Psychologist and ATTENTION SPAN author Gloria Mark joins us to discuss the connection between attention and well-being, the technologies manipulating our attention (and why social-media algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg), why modern life isn’t “causing” ADHD, the individual and societal changes needed to improve attentional well-being, how to discover your own personal rhythm of attention, 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
Contains affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
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
Her recent piece on the diverse needs of our minds
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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 back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is Gloria Mark, who's a psychologist and author of the book Attention Span. We discuss the connection between attention and well-being, the technologies manipulating our attention and why social media algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg, why modern life isn't quote unquote causing ADHD, the individual and societal changes needed to improve our attentional well-being, how to discover your own personal rhythm of attention, and lots more. This is a really important and nuanced conversation, and I know it's given me a lot to think about and some really helpful new ways of thinking about my own attention. I can't wait to share it with you shortly, but first, a few announcements.
This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Paid subscribers help keep this show going and keep me able to make the best free content I possibly can, including paying our editor and sound engineer and our administrative assistant. All of this is, of course, an investment. Making a quality podcast is a big investment, and paid subscriptions help support that. And paid subscribers also get a lot of great perks, like bonus episodes with our guests, including a bonus interview I did with Gloria Mark that will air this Friday, subscriber only Q & As, full access to our archives where I do deep dives into wellness culture topics, commenting privileges and places to connect with other subscribers, and lots more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com. And if you're already a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support.
This podcast is also brought to you by my second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-Being, which is available wherever books are sold. I created this podcast to continue the conversations that I was having in that book. And one of the things that explores is the attention economy and how it's contributed to all the misinformation and scams and conspiracy theories that have proliferated in wellness culture. The book also addresses ways we can protect ourselves at the individual and societal level from these harms, and I think it's a great complement to this conversation with Gloria. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellness trap to learn more and buy the book. That's christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap, or get it at your favorite local bookstore. Now without any further ado, here's my conversation with Gloria Mark.
So, Gloria, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being with us.
Gloria Mark: Thank you so much for having me.
Christy Harrison: I'm really excited to talk with you today. You've written a great book about attention that I'm sure we'll dive into and talk a lot about the nuances of. But before we get into that, I'd love to have you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in studying attention in the first place.
Gloria Mark: So I have a background in psychology. I did my PhD in psychology, and my specialty was decision making, which of course is very much wrapped up with attention. So after I did my graduate work, I worked in the area that's called human computer interaction. So, I worked in a very large research institute, and then I came over to academia. So human computer interaction really looks at the intersection between people and computing. So how the use of computing our computers, our smartphones, tablets, Internet, social media, all of that, how does that affect our attention? And so it was just a natural merging for me of these two interests, tech use and the psychology of attention. I've been studying this for three decades.
Christy Harrison: And you also have a background as a fine artist. Right? How did that play into your work?
Gloria Mark: My first career was as a fine artist. It did not last very long, and I knew how hard it was to survive as an artist. And so I thought I would choose something that I could enjoy doing eight hours a day and would bring me sustenance. So fine art affects me in the following ways. So I learned what's called lateral thinking. Basically, where you bring two seemingly very, very different ideas together, and you create something new. That's that's what lateral thinking is. And when I switched from art to science, I applied this idea of lateral thinking, and it helped me come up with new ideas.
It changed my perspective on the world, and my approach to studying science is to be informed by people's experiences and by my own intuition. And so having this art background and and seeing things very broadly really helped me come up with research ideas. That's very different than how I was trained in science, which is called a linear logical type of thinking, where you reason from a to b to c to d, which is really important. But when you come up with those very initial ideas of what to study, I think that my art background really influenced me there.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I'm really fascinated by this idea of intuition and its role in your work and in the relationship between intuition and science. I teach a practice in my dietetics work called intuitive eating that's about helping people reconnect with their body's cues and learn to trust themselves and learning to tune out the noise from diet and wellness culture telling you all these things that you're supposed to eat or not eat that are so in contradiction with one another. Just getting back to to basics of kinda basic nutrition, but also really trusting yourself and trusting your body's hunger and fullness and your your sense of pleasure and satisfaction and all of that.
I am also someone who is very, very much critical thinker and critical consumer of science and of health information, and really interested in digging into studies and dissecting them and finding out what we can really know from studies of nutrition, especially in in other areas of wellness where there's just not a lot of good research and it's mostly epidemiology, and it's not a lot of randomized controlled trials, and those that we have are really limited. So I'm always thinking about this sort of, like, pull in myself, I guess, between those two forms of thinking, you know, the intuition and the sort of lateral thinking, as you say, which I love and, you know, making those kinds of connections, and then, like, the logical linear thinking of science and reading scientific research and interpreting it.
