaim their mental space.
- Notice your notifications. Before you try to change anything, take some time to notice all the of interruptions which are demanding your attention – even the ones that you ignore. Give yourself 15 minutes and notice how many times you are being alerted to something. Make a list of all the programmes which are competing for your attention. Don’t forget to take account of all your devices, phone, computer, smart watch, tablet – anything that pulls your attention.
- Be selective. Do you really need to know every time an email arrives? Will the world fall in if you check Facebook once a day rather than receiving notifications every time someone comments on one of your posts? Switch off notifications for everything that isn’t truly necessary. If you can’t work out how to do it, google it. If it doesn’t work, try again. It took me two days to work out how to switch off my mail notifications, I was getting them via three different programmes.
- Notice your anxiety. Are you worried that if you don’t respond to a notification disaster will occur? Does part of you feel you have to be available for your entire life, whether asleep or awake? See if you can sit with the anxiety and just notice, rather than act upon, the urge to check for messages. Psychologists call this ‘urge surfing’ – imagine yourself on the wave.
- Plan some non-interruption time. Put your phone in a different room, sign out of your mail programmes and social media and give yourself some time to get truly absorbed in something you enjoy. Read a book, knit a scarf, paint a picture, listen to music, do some yoga – it doesn’t matter what, but give yourself the gift of no interruptions. Notice your urge to multi-task, to listen to the radio or watch TV as you paint or knit – and choose not to.
You’ve probably decided already that this isn’t realistic for you, that you need to be constantly available, and I just don’t understand how important your job is. And perhaps it is. Or perhaps that feeling itself is a symptom of your life of constant interruptions, and until you try something different you’ll never know.
What’s stopping you from giving it a go?
Dr Naomi Fisher
Clinical & Chartered Psychologist and EMDR Consultant (EMDR-Europe)
