INTHEBLACK Mental Health 2021 - Magazine - Page 27
BRAIN FUNCTION
Every second counts. To boost
attention span, it is important to
understand the time it takes for our
brains to perform everyday tasks
that we take for granted.
0.25 SECONDS
The minimum interval required for
the brain to switch from one task
to another.
BETWEEN 0.33
AND 0.5 SECONDS
The time it takes us to access the
meaning of a word.
40 SECONDS
The time we manage to maintain our
attention on a computer, regardless
of the type of screen.
64 SECONDS
OPEN VIDEO IN A NEW WINDOW
DON’T TRY TO MULTITASK
Think you can read emails, finish a project and
scroll Facebook Marketplace all at the same
time? Think again, says Lauren Tuck to business
coach and founder of Rah Rah Consulting.
“When we try to multitask, we have to
continuously come back to the work and find
our place again, because we have lost the flow,”
she says.
This has a marked impact on our attention
span, as we move between different projects,
unable to fully focus on one thing.
“People think they can multitask, but they
actually can’t,” says Tuck.
LEARN TO SAY “NO”
Many employees struggle to say “no” to competing
tasks, which leaves them unfocused and pulled in
many different directions.
“When we don’t say ‘no’, we set ourselves up
for…stress,” Tuck says.
She recommends practising saying “no”
regularly to stay focused and improve attention
span. “Saying ‘no’ is not only about declining
certain work requests, but it’s also saying ‘no’ to
those conversations or that person who’s trying to
show us all these funny GIFs,” she says.
TAKE A BREATH
Finally, mindfulness, meditation, yoga –
whatever it is that grounds and relaxes
you – is imperative for increasing your
attention span.
A 2018 US study published in Frontiers in
Human Neuroscience notes that meditation
training of just 10 minutes a day “improves
executive attention” even in “novice
practitioners”.
Tuck says this doesn’t mean you need to
meditate for an hour a day. A few minutes can
go a long way towards helping calm your
fight-or-flight response.
“Perhaps before a meeting, take three or four
big, deep breaths in through the nose and out
through the mouth,” she says.
“What that does is, it grounds us. It allows us
to come back to where we are now, which is
here, in the moment.”
How long it takes us to return to the
original task after checking an email.
5 - 10 MINUTES
The time we need to allow ourselves
to maximise our attention on each task,
according to Jean-Philippe Lachaux,
cognitive neuroscientist and attention
specialist, who suggests that we set
ourselves micro-objectives of five to
10 minutes each.
25 MINUTES
The time it takes for the brain to
refocus on a task following a
distraction. The typical worker,
however, has only 11 minutes to do this.
Source: KnowledgeOne
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intheblack.com October 2021 27