Updated on July 5, 2024
Do you know what is a digital distraction and how to beat digital distraction? Are you aware of how social media can be a distraction? It is true that in this digital world, you need to use digital devices for many things. In the present world, technology is so pervasive it can be difficult for many people to put down their smartphone or turn off the tab and laptop. Are you one of them? If yes, this article is for you.
Do you know spending too much time with digital devices is not good for your health? Addiction to digital devices can be detrimental to your personal relationships, family life and can also become an obstacle to your success in life. Continue reading and watch the video talk of Robin Sharma explaining everything in detail.
How to beat digital distraction?
What is Digital Distraction?
Have you heard the term ‘Digital distraction’? Old-generation people might not have heard or been affected by this term but the new generation knows the meaning of digital distraction. Many people are affected by digital distraction and some of them don’t realise the wrong effect of this on their future.
As you know, being distracted by technology is not a new thing. But today digital technology has become so personal, that many people can’t imagine living their lives without it. Digital youth didn’t inherit digital distraction but were born into it. Today you can see a small child of 2 years or even less age knows how to operate a smartphone.
Read 15 Habits That Destroy Motivation
Many people are not much worried or under stress about how and where to find the next meal for themselves and their families. But they are constantly under stress on checking their personal social media account or the next big update. While sleeping some of them have a bad habit of keeping their digital device under the pillow and checking for any updates. This affects their sleep at night and also their productivity on the next day. They must understand the importance of better sleep at night.
Read Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind Before You Sleep
Some people do multitask. When you multitask the other tasks are like white noise. They cloud your concentration from your goal and the task at hand.
Read 6 Easy Ways To Concentrate Better And Maximise Results
It is important to learn how to beat digital distractions and divert your mind to focus on creative things for a successful life. Using digital technology is good, but addiction to digital technology or wasting time on digital distractions should be avoided. In this article, you can find 4 excellent habits to beat digital distraction.
Read 10 Amazing Habits You Must Adopt For A Successful Life
How social media can be a distraction?
How often do you check your social media accounts? Once a week, twice a day, or every few hours? Sure, you want to improve your network and stay on top of the latest trends in this digital world. But is that really why you’re glued to the screen? Social media distraction is really affecting a lot of people. If you check, you will find that up to 80/90 per cent of the time people spend online at work has nothing to do with their job. Many people waste a lot of time browsing social networks and on entertainment. This results in a loss of productivity, decreased performance, and costly mistakes.
Read Time Is Precious And Priceless | Never Waste Time
Problematic social media use
Problematic social media use, also known as social media addiction or social media overuse, is a proposed form of psychological or behavioural dependence on social media platforms, also known as Internet addiction disorder and other forms of digital media overuse. It is generally defined as the compulsive use of social media platforms that results in significant impairment in an individual’s function in various life domains over a prolonged period.
This and other relationships between digital media use and mental health have been considerably researched, debated, and discussed among experts in several disciplines, and have generated controversy in medical, scientific, and technological communities. Research suggests that it affects women and girls more than boys and men and that it appears to affect individuals based on the social media platform used. Such disorders can be diagnosed when an individual engages in online activities at the cost of fulfilling daily responsibilities or pursuing other interests without regard for negative consequences. Source: Wikipedia
4 Excellent Habits To Beat Digital Distraction
- Build your tight bubble of total focus.
- No phone conversations.
- Construct your own Menlo Park.
- Join the 5 am Club.
In this video of Robin Sharma, you will learn:
1. How the pros construct creative sanctuaries to protect their attention and fortify their focus so they do their best work?
2. The “No Phone Conversation” protocol amplifies your listening so people not only trust you more but rise when they are with you.
3. How to construct your personal “Menlo Park” so that you leverage the neural biological phenomenon of Transient Hypofrontality to step into your primal genius.
4. The value of joining The 5 AM Club and calibrating your morning routine so that digital distraction is a non-issue as you move through your day.
Read 3 Simple Morning Routine Will Change Your Life Forever
This mastery session is all about four excellent habits to beat digital distractions. An addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production. There is research coming out now saying that the average person checks their phone 200 to 500 times every single day.
Your phone is costing you your fortune. If you look at the great geniuses of the world, The Shakespeares and The Baskets and The Beethoven, The great Chefs and the great Titans of industry and the great Humanitarians all great thinkers have one thing in common. They spent long periods of time away from diversions, distractions, and trivial interruptions.
So you can be like the majority being busy, being busy or you can be a history maker and a legendary producer and not being on your phone not playing with technology every second not being addicted to that white screen, you don’t get to do both. So if you really want to multiply your creativity and if you really want to accelerate your productivity this video of the mastery sessions will be incredibly valuable for you.
