Multi-Tasking and Your Mental Health
Does
multi-tasking affect your health? It may seem like it is increasing
productivity and saving you time and energy, and many women are proud of their
multi-tasking abilities. However, ongoing research has confirmed that
multi-tasking can have negative effects on levels of productivity and overall
brain health in some cases.
Multi-tasking Is Safe Only If Different Stimuli Are Used
Experts
agree that multi-tasking is safer if the tasks involved do not use the same
stimuli, such as reading a message from the laptop while listening to music.
Our brain is not designed to deal with the same stimulus challenge at the exact
same time.
That
is why driving a vehicle and texting on a phone at the same time is considered
extremely dangerous. You are using the same visual stimulus. They are both
competing for the same limited focus. Although it appears you are
multi-tasking, you can only be actively engaged with one or the other.
So
instead of doing two things at once, you are actually rapidly switching from
one to the other, and back again. If your attention is attracted to the phone
for a second too long, the job of consciously controlling the vehicle ceases,
and catastrophe can follow.
Another example is when you are attempting to listen to multiple conversations around you. It is impossible to listen to two people who are talking to you simultaneously, because your auditory stimulus becomes overwhelmed.
Multi-tasking Can Harm Your Memory Ability
If
you find yourself multi-tasking, each task that your mind is engaged in will
drain a part of your mental energy. As your mental energy drains, you become
more absent-minded. This is because your mind begins to drift.
Even
if you could complete the two tasks successfully, you will quite probably not
recall how you completed the tasks. This is because our brain does not have the
ability to fully focus on two or several tasks at the same time.
Each
time you multi-task, your mind becomes a juggling act. When you multitask, you are diluting your
mind’s investment towards each task.
When Multi-taskers Think They Perform Better
A
study headed by Zheng Wang of Ohio State University showed that people who were
text messaging while being asked to focus on the images displayed on a computer
monitor had decreased levels of performance.
What
makes this finding even more troubling is that those subjects who were asked to
multi-task using the same visual stimulus, believed they performed better,
although the results showed the opposite.
Their
ability to focus on images displayed on their computer monitor plummeted up to
50% even though they thought they were performing perfectly. The same study
participants were asked to multi-task using different stimuli, such as visual
and auditory, and were found to have reduced levels of performance as much as
30%.
Professor
Wang stated that performance level perception when multi-tasking is not the
same, as the results proved. Researchers have
also found that media multi-tasking increases your risks of developing impaired
cognitive control.
The most
current research is confirming that multi-tasking means “performing multiple
tasks sub-optimally”. Unfortunately, in addition to productivity losses, there
is a compounding, taxing burden placed on the mental and emotional faculties.
This results in accumulated stress, which is already a very real problem for
many, if not most, to some degree.
Although
technology today makes it difficult for us to avoid multi-tasking, just make
yourself more aware of when it is happening and try to remove the overload on
your mind as much as possible.
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