Always on can be mentally taxing, so better switch off

Have you ever landed up at work on a Monday morning and found your mailbox clogged with over 200 emails demanding your immediate attention?

As you start replying to these emails, one hour and 40 replies later, you realise you still haven’t prepared for the strategy meeting starting in half an hour. So you start doing both, trying to reply to your emails and putting your thoughts together for the meeting. And then a friend calls, wanting to share with you her weekend adventures.

So now, you are talking to your friend while replying to the emails, even as you are deliberating about the meeting. And suddenly you realise you are not sure what your friend was saying, you haven’t prepared for the meeting and there are still 160 emails waiting for your reply.

David Rock, the global CEO of Results Coaching Systems (RCS), calls this situation, almost in every worker’s life, “an epidemic of overwhelm.”

In his book, Your Brain at Work – Strategies For Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, And Working Smarter All Day Long, Rock writes, “Workers everywhere are experiencing an epidemic of overwhelm…As the world digitises, globalises, unplugs, and re-organises, having too much to do has become our biggest complaint.”

But the bigger question is can human beings be made to multitask? The answer is a big NO. “The trouble is, when it comes to making decisions and solving problems…the brain has some surprising performance limitations. While the brain is exquisitely powerful, even the brain of a Harvard graduate can be turned into that of an eight-year-old boy simply by being made to do two things at once,” Rock says.

The author claims that though sometimes it’s physically possible to do several mental tasks at once, the accuracy and performance suffers. Moreover, sometimes consequences of multi-tasking can be dangerous, too.

“An investigation into a fatal train accident in 2007 showed that the driver sent a text message at the precise moment the train accidentally sped around the corner,” he writes.
Researchers call this phenomenon the dual-task interference, which can have a negative impact on our performance.

“A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.”

So the moral of the story is that being “always on” is not the best way to work. “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 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.” But why does the effectiveness of a human brain come down the moment a human being tries to do more than one thing at the same time?

Rock says, “Making decisions and solving problems rely heavily on a region of the brain called prefrontal cortex. The cortex is the outer covering of the brain, the curly gray stuff you see in pictures of the brain…The last major brain region to develop human evolutionary history, it is a measly 4-5% of the volume of the rest of the brain.”  

As they say, sometimes good things come in small packages. And prefrontal cortex is just that.

“Without a prefrontal cortex you wouldn’t be able to set any type of goal. …You wouldn’t be able to control impulses, so if you felt an urge to lie on a sun-warmed road on a cold day, you’d be in trouble…Your prefrontal cortex is the biological seat of conscious interactions with the world. It’s the part of your brain central to thinking things through, instead of being on “autopilot” as you go about your life,” Rock writes.

Having said that, Rock says the prefrontal cortex has its limitations, too. “The prefrontal cortex chews up metabolic fuel, such as glucose and oxygen, faster than people realise.”
Rock quotes Dr Roy Baumeister from Florida University, who explains the phenomenon. “We have a limited bucket of resources of activities like decision-making and impulse control… and when we use these up, we don’t have as much for the next activity.”

“Make one difficult decision, and the next one is more difficult…Some scientists think that prefrontal cortex is energy-hungry because it is still new in evolutionary terms and needs to evolve further to meet today’s information demands.”

Small wonder trying to do more than one thing at a time doesn’t work well. So when you are thinking about something, just switch off for a while.  Switch off your cell phone, stay away from your email and chat and so on. And soon you realise you are thinking better and the number of emails have, suprisingly, reduced, too.