Gloria Mark: That aligns very well with my approach to studying attention. So I believe that people also have to get in touch with their intuition about their goals, their motives in order to really gain better control over their attention. We're living in a digital world. We're pulled in so many different directions. And so getting in touch with people's intuition about what's important to focus on, that's really the key thing.
Christy Harrison: That is so interesting. Can you say a little bit more about that and how that can work in practice for people?
Gloria Mark: So first of all, I believe that people can gain control over their attention. There are a lot of reasons why people feel that they've lost control when they use their devices, and people complain about being distracted, going down rabbit holes. That's very true. I mean, I've been studying and observing people for many years, and that's exactly what I've seen. But I do think that everyone can gain control over their attention. We're not victims to the technology. We're not victims to algorithms. And, you know, there are a number of ways that people can do this.
If you want, I can dive in and talk about ways that people can gain agency. Shall I do that?
Christy Harrison: I'd love that. Yeah.
Gloria Mark: One of the first ways is it's a practice that I was actually inspired from by the idea of mindfulness. So I know a lot of people are very familiar with the idea of mindfulness meditation, which teaches you to focus in the present. And I realized that when I was doing mindfulness that the very same principle applies when I'm on my device, that I need to focus on the present. And I developed a practice that I call meta awareness, which is being aware of what you're doing as it's unfolding. Now, the problem when we use our devices is that so many of our actions are just unconscious.
You know, I look at my phone next to me, and without thinking, I just pick it up and swipe it open. Or we have a notification on our screen and we click on it. Or we have an urge to check email or check social media. And it turns out that about half the time people self interrupt. They interrupt themselves to to check social media, to go surfing on the web, to look something up. But practicing meta awareness can help us have agency over these automatic actions to make them more conscious. And when we convert an automatic action into something that's conscious, we can be more intentional. And when we are intentional, we can make plans about what we can do.
How do I do this? I probe myself. So, whenever I'm online, I've learned to recognize my urges to switch to read the news or switch to do email. And I probe myself and ask, do I really need to do that right now? Chances are no. Or if I'm already reading news, I keep probing myself. Okay. Have I gotten the gist of this article? Or is this giving me new information? Is it still interesting? If it's not, leave it, go back to work or go back to doing. What is for me more important? Now, meta awareness is it's a little bit awkward at first. You have to keep reminding yourself to probe yourself.
But after a while it becomes second nature. And it's it's a skill that you can develop. It's like a muscle that you can build up. So, meta awareness is one way we can gain agency. I can talk about another way as well, and it's about practicing forethought. And practicing forethought is imagining our future selves. And the best time for me to imagine it is, who am I gonna be? What am I gonna feel like at the end of the day? And so the important thing is to create a visualization of yourself at the end of the day. I want to see myself sitting on the couch, reading something interesting, maybe watching a show, you know, talking with friends.
The last thing that I want to be doing is working on that deadline. And so during the day, when you have this urge, when you feel, oh, I'm just not motivated or, you know, I'd so much rather scroll on social media, create a visualization of your future self at the end of the day, and this can help keep you on track. So it's a really good way to help visualize goals.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I think those two things have been really helpful for me. The meta awareness, especially, I think was really key in breaking my addiction to tech and to social media especially because I was so just not even thinkingly grabbing my phone. My thumb would find Instagram, I'd be looking at the comments and the likes and the notifications before I was really even awake in the morning or before I really knew what I was doing and starting to become aware of just, like, how does it feel in my body when I do this? How is it landing with me to be this online and this present? Oh, interesting. I'm having these kinda yucky feelings. It's giving me a queasy feeling in my stomach. It's making me feel really tight. It's making me feel really anxious.
I fell down the stairs once checking social media. You know, all of those things kind of built up and gave me a sense of capacity to take a step back from it. And I've taken a huge step back, and I don't even do my own social media anymore. I have someone who posts on Instagram for me, and that's it. Like, I don't check it. I don't participate in it, and it feels incredibly freeing. But that was, like, probably two or three years of consistent work and practice towards that because I had been really active on social media before, and I had a big following, and so it felt like a lot to give up. And I've been really interested in all the research that's come out and the testimony from people like Frances Haugen about how algorithms are designed to capture our attention and, you know, polarize us and get us into controversy and sort of whip up anger and mistrust and how that keeps people on the platforms and maximizes engagement and helps the platforms achieve their end, which is ultimately, you know, making money through selling our attention to advertisers.