Go ahead and watch this valuable video.
1. Build your tight bubble of total focus
The first habit that will help you beat digital distractions is to build your tight bubble of total focus. There’s a relatively new term coming out right now called digital dementia, Digital dementia. We are spending so much time in front of our screens that we are waking up with this full well of cognitive bandwidth, in other words, our gifts and our glory in terms of our brain’s capacity we wake up and we’re ready to go.
And then what happens is in terms of digital dementia we check our phone, we check our email, we check for likes, we watch a video, we play with an app. And every single piece of attention that we give to one of those distractions is stealing your cognitive bandwidth. This is really important.
You wake up full of cognitive potential, full of the ability to be creative and productive and every single time you check your screen some of your cognitive bandwidth that’s the term that the researchers and neuroscientists use is left on the screen.
Another term is called attention residue. You leave a residue of your attention on the screen and then you turn on the news more, if your attention is left on the news and then you check for email, more if that attention residue is left on the email and then you’ll find it’s 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock in the morning and you can’t focus and your creativity is depleted.
Read Simple Morning Routines That Will Transform Your Life
Well, it’s not because you can’t bring on your fire to don’t dominate your domain it’s because you haven’t managed yourself like the pros do. And so the first excellent habit to beat digital distraction is installing this metaphorical tight bubble of total focus around yourself so that you don’t let distractions in.
Just imagine you have this bubble. It’s like a five-foot bubble around you, it’s a porous bubble, so creative things, inspirational things, high vibration, joyful, excellent, amazing people get in the right spaces, get in and anything that is toxic, anything that is a trivial distraction which is generally because you have an addiction to it. We’ll talk about that later in this episode. It doesn’t get in.
And so really it’s very valuable to get lost. It’s very you know most people are available to everyone the phone rings and they pick it up and they answer it well if you do that you’re letting someone else’s priorities run your day versus you running your day by your priorities. A tight bubble of total focus could also mean that you know you set up your ecosystem and your environments so that there’s no distraction. Type bubble of total focus could mean that you spend long periods of your day alone working on those one or two projects that are your Sistine Chapel ceiling. So okay so set up a tight bubble of total focus so you literally stop letting so much distraction and so many things that fragment your attention into your workday, into your crazy creative orbit which will allow you to get into a state.
And I walk you through it in my book the 5 a.m. Club. There’s a whole model it explains how every human being can operate at a genius every day. But the long story, short transient hypofrontality is the neurobiological phenomenon that allows you to if you set yourself up to get away from distraction you’ll leave your phone and technology maybe in another room. And you simply sit or work on the project that will allow you to change the game in your marketplace, your prefrontal cortex which is the seed of thinking and criticism and ruminating and the monkey mind actually shuts off for a short period of time that’s the transient part of transient hypofrontality.
And when that happens you actually set up a pharmacy of mastery dopamine, the inspirational neurotransmitter is released, serotonin, the pleasure neurochemical is released, your brain waves actually shift from beta and they slow down, they go to alpha and maybe down even to theta maybe even down to Delta. And you actually get to a deeper place of thinking where genius lies you have that within your brain.
But if you live in a world of scattered attention if you’re busy, being busy, you’re never going to allow the phenomenon that your brain already has transient hypofrontality to kick in. Okay, so really take the time to think through how you can set up your tight bubble of total focus where you spend at least two or three hours a day away from distraction, a diversion that will set up that digital dementia that I talked about.
2. No phone conversations
The second excellent habit that will allow you to beat digital distractions is no phone conversations. Well, as I travel across the planet, I go into restaurants, and I see the entire family sitting around a table. No one is talking. everyone is on their phones or on their tablets. I was in a European country recently and I saw a husband and wife sitting at a table with probably a five-year-old child. The five-year-old child had these noise-cancelling huge massive earphones that were bigger than his own head. And I’m joking but huge earphones to block out the noise and the tablet had been set up in front of him and he was playing video games and he didn’t say a word to his parents. And over the two-hour meal while I was at the restaurant with my loved ones having deep conversations of laughter and sharing. And you know I’m not judging, I’m just reporting the parents didn’t say a word to their child.
I see so many times in business meetings someone in the middle of a meeting will pull out their phone and start checking their social media feed or start checking emails. And what I suggest, this is just my opinion but you know that’s disrespectful. The greatest gift you can give your child or your spouse or your client or your coworker is the gift of the fullness of your attention.
