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my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame. Three: based on what I learned about the way social media is designed to hack our attention spans, I now take six months of the year totally off it. (This time is divided into chunks, usually of a few months.) To make sure I stick to it, I always announce publicly when I am going off—I’ll tweet that I am leaving the site for a certain amount of time, so that I will feel like a fool if I suddenly crack and go back a week later. I also get my friend Lizzie to change my passwords. Four: I acted on what I learned about the importance of mind-wandering. I realized that letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention, but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right. It is when you let your mind drift away from your immediate surroundings that it starts to think over the past, and starts to game out the future, and makes connections between different things you have learned. Now I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections. I found that, precisely because I give my attention space to roam, my thinking is sharper, and I have better ideas. Five: I used to see sleep as a luxury, or—worse—as an enemy. Now I am strict with myself about getting eight hours every night. I have a little ritual where I make myself unwind: I don’t look at screens for two hours before I go to bed, and I light a scented candle and try to set aside the stresses of the day. I bought a FitBit device to measure my sleep, and if I get less than eight hours, I make myself go back to bed. This has made a really big difference. Six: I’m not a parent, but I am very involved in the lives of my godchildren and my young relatives. I used to spend a lot of my time with them deliberately doing things—busy, educational activities I would plan out in advance. Now I spend most of my time with them just playing freely, or letting them play on their own without being managed or oversupervised or imprisoned. I learned that the more free play they get, the more sound a foundation they will have for their focus and attention. I try to give them as much of that as I can. I would like to be able to tell you that I also do other things I learned I should do to improve my focus—cut out processed foods, meditate every day, build in other slow practices like yoga, and take an extra day off work each week. The truth is I struggle with this—so much of how I deal with ordinary anxiety is tied up with comfort eating and overworking.
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Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)