And so there's that piece of it too, right, which is sort of the larger cultural context. How do you see your work as fitting in with that, and how do you sort of conceptualize this idea that algorithms are doing something to manipulate us maybe even if we have some power to push back.
Gloria Mark: Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely right that every time we go online, when we especially when we go on social media, algorithms play a role in capturing our attention, keeping us glued to the screen. TikTok is a great example. So TikTok is a very strong recommender engine, and it learns people's preferences very quickly, And it can gear videos to you that this engine believes that people are going to pay attention to and like. And, of course, if you watch something that's just hilarious, it provides reinforcement, and it keeps you going back. You want more. You want to get more of this this reinforcement. So, yes, algorithms are a very important piece of this, but I want to kind of make the perspective much broader.
And I want to say that algorithms are just one small piece of what keeps our attention glued to computers, but also importantly, what makes us switch our attention between different windows and different screens so rapidly. So in my research, we found that people pay attention on any computer window or on any device on average 47 seconds. And our attention spans have shrunk over the last 20 years since we've been measuring this objectively. But there's so many other things besides algorithms that play a role in gearing our attention. And for example, the design of the Internet itself. The way it was structured in terms of its its nodes and links, was designed for us to be distracted. I mean, people don't realize this, but when you go on a Wikipedia page, and you're reading it, all kinds of associations come up in your mind and then you see links and you click on a link and you read a new page, all sorts if new associations. This idea of information being associated together maps on so well to how human memory is structured in terms of ideas being associated with each other. So it's like the Internet greases the wheels for us to just go joyriding and Internet surfing through it.
There are, of course, other reasons as well. We're social beings, and there are a lot of social dynamics that are just tied up in online behavior. For example, there's an idea called social capital. Social capital is it's the exchange of favors. You know, we gain resources. When we're with other people, we also give resources in return. So, there is an exchange of this kind of social capital. And there is a marketplace of this kind of social capital on the web.
For example: I'm going to answer your email because I'm hoping you're going to answer mine. And we see this in social media. People exchange information. But it's not just social capital, right? There's power that's wrapped up in our use of social media and our use of communications software like email and Slack. There's also identity. I mean, people really spend a lot of time constructing and maintaining their online identity. And that keeps their attention just glued to the screen. There are personality differences.
Some people are bored with a trait for really good self regulation ability. And others aren't born so lucky. It doesn't mean you can't develop good regulation. You can. But it's just that there are individual differences to start with. And last, let me also say that if we really think broadly about our culture and our media society that we live in. You know, people are not just on computer screens and phone screens, but, you know, we also watch TV. We watch films. We watch music videos, and shot lengths on TV, film, music videos, commercials even, have shortened over the years.
And, you know, take the example of a blockbuster film. It changes shots about every two seconds on average. If you look at YouTube, YouTube also switches shot lengths pretty fast. There's something called jump cuts that's used a lot in YouTube. And these are techniques that film directors and editors use to keep our attention on the screen. Right? So these really fast changing shots. But as a result, they're also reinforcing us to think in terms of short attention spans. So they're keeping us glued to the screen because there's, you know, a switch in action very often, But it's also reinforcing us to expect that shot lengths will change. So, yes, algorithms are one factor, but I I wanna stress that it's only one factor. I believe that human beings, we're not pawns in the sense that even though we are affected by algorithms and by notifications, our thinking is and our natures are much broader than it is.
Christy Harrison: That's one thing I've definitely noticed about myself in the time since I've been off of social media. It's like the seeking of sort of, like, things to scratch the itch has just gone elsewhere. You know? First, it was news. Now it's more like looking up interesting information. I have a two year old daughter, and, you know, I'll tell her about something and be like, "Oh, why is that? You know, why does the moon move in the sky?" And, like, looking up trying to figure it out. And it's like just going down all these interesting rabbit holes and satisfying curiosity, but it can take my attention away from what's right here and what's in the moment. So, yeah, I appreciate that that you're sort of emphasizing that we have all of these influences beyond just algorithms. I'm curious your sort of perspective on ADHD and how that plays a role, because I know you write in your book that this is not just a problem for people who have ADHD, but for those who do, what sort of added challenge is there for this environment?
