We live in a productivity obsessed world where dozens of studies, hundreds of books and thousands of articles and have been published on the science of minimizing distraction.
But we shouldn’t underestimate the value of being able to intentionally distract ourselves. Applied judiciously and within the appropriate context, doing can make all the difference in the world.
Consider those individuals with chronic pain or crippling anxiety. Having experienced both states myself, I can attest that a person gets caught in a vicious cycle.
Because of the pain, you don’t feel like going out into the world to do things and enjoy activities. You’re too worried about your own condition and what it might attract into or repel from yours and other people’s lives.
And so, you end up staying at home and isolating yourself, doing nothing other than worrying about your pain. Which, in turn, only makes it worse. It’s a human powered perpetual motion machine.
On the other hand, if somebody decides that their life purposes are going to trump their temperaments, that the meaning they intend to make is more important than the mood they try to measure, they will find ways to distract themselves back to a state of wellbeing.
If, instead of focusing on how much their body hurts or how incompetent they feel, they can firmly turn their attention to something else. And if, instead of sitting around feeling sorry for themselves, they give themselves distractor tasks designed to occupy the conscious mind, life won’t seem so gloomy.
I’m reminded of a study published in a pain management journal. Scientists showed that the participants who were able to withstand pain for longest amount of time were the ones allowed to shout out the phrase owww!
Turns out, people’s pain tolerance was higher because shouting that word interfered with pain messages traveling to the brain, making the experience in and of itself potentially analgesic.
The point is, distractibility doesn’t necessarily have to be the devil.
It can be used as a weapon to wage peace.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What negative energy do you need to give a project?
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Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.
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Namaste.
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