Why It’s So Hard to Focus Right Now
You’ve finished work for the day and sink into the couch. After a long day, your brain says, “I don’t want to think.” You turn on a favorite movie and within minutes, a warm comfortable feeling settles across your body as your mind zones out.
Versions of our brain drifting play out daily. Our mind wanders as someone is sharing data in a meeting. A loved one is explaining something, and we’re too busy daydreaming to hear a word. We stop paying attention to a presentation when we don’t find the topic interesting. There is a good reason for these moments.
In The Perfect Story, I introduce Five Factory Settings of the Brain. These describe how the brain responds to information and stories, and what to include in your stories to make them engaging. They provide principles and choices you can make with your stories to make sure they achieve the desired outcome. I wanted to share more about the first factory setting from a slightly different perspective–how to consider it for this moment in time.
The first factory setting is that the brain is lazy. This is based on research from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Dr. Paul Zak. The brain is our most complicated organ, and its number one goal is to keep you alive. Repetition is a favorite habit of the brain. It wants you to do things the same way you did yesterday because it worked—you’re still alive! Doing things new or different requires the brain to spend more calories. It uses the most calories out of any organ in the body and is in the conservation business.
The brain acts as a banker that brokers calories into two buckets: save and spend. The spend bucket is for the non-negotiables: running organs and systems to keep you alive. Within those calories is a stash used to make predictions for how to move your body or respond to things in your environment. These calories are non-negotiables. Without them, your body wouldn’t be able to run effectively and keep you alive.
The second bucket contains the calories that are conserved. The brain is frugal with these calories because they must make up any overdrafts from the first bucket. If you are under stress, fighting an illness, lacking sleep, or dealing with an uncertain situation, your body spends calories inefficiently. As Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret recently said, uncertainty is expensive for our bodies. It’s a bit like burning through more gas driving in stop-and-go city traffic than when cruising on the highway.
This is why it’s so much harder to think clearly or listen when you are tired or stressed. It’s also why your brain goes numb at the end of a long day. Your brain is sending you the signal that it wants to rest and restore. You reach for the things that are comfortable and familiar because they require fewer calories and give a dopamine boost.
When you drift off as someone is speaking, presenting, or telling a story, the content isn’t worth the calories. The brain shifts into a gear that spends lower calories. The brain isn’t meant to be deeply focused every minute of the day without a break. Attention ebbing and flowing is natural, but that is accelerated if the content isn’t meaningful to the individual.
Dr. Paul Zak once told me, “I’m either going to listen or read what you’ve created, or I can watch cat videos. People need to think, “Why would anybody give me 10, 20, 30 minutes of their time?” Each time you are communicating or sharing a story, you are inviting the listener to pay attention or daring their brain to be lazy.
Think of those moments you’ve been scrolling on social media. You either look or scroll, deciding in less than two seconds. How often have you put a book down after the first chapter because you just couldn’t get into it? Or abandoned movies ten minutes in because made your brain check out (I’m looking at you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). Throughout the day, the brain makes split-second decisions to spend calories or drift. This makes the role of the communicator and storyteller to share things compellingly.
If you’ve ever…
Put up a slide and said, “I’m not going to read this to you…”
Told a story without structure that rambled
Put up a chart and said, “The data speaks for itself!”
Told a story without thinking about the outcome for the audience
Spent two hours tinkering with the formatting of your slides but only spend five minutes thinking about what you would say
…then you’ve likely made your audience experience the lazy brain.
Add on top of it this unique time we are in. The end of the calendar year is always exhausting from people packing in activities in work and life. People are experiencing more burnout than ever. Global events have created significant stress. The uncertainty makes it that much harder to focus and pay attention.
As you wind down your year, consider doing these things to help your teams:
Plan your communications calendar: Not all communications have the same weight. Quick updates and status are easy to process. Communicating changes, vision, strategy, or even coaching moments are higher stakes. You need to plan any time you want people to experience an internal shift that informs, influences, or inspires action. Look at your meeting cadence and schedule dedicated time to work on your communications and stories.
Streamline your communications and then cut them in half. People will remember about 50% of what you say within an hour. What is that 50% you want them to come away with? Begin structuring your message around those things and trim them further.
Identify what can be stopped. Recognize that people are experiencing burnout more than ever. We are great at starting things up by terrible at stopping them. Take a hard look at your meetings and ongoing activities to see if they are bringing value. Ask teams to identify one thing they would like to stop.
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