Gloria Mark: It certainly is a challenge. It's harder for people with ADHD to pay attention to any one window or screen or device for that matter. So so they have additional challenges. I will say that the problem is not just unique to people with ADHD because what we're seeing with so much fast attention shifting between windows is that people's behavior mimics that of people with ADHD. I'm not saying that people who switch their attention fast have ADHD. What I am saying is that their behavior looks as though they have ADHD. So it's, you know, very similar kinds of behavior. Doesn't mean they have ADHD. But it's certainly much more of a challenge for people with ADHD because, you know, the the things I mentioned earlier that can attract people's attention. It's just really harder for them to pay attention.
Christy Harrison: Do you think that being in this kind of information environment makes people more likely to develop ADHD, or does it come from a different place, or is there some sort of genetic environment type of interaction there?
Gloria Mark: We can't say that scientifically that use of technology causes ADHD. We can't make that assertion. It's true that the number of ADHD diagnoses have risen, but there's also a lot of factors behind that. So it's not just the use of tech, but the, for example, the criteria. The awareness of ADHD has also changed. So, you know, there are so many factors that are involved in in the rise of ADHD diagnoses. And there's other factors as well.
People's sleep quality is not great. And sometimes when people are sleepy, their behavior can mimic someone who has ADHD. It doesn't mean that a person who is sleep deprived has ADHD. It's just that their behavior looks similar. But that's just one example. The point is that there's many factors in our culture other than tech that are responsible for this increase in ADHD diagnosis. And I think scientists just don't really know exactly what this rise can be attributed to.
Christy Harrison: I think it's similar to so many things in society where there's a rise in diagnoses, and it's a multifactorial thing. Nobody knows exactly what it is. I'm curious to talk now about attention and well-being and that connection there, because I think that's a somewhat unique piece of your work, at least in terms of what I've seen of people that you actually talk about the connection between attention and well-being. You argue that instead of thinking about how we can be maximally productive and harness our attention into productivity, we need to think about how to achieve our greatest well-being, you say, by being attentive to our attentional resources. Can you explain that a little bit?
Gloria Mark: I think that if there's one message that I hope to convey from my book, it's that that we should really put well-being first and foremost before this notion of productivity. And there is a very strong cultural narrative that, you know, we should push ourselves to be as productive as possible. And very often this also refers to quantity of of information produced, and not just quality. But, you know, I want us to reverse that. So let me talk about cognitive resources. I like to use the metaphor of people having a tank of cognitive resources, or you can think of this as attentional capacity. And there's things that help us build up our tank, and there are things that drain our tank. What helps build up our tank would be getting a really good night's sleep. That's that's so important.
But also taking really good substantial breaks throughout the day can help us replenish that tank, but there are things that drain that tank. And and that's the problem. And when the tank is drained, you know, when people are fatigued and exhausted, you know, people are running on low or empty, that affects people's well-being. So what can drain those resources? Focusing for extended periods of time can drain us. And, you know, there is this this narrative in our culture that we should try to achieve non-interrupted focus, extended periods of focus. But, you know, humans are just not cut out for that. If you're working on something that's challenging and hard that involves effort, right, mental effort, people can't do that for a very long time because it it drains our resources.
You can be on social media for lengthy periods of time because those are easy things. Those don't drain our resources. Another thing that drains that tank is multitasking. So when we're switching our attention from one thing and then immediately you switch to something else, our tank leaks. Right? Those resources leak. Why? Because we need additional resources to reorient to every new task that we're doing. You know every new window that we're looking at, we have to pull up new information.
In psychology, this is called a schema. Right? A schema is think of it as a frame of reference that contains information for the thing you're doing. And so, if I'm writing a paper, I have a schema about that paper. I have the information in my mind for what I need to do that, and then I suddenly switch to email. I have to pull up a new schema, which is my email schema. You know, I look in, who is the sender? What emails should I answer? There's just kind of this general, "Oh, no. I have too many emails to answer." That's my general email schema. But we keep switching.
And going back to this idea of cognitive resources. Right? Switching our attention to different activities drains those resources. Right? So we've got, you know, focusing for extended periods of time, switching our attention, and of course as the day wears on, our tank naturally gets drained. Right? So the time since since we woke up in the morning, you just see it like a downward curve of the amount of cognitive resources we have available. So to achieve well-being, it's really important to keep that tank replenished. Maybe we can't get it as full as in the morning. We can do things that keep that tank pretty high. Taking breaks.
