Every cell phone buzz takes us away from the daily tasks that need to be completed. The WhatsApp messages, Facebook alerts, Instagram feeds, and other push notifications cause constant distraction. WhatsApp status is a reminder of the colourful lives others are enjoying against our washed-out life, causing FOMO to creep in. A study suggests that it is hard to concentrate on a task for more than 11 minutes in such an environment. Being focused is the biggest challenge in today’s life. Adding to that is ever-increasing information constantly bombarded us through these social messaging platforms causing an information pandemic.
Technology, cheap Internet plans, easy access to smartphones have aggravated attention deficits in individuals. A study suggests that the brain needs an average of 25 minutes to get back to the original task once interrupted. We do not realise that subscriptions to OTT platforms like Netflix cost money (of course) but also our valuable ‘time’. Such platforms and other social networking Apps essentially ‘buy’ your ‘time’, a commodity that is very rare in one’s life. The young generation attending online classes are the worst hit. They are the ones who are the primary consumers of such distractions. As human minds are biologically wired to get ‘distracted’ quickly, such a gadget-dominated world quickly adds up reasons to get us defocussed from work. Such distractions can be recurring due to instant gratification achieved each time we toggle through a Facebook feed or a WhatsApp forward. Over time the body cannot resist it. The stimulus provided by them is comforting for the brain, which can slice your attention.
The human brain has never been exposed to astronomical levels of information to process. About 2700 books get published every day & around 1.5 lakh scientific articles are published every month in the world. There are approximately 392 news channels on Indian television today. There are an estimated 2 billion websites out there waiting for a click. Extraordinary amounts of data have been pumped on the web every day. This is only going to increase exponentially in the near future.
Tens of videos, links, pieces of unverified forward messages, photos are received on every individual’s phone every single day. Ideally, having so much information should make our lives easier and help us make informed decisions. It should enable us to gain knowledge, make us wiser, and produce an intelligent breed of individuals ahead of their previous generations. But unexpectedly, the information does more harm than good. Data from a plethora of sources occupies our brain and inundates it so much that critical analytical ability to filter out the correct information is lost. This is also called ‘brain fog’, essentially a cognitive overload.
How to deal with all this? An easy but challenging solution is to stay away from sources of distraction: Easier said than done. We must keep track of the number of times we check our smartphones for needless updates. Take a break. Remind yourself that you cannot process all the data.
