In this bonus episode, psychologist and ATTENTION SPAN author Gloria Mark returns to discuss what to do when stress leads to difficulty focusing, how to reclaim your attention from your inbox, how to help kids cultivate attentional well-being, and more.
Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine, and also spent ten years as a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. For over two decades she has researched the impact of digital media on people's lives, studying how using our devices affect our multitasking, distractions, mood and behavior. She has published over 200 papers in the top journals and conferences in the field of human-computer interaction, has received numerous paper awards, and was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition for her contribution to the field. She has also been a Fulbright scholar and has received the prestigious NSF Career grant. Her work has been widely recognized outside of academia: she has appeared on The Ezra Klein show, NPR’s Hidden Brain, Sanjay Gupta’s CNN Chasing Life, CBS Sunday Morning, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert, among many others. Her work has been featured in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, BBC, and others. She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Her recent book is Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, named by The Globe and Mail as the #1 Best Business and Management book of 2023, and chosen as the Season 20 selection of the Next Big Idea Book Club. Find her at gloriamark.com and on Substack.
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Resources and References
Gloria’s book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which came out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which was published in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and get them all at christyharrison.com/books.
Hey there. Welcome to this bonus episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest from earlier this week, psychologist and Attention Span author, Gloria Mark, is back for a bonus interview. We discuss what to do when stress leads to difficulty focusing, how to reclaim your attention from your email inbox, how to help kids cultivate attentional well-being, and more. So without any further ado, here's my bonus conversation with Gloria Mark.
So, Gloria, welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this bonus episode with me.
Gloria Mark: Thank you for having me.
Christy Harrison: I wanted to talk a little bit more about something we kinda started to touch on at the end there, which is, like, being always on in a workplace and the effect that that has on people and the way that that can make us vulnerable to burnout. You know, I talked about how I've successfully broken my addiction to social media, and that took years and, like, handing over the reins to somebody else. But for me, email is so much harder because I have my own business, and I feel very beholden to email. And even though I have an admin assistant who answers all the, like, over the transom stuff that comes in, there's still people who find me randomly and find my email address, and I can get some really interesting opportunities in my email inbox. I can also get some fires that I have to put out coming in there. There's just a lot of extremes and everything in between there. And I'm curious to talk a little bit about your findings that you mentioned in the book about how email affects stress levels, and then, you know, a little bit about what people can do to reclaim their attention from email.
Gloria Mark: One of the most robust research findings that we found is that email creates stress and not surprisingly, email puts people in a bad mood. Right? It affects our emotions. We become very negative when when we're around email. So we find, you know, in study after study, that there is a correlation that the more email people have to deal with, the more stressed they are and the more negative they feel. So email is an additional workload on top of the work we already have. You know, we have deadlines, we have things we have to get done, and on top of that, there's an expectation that we're gonna deal with email. Now, you know, some people can spend hours a day just dealing with email. I know I do. And that's that's on top of the other work that I have to accomplish each day. So it's an additional strain on people. We've done studies with physicians, and we find that they spend, you know, over an hour each day just dealing with the email.
Christy Harrison: On top of that intense workload of going from patient to patient. Yeah.
Gloria Mark: Exactly. And, you know, there's a lot of concern about physicians experiencing exhaustion and burnout, and, of course, you know, having an extra hour doing this kind of work is is not good. Now, email has unequal benefits. The sender of the email gets the benefits. Right? They're asking for information. They're asking for some kind of service. The receiver is the one that has to do the work. To give the sender what they want. And so we have these unequal benefits. And that also contributes to stress. And, you know, the other thing too, is that email is a symbol of work. Right? When we go on social media, that's generally not work related. Although some social media like Facebook could be work related.
Christy Harrison: Or like my Instagram when I'm promoting a book or something, you know.
Gloria Mark: Sure. But for the most part, email is work related. And so whenever we see email, it just symbolizes work to us.
Christy Harrison: I'm so interested with the finding that email puts people in a bad mood, that so many of us, you know, I've talked to other people who are in a similar place of, like, kind of having moved away from social media and taken away that addiction or that thing that your thumb just goes to when you're standing in line at the grocery store or whatever, but, you know, where email starts to fill that void. And when it's something that's, like, actively making us feel bad, putting us in a bad mood, why do we do that to ourselves? Why is it so appealing?
Gloria Mark: Well, we have developed a a habit of checking email. That's one thing. So there's intermittent reinforcement, which means that not every email is going to bring a reward. In fact, very few of them do. But every so often, you know, I might get an email that invites me to say, give a talk. And that makes me feel great. Or I get an email from a long lost friend. Right? And wow, that just puts me over the moon. I'm so happy.
Those rare times that we get these kinds of really positive emails, it's enough to keep us checking. But there's also expectations and demands in the workplace, so there are expectations that we're going to be on top of our email. We're going to be responding to it. If your manager or your colleague emails you and needs information, there is an expectation that we're going to respond, and we're going to respond fast. Earlier, I talked about the idea of social capital. We want to maintain a good balance of social capital with our colleagues and with our managers, or if you're dealing with clients. So of course, we're gonna respond to email to keep that balance.
Christy Harrison: What can we do to reclaim our attention from email if we feel like it's getting co opted or, you know, hijacked by email all the time?