Sometimes we have to switch from doing hard focused work to doing something that's easy, and that's gratifying. So, there's a lot of ways that we can maintain a balance. And let me just finish by saying that there is psychological research that shows that when people feel positive, they can actually do more. They can be more creative. There's a theory called the broaden and build theory, which shows that, you know, when people feel positive, they can think of more ideas and better quality ideas. They have better motivation to do work. So, you know, these are all arguments for us to really put well-being first and foremost before focusing solely on productivity. Because the productivity will happen if you feel positive.
Christy Harrison: It seems like so much in our culture is designed around this idea of maximizing productivity to the detriment of how people's brains naturally work. Right? Like, you talk about how the eight hour workday and the sort of idea of just hyper focusing for long stretches of that really drain people's tank. What do you see as sort of an ideal day for someone? Or I know it varies, but, like, what are some sort of blocks of the day that you can define to try to help people maximize their attentional well-being?
Gloria Mark: So we found it in our research that people's focused attention occurs in a rhythm. So everyone has their own personal rhythm of when their attention is at its peak and when their attention is in a valley. And for most people, they have an attentional peak mid morning, and then another one mid afternoon. And so, what I would suggest is for people to discover what your own personal rhythm of your attentional peaks and valleys are. How can you do this? Well, first of all first thing is be aware of what your chronotype is. Everyone has a different chronotype. Some people are early types. You know, they get up with dawn, and they're just ready to go, and their attentional peaks are much earlier in the day.
Other people are late types, and you know, they don't get going until late morning. That's how their bodies and minds are constructed. Most people are moderates. I'm a moderate type. And if you want to know your chronotype, there's an online survey that's called the Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire. It's a very quick survey. You can take it. But, you know, I would bet most people have a good sense of whether you're a morning type or evening type.
So that's the first thing to do. Then you can also, I mean, if you really want to do this systematically, you can keep a little diary throughout the day of how engaged you are in what you're doing and how challenged you are. Those are two different things to think about. So, you know, if I'm watching a YouTube video, I'm probably very engaged, but I'm not at all challenged. And I call this rote attention. But if I'm really engaged with something and I really have to put in a lot of effort, you know, I'm reading, say, an academic article or I'm trying to write something. I call this a state of focus. And so we can switch things around.
You don't have to do focused work the entire day. You can switch between doing focused work, doing rote activity, and taking breaks. And that's the best way to be productive. It's the best way to preserve our tank of cognitive resources. And so, you know, I've had my students do this as an exercise. They keep a little diary of, you know, how challenged and engaged they are throughout the day. And, you know, they mapped out when their attentional peaks are. So what do we do with this information? We can design our days, right? Most people think about designing your day.
No, most people don't think about the term "designing your day". You think about doing a to do list and scheduling your day. And people write down the tasks that have to be done, and usually a time associated with it. Or maybe they just write down the tasks that they want to accomplish through the day. But designing your day is thinking about when to put the hardest tasks. Those tasks that require the most creativity, putting those at the times when you're at your peak focus, because then we have the most cognitive energy to perform that. So, you know, think in terms of designing your day. Intentionally design breaks into that day, and then people will be at their best.
Christy Harrison: It's so interesting too that you talk about, like, rote attention as one form of replenishing your tank and then there's like focused attention, but that a flow state, which has always been something that I've aspired to and something that I find occasionally in my writing or in, you know, other pursuits, skiing that I used to do when I was a kid or other things like that. You know, that that that's, like, the thing that I've that I chase with, like, the state that I would just love to be in all the time. And you write that for many of us in the jobs that we have today in this, like, information economy, that we really can't find flow in those jobs, or those jobs are sort of designed in some ways to to block flow or make it harder to achieve flow. And so this this idea of balance and rhythm is really what we should be aiming for more. Can you talk a little bit about why that is?
Gloria Mark: So first of all, I want to frame this in a more positive sense. It's true that we've studied many many hundreds of knowledge workers over the years and flow in the knowledge workplace is very rare. But I want to frame this in a very positive way because I want to say that's not so bad. Because it can be very rewarding to do work that requires some effort. It's a different kind of thinking. It's more analytical thinking. Can be extremely rewarding and gratifying. And a person doesn't have to be in flow to achieve that kind of gratification.
Now, we talked earlier that I used to be an artist, and I would get into flow regularly. I could be pretty much certain that I would get into flow every day when I did art. And in a state of flow, it's a combination of using your skill, but also being challenged in just the right amount. If you're too challenged, you're frustrated. And if you're not challenged enough, then it's too easy, and you're not really getting into a flow state. So there's this sweet spot of just having the right amount of challenge, right amount of skill. But it also is much easier to get into flow if you're skiing, like you mentioned, or if a person is an artist or a musician or does a hobby like woodworking. Right? Those are much easier ways to get into flow.
