Distractions Won’t Save You From Feeling Blah
They just distract from all the amazing things you could be doing.
If I’m gonna be honest, distractions are what got me into this mess in the first place. I would distract myself from reality by aimlessly browsing social media at unhelpful moments of the day — like when I woke up or when I was going to bed. I would play games on end when it would be more beneficial to do some writing or even clean my room. And these distractions exacerbated my helplessness.
Because, here I was, wasting time on unnecessary actions — and knowing this was making me feel even more like shit. I was wasting time on mundane things that won’t ever progress my daily life. All those endless videos on Facebook — half of which I’m sure I’ve seen before — did not add substance to my life. They just filled time.
This made me realize that I should be focusing on tasks that do add substance to my life. Or at least progress it. Even something as simple as folding washing, which sounds boring, is a good task to focus on. You are getting your future ready with nicely folded clothes, ready for you to pluck out from your drawer or wardrobe in a few days time.
At the crux of it, you need to find flow. This I learned from Adam Grant, who you may remember from that relatable New York Times post on languishing.
In his Ted Talk on the same subject, he debunked the myth that the key to feeling great is not optimism.
“In the early days of the pandemic,” said Adam, “researchers found that the best predictor of well-being was not optimism. It was flow. Flow is that feeling of being in the zone, coined by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
“It’s that state of total absorption in an activity.”
For me, the many things that give me flow are writing, gaming, bushwalking, cooking, and sometimes reading (only if it’s a great book). For you, it could be anything that you really like doing. Gardening, crocheting, buying more books for your mountainous TBR pile.
Of course, you could say that endlessly scrolling Facebook also offers a state of total absorption. I mean, I’ve sometimes lost an hour of time being “in the zone” on social media, only to realize it’s now midnight and I really have to be asleep. But after all my scrolling is done, when I’ve snapped myself out of it and told myself to leave my phone alone, I don’t feel great. In fact, I feel like crap.
So, just because it’s something you like doing, doesn’t mean it’s something that will give you that beautiful flow. Even cleaning your house can be a bad distraction, especially if you could spend that time doing something more rewarding. Like writing. Or even reading.
In order to truly feel that amazing flow, where you succumb to time and generate mental vitality, you also need to feel like you are getting somewhere. That you are progressing to a new level or creeping closer towards your goals.
Adam Grant calls this mastery, where happiness in Western culture “depends more on how our projects are going today than how they went yesterday.”
We need to feel as if things are happening; as if there is a destination with which we are hurtling towards at a given pace.
Another term for this was coined by John Gardner in his book The Art of Fiction. It’s called profluence, which simply means “copious or smooth flowing”. But what he really meant by it is that your fictional work needs to feel like it’s getting somewhere.
Of course, while John meant this as literary advice, it could easily be translated to finding flow in our daily lives.
Call it mastery, call it profluence, the ultimate goal is to feel like you are in progressing. As if you are getting somewhere.
Now Focus!
It is all well and good to do tasks that perpetuate growth or push our lives along, but it ain’t gonna be much help if we’re stuck wallowing through all those negative thoughts. You know the ones… The “what ifs” and the “why mes”, and all the self-pity that comes dancing along after them.
It’s hard to find flow when all that negativity is clanging about your mind.
But, despite what you may think, I’m not going to tell you to stop thinking negative thoughts. That is impossible. You will always be having negative thoughts, and that’s perfectly okay. More than that, it’s human.
However, there is one surefire way to help drown them out, and that’s by focusing on the real world in front of you. It won’t stop the negative thoughts from coming, but it will stop your annoying fascination over them.
In whatever task you do — provided it’s one of those tasks that offer progress — you must focus on it. Give it the attention it deserves.
For instance, if you love to write, train your mind to focus on writing. The best strategy is to get into the habit of writing daily, and removing any unnecessary distractions from your periphery. Yes, including phones.
You may even adopt certain things to help drive your concentration. Sometimes I find easy listening tunes to be a great addition to my writing. Other times, having a hot tea nearby gives me something to do in between writing and researching. You could even use this certain thing as a way to drive the habit into a routine, like playing the William Tell Overture before sitting down to your computer.
Of course, you may find this easier said than done, and that’s not too surprising. Focusing our attention on one task is not something a lot of us do these days, according to Adam Grant.
“There’s evidence that, on average, people are checking emails 74 times a day, switching tasks every 10 minutes, and that creates what’s been called time confetti, where we take what could be meaningful moments of our lives and we shred them into increasingly tiny, useless pieces,” said Adam.
“Time confetti is an enemy of both energy and of excellence. If we want to find flow, we need better boundaries.”
The fact is, if you really want to do something, you must remove all unnecessary distractions. Set boundaries, as Adam stated. This means you have to be your own coach at times. Force yourself to place your phone in another room when you do pilates; plug in earphones while doing your 1,000 blog post on boob jobs, to ward off unnecessary conversations with colleagues. Find and set rules and guidelines that will help shape your future for the better.
Ultimately: stay focused and remove distractions.
On writing, Stephen King gave the greatest ultimatum of throwing out your television set if you want a great writer. God, it sounds like overkill to most of us — it borders insanity. But is TV that much of a necessity?
Well, if you want to be a great writer, TV could easily be the enemy. Sometimes it pays to treat it as such…
