Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

“I came to this realization that my job in a way is to think something that is different from everyone else—but I was in an environment where I was just getting all the same information as everyone else, and I was just thinking the same things as everyone else.”

everybody were to spend [an] extra hour sleeping [as they did in the past], they wouldn’t be on Amazon. They wouldn’t be buying things.” If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-d

some scientists in the field believe that “dreaming somehow helps you to adapt emotionally to waking events.” When you dream, you can revisit stressful moments, but without stress hormones flooding your system. Over time, those scientists believe, this can make it easier to handle stress—which we know makes it easier to focus.

Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either.

Mihaly’s studies identified many aspects of flow, but it seemed to me—as I read over them in detail—that if you want to get there, what you need to know boils down to three core components. The first thing you need to do is to choose a clearly defined goal. I want to paint this canvas; I want to run up this hill; I want to teach my child how to swi

“An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state,” he told me. “It’s all about avoidance. It’s all about—how do I get out of this uncomfortable state?” He believes we all need to explore our triggers nonjudgmentally, think about them, and find ways to disrupt them. So whenever he felt that prickling feeling or boredom or stress come to him,

Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap at $30, far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us.