You know, a person who's doing financial administration might be a bit harder. A person who's an administrative assistant might be harder. With writing, sometimes people can get into flow. But I want to say it's a positive thing to be able to do something that's rewarding and gratifying, and you can be so proud of your work. And we don't have to get into flow to be able to achieve that kind of feeling.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. That's really helpful. Thank you. I wanna talk a little bit about mindfulness and mind wandering and sort of the maybe tension between those two things. I'm not sure. Curious to hear your thoughts on why is mind wandering important and what can it give us? Because I used to think that, you know, and I have found personally that mindfulness is really helpful for my attention and also my happiness, you know, my sense of well-being. And there is some research on on that showing, like, a paper you cited in the book that I actually also cited in my first book called A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, where the researchers interrupted people to ask them what they were doing and if their attention was on what they were doing or on something else and then rate how happy they were. The research showed that people seemed to be happier when their attention was on what they were doing versus when they were thinking about something else.
So there's that piece of it, but then there's also a lot of research showing the benefits of mind wandering. So curious to hear you talk a little bit about that.
Gloria Mark: So I actually wrote a Substack about this not too long ago. So we do mind wandering quite a bit during the day. One study showed that when people were probed throughout the day, 47% of the time, they report it doing mind wandering. But our attention naturally drifts between what's external to us and our own inner thoughts. And for something external could be, you know, you're reading a paper, you're reading the news, but, you know, even surfing the Internet is a kind of external use of our attention. But when our mind drifts to our inner thoughts, right, that's that's mind wandering. You're right. There was a study that showed that when people mind wandered, they tended to report negative thoughts.
But there's an opposite interpretation of this because it's not always the case that people are unhappy when their mind wander. But it could be that when our attention is directed towards something external, like other people, we're just way happier when we're focusing on something external, or we're out in nature, and we're looking at the environment. You know, we might feel happier. So it doesn't necessarily mean that we're feeling negative when we're mind wandering. But it could be in comparison to this focus on what's external to us. And of course, you know, some people do ruminate over negative things when they mind wander, particularly if people have a personality trait of neuroticism. Right? People tend to replay negative events over and over again. And so, of course, if you're a person who tends to do it and I think in some ways we all do this from time to time, and I do myself.
You know, you think, "Oh my gosh, I could have said that differently." We keep ruminating about that. But I also want to point out that mind wandering can bring us benefits. So, there's a psychologist Wayne Winkelgren, he wrote a book called How to Solve Problems. And he talked about that if you have a really tough problem or a tough decision, it's good to just kind of, you know, move away from it for a bit. Let your mind wander. Because in the back of our minds, we're still kind of considering that problem.
And we're letting it incubate. And sometimes when we return to that problem or that hard decision, the answer could be really clear. Right? So removing ourselves from it, letting our mind wander can sometimes give us really good benefits. What's really important is to be able to harness our attention. Right, to be aware of when our mind is outwardly facing and when it's inwardly facing. And, you know, the thing that we don't want to do is sink into a rabbit hole of mind wandering when we really have important things to do. You know, if you're taking a walk outside, oh, that's a great time for mind wandering. And our attention is going back and forth from looking at the flowers, and birds, and trees, and then going back inside of our minds, and thinking of other kinds of thoughts. And so we're kind of going back and forth. But we don't want to sink into a rabbit hole when we have work to do. We, you know, we have goals to accomplish. So that's really important.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I find mind wandering to be so important to my writing practice and other creative practices. Like when I get outside and take a walk and just don't listen to anything or look at my phone, just kinda let my mind wander, I find so many great insights and, you know, something that I might have been puzzling over in the background often becomes clear, or I come back and then it's clear. Sometimes it takes a few days or whatever, but I think that that walk and that mind wandering has contributed to the process.
Gloria Mark: Absolutely.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious though the piece about rumination is really interesting to me because I am someone who definitely has a tendency towards that. I've been, in the past, diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and done a lot of healing around that, but still definitely have some tendencies towards anxiety. And letting your mind wander in a way that's not self destructive seems to require some baseline of coping skills I think cause I would get into such loops and rabbit holes with mind wandering back then that, you know, I wasn't really able to pull myself out of and even still, if I'm in a period of greater anxiety, this can happen, you know, where, like, I'll be like, "Yeah, I should do this coping skill. I should stop looking at my phone or whatever, but I'm just gonna do one more thing. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna be here in it." And sometimes maybe we all just need to do that, and then we burn ourselves out on it and really feel ready to do something different. But I'm curious if you have any thoughts on, like, how people can prepare themselves for mind wandering or sort of have support systems or scaffolding around mind wandering when they're struggling with some of these issues, like anxiety and rumination.
Gloria Mark: I found for myself, what's helped me the most is mindfulness. I took a course in that my university offered during the pandemic in mindfulness, and I didn't know what to expect. But I have to say that if I practice mindfulness, which is, you know, essentially just focusing on the present, it really helps my mind settle down. And, you know, when we have these thoughts of replaying events and when they start to become negative, when you focus on the present it kind of pushes those thoughts aside. Right? And it just helps us kind of settle down and gives us a new perspective on things. So I found for myself that this has helped so much. Being in a very stressful job, in academia, and working with a lot of different people has been extremely stressful. But to be able to pull away and do, you know, this kind of mindfulness is has just been so helpful.
The other thing that's probably been just one of the best things that I've done is to exercise and trying to get outside in nature. Now, you know, exercise could be walking, taking a walk, being outside. I like to run, but boy, just taking a walk can do wonders. I lived in New York City recently for a few months, and even in the middle of New York, you can find nature. And you know, I used to go to different parks in New York and run or take walks. The important thing is that wherever you are, look for some nature. You can be in a very urban area, but you can find trees. You can find birds, you know, you can find some kind of nature. And it has this restorative effect on us.
And I've done research which shows that, you know, being outside for 20 minutes can help improve what's called divergent thinking. It's like brainstorming, thinking of more ideas, different ideas, a wide variety of different ideas. And that can help us when we're ruminating, because we're stuck in a loop, right? And we keep going over the same thoughts over and over again. But, you know, if we can break out of that loop and come up with new ideas that can really help us. And of course, there's other research as well that shows being outside in nature for 20 minutes can help people de-stress. It's a wonder drug, and it's available for all of us for free.
Christy Harrison: We talked a little bit about how there are these factors outside of our control, including algorithms and other cultural factors in the design of the Internet itself that are vying for our attention and maybe influencing our ability to pay attention. And so, you know, you've talked a lot about individual solutions and responses and, like, ways that we can know our own mind and know how to sort of fight back or at least take some control of the situation. But curious if you have any thoughts on how much of this is gonna require societal changes and what those might look like.
Gloria Mark: I think a lot of it is going to require societal changes. So from an organizational perspective, I think that managers and decision makers in organizations need to understand to put the well-being of employees first. So rather than pushing people on a schedule to be productive, let's instead think about what can we as an organization do to ensure that people have positive well-being. Right? What can we do in this environment to make it a place where people will come to work each day and feel positive? They'll feel rewarded. Right? That's where I think managers need to put their attention to. They can, for example, institute a quiet time. They can promote a culture of respect for others and a culture of warmth and friendliness so that people, you know, they want to come to work. A collegial atmosphere is so important.
But on a broader societal level, I think that there can be laws and policy that are needed. Tech companies, of course, need regulations. This has been discussed for quite a long time by a number of people, and so we really do need to put regulations. For example, regulating misinformation on sites, regulating algorithms. You know, for example, Facebook had used an algorithm to promote content that made people angry. Why? Because they found that people tended to stay on sites when they were fed this kind of content. So, let's regulate that. But even more broadly, I'm very much a fan of right to disconnect laws. And in France, there's the El Khomri law. There's also regulation in places like Ireland and Ontario, Canada, where workers are not penalized when they do not answer electronic communications after work hours.
Christy Harrison: So huge.
Gloria Mark: That's really important, because what's happening is that our personal lives and our work lives have just become blended together. And we need to have borders. We need to reinstall those borders. That when you're at home, that's the time to take a break, to decompress, to psychologically detach from work. It's really important. And if we're talking about well-being, it's so important for people to have personal time away from work. And when you can psychologically detach, you can better psychologically reattach to work the next day. And so, you know, I would really like to see right to disconnect laws happen.
Christy Harrison: I would love to see that. What happens when people don't psychologically detach ever and they're just constantly on and feeling like they have to respond at all hours?
Gloria Mark: Well, they get very stressed, and and this can lead to burnout and exhaustion. The stress we experience during the workday can carry over into our personal lives in the evening. So, you know, it's very hard to just completely cut off. And of course, if people are answering emails and Slacks throughout the evening hours, then it's not giving them a chance to really turn off. Right? But if we can really, you know, make a break. And, you know, you still have this residual stress from during the day, but it gives us at least a chance to try to manage that stress, you know, to at least have some free time where we're not thinking about work, hopefully. Right? I know it's hard to completely turn off, but at least we don't have the reinforcement of electronic communications. And so it can help prevent burnout. Right? I mean, it's a step to be able to have time away from thinking about work. And, you know, we need to be thinking about that for people. And, you know, if it requires policy to do that, then yes, let's create that policy.
Christy Harrison: I love that. And I'm thinking so many things about, you know, as a small business owner myself, someone who feels like I always need to be on, you know, it's really hard to do that. So maybe we can talk a little bit in the the bonus episode, bonus questions about some of the ways to manage that when you feel like you're the person, you're the one managing everything in your in your work life. But before we do that, I would love to ask you a question that I ask all my guests at the end these days, which is, how are you rethinking wellness in light of your work? The podcast is called Rethinking Wellness, and it sort of has double meaning of, like, rethinking this whole business that we call wellness, the wellness industry and wellness culture, and sort of the way that it misinforms and misleads so many people and takes them away from true well-being, and then rethinking the concept of wellness meaning, like, true well-being. How can we envision that for ourselves? So you've talked a lot about well-being, and and I think your work revolves so much around that. But I'm curious for you personally, sort of how are you rethinking wellness in light of your work?
Gloria Mark: This actually is in contrast with how I used to work, where I just worked myself through to exhaustion. I didn't take breaks in the evening. I had two children with my husband we were raising, and it was a really crazy time. And I look back on those years, and I realize how stressed I was and how I was experiencing burnout. And so now for me, wellness, it's a greater awareness of really stepping away from work that's stressful and doing something that can promote a feeling of being positive, whether it's reading something inspirational, trying to read something that's inspiring every day is really important. Another thing I try to do is do something that I can learn each day. Right? You know, some philosophy, for example. I find that really interesting, and I don't know so much about it.
But finding something that, "Wow, I just learned something new today." This helps promote my wellness. So making time for this, and of course, making time for people is so important. You know, in those years when I was just getting myself exhausted, I wasn't making enough time for relationships. And I realize how important that is for our health and well-being. In fact, studies show that one of the major factors associated with healthy living is having really good social relationships and, you know, being socially connected with other people. And so I've really made that a point to to try to to really value other people. Right? And this really helps my well-being as well.
Christy Harrison: Thank you so much for sharing that for everything you shared and discussed in this episode. This is really, really helpful. I'm excited to talk with you a little bit more on the the bonus episode. But for those who are just listening to this, can you tell people where they can find you online, learn more about your work, and get your book?
Gloria Mark: So you can find me www.gloriamark.com. My book is called Attention Span, and it covers quite a few of the things that we talked about today. Goes into a little bit more details about the research and the findings. Some of them I think you might find surprising. They've been surprising to me. I would also invite you to subscribe to my Substack, which is gloriamark.substack.com. And in this Substack, I talk about a lot of these different topics that we covered today, and even more. I talk about children and screens. And I talk about how AI might affect our attention and our our well-being. I talk about distractions, what they do for us. And I also talk about just the the joys of being present. Present as in, you know, really being motivated and engaged in what we're doing. So these are just some of the topics. And that's gloriamark.substack.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn and on X, formerly Twitter and Instagram.
Christy Harrison: That's great. We'll put links to those in the show notes, and I'll definitely shout you out on Substack too because I'm there as well. So, yeah, thank you again for being here. It's a real pleasure to talk with you.
Gloria Mark: Thank you so much for having me.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show. Thanks to our guest for being here and to you for listening. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I'd be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. You can also support us by becoming a paid subscriber for just a few bucks a month on Substack. With a paid subscription, you unlock great perks like bonus episodes, subscriber only q and a's, and much more. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Got burning questions about wellness trends, diet fads, or anything else we cover on the show? Send them my way at christyharrison.com/questions for a chance to have them answered on an upcoming episode. And if you're looking to heal your relationship with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. You can learn more and enroll now at christyharrison.com/course. Rethinking Wellness is produced and edited by Softer Sounds podcast studio. Julianne Wotasik does our website production. Our album art was created by Tara Jacoby. Theme song was written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. And I'm your host and executive producer, Christy Harrison. Thanks again for listening, and take care.
Reclaiming Your Attention and Finding Digital Well-Being with Gloria Mark