When you focus your presence and your energy and your attention on another human being you make that person bigger, you validate that person. One of the greatest gifts you can give another human being is the gift of pristine listening. And if you’re checking your phone, well, then again you’re taking your attention and you’re leaving attention residue on your phone which means you have less attention for the conversation. And if you have less attention for the conversation then you’re not really listening to that person and if you’re not really listening to that person the deep place within them knows it and they’re gonna trust you less. And you’re gonna miss data that would allow you to serve your client or build the teammate or dominate domain.
So no phone conversations professionally and personally just turn off your phone, turn off your device before the meeting and go all old-school and have a real conversation. The best leaders are curious you don’t get that if you’re worried about your incoming digital messages.
3. Construct Your Own Menlo Park
The third of the four excellent habits to beat digital distraction construct your own Menlo Park. So, you know, I’m a big fan of Thomas Edison. He’s one of the greatest if not you know arguably the greatest inventor and the history of humanity. I mean over a thousand patents to his name came up with amazing, amazing things. How did he do it in isolation? You can be out in the world, you can be a history maker and a productive legend, but you don’t get to do both.
One thing all great geniuses do is they spend a lot of time in solitude. Solitude has a bad reputation in our society right now. We think if we’re not with the cool crowd if we’re not checking our devices if we’re not posting selfies or other images, we are losing out. we have all these fears and here’s what really happens. As you start to play with your phone, you start to get hooked on likes. As you start to spend most of the best hours of your greatest days posting, checking, playing with apps, and getting hooked you actually become addicted.
We all know about technological addiction and it’s literally dopamine. Dopamine, as I mentioned earlier in this mastery session, is the inspirational neurotransmitter. And every single time you check for a like, there’s a shot of dopamine and it becomes this addiction. Every single time you check for a like, the hook grows stronger. Every single time you pick up your phone you build the neural pathway to check it even more often. Every single time you see that if someone’s liking you and you’re following growing, you tap into that reward system that every human brain has. Because when we were tribal thousands of years ago on the Savannah we wanted to be liked by the people in our tribe. We wanted to follow the herd and if we weren’t being followed by the herd, we would stray from the herd and get eaten by sabre-toothed Tigers. We would starve or we would be captured by warring tribes.
And now here it is in modern society but we still have that neurobiological instinct. It’s a part of who we are to check for likes. So we fit into the crowd. Well, the true nature of a leader is you’re not a follower. And so you absolutely have to do the inner work required to break that hook of being liked. I mean that’s what leadership is all about, that’s what being a great artist is all about, that’s what dominating your domain is all about, that’s what changing the world is all about. It’s about saying here’s Who I am, I have my own mission, my own vision, and I’m gonna break free from the crowd.
So back to this point about Edison. Edison had constructed his studio like every artist has a studio and he called it Menlo Park. And this was his laboratory. His lab was at the top of this hill where he and his small team would go and they would spend weeks there. They would actually spend week after week alone. There were no distractions. No one was allowed up there. They had no diversions. Sometimes they would work around the clock and guess what. Because they had isolated themselves because they had found this ecosystem, this environment that was inspirational and isolated. Their brains could go into the state of transient hypo-frontality which you have that. You have that capability. It’s part of every human brain and they could access the deeper insight that does not get to you when you’re thinking all day long.
Your instinct is more valuable than even your intellect. The great apps, the great businesses, the great pieces of the great symphonies, and the great movements that have transformed humanity did not come from the neocortex. And thinking, thinking being reasonable the great pieces of progress that have shaped our civilization came from that deeper place beyond the neocortex which is the scene of human genius. When people followed their instinct.
George Bernard Shaw said,
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
If you are stuck in your reason, your neocortex, then you’re just repeating what the world says is possible. I want you to be a possibilitarian and I want you to start playing around what the world says is impossible. And that comes by finding your Menlo Park. That could be a spare bedroom in your apartment, it could be working in a library for two hours a week, it could be renting another apartment in your city where you go just to get away from the world. And then you have these glass walls that you write on it, could be travelling more what there is emerging science coming out that says there is a huge link between travelling and amplified creativity.
I’ve written my best books, I’ve done my best videos, I’ve got my best frameworks, and my best insights when I’m out on the road. And I go into a hotel room and I order flowers, I go to a local flower shop and I bring in flowers because flowers are one of the secrets of advanced Minds. Because as you put more beauty in your Menlo Park you feel more inspired. When you get away from the intellect and you get more into your instinct.
And in your hotel room, one thing I do is I bring dry-erase markers and I start doing models and goals and insights all over the windows and I literally make those hotel rooms beautiful. Cities it could be Prague, it could be Milan, it could be Tokyo, it could be Perth, Australia, it could be you know Agra, India, could be New York City or Los Angeles and you’re here in this hotel room which is your Menlo Park. And you’re spending a day there alone and you get your phone on Do Not Disturb and you maybe don’t eat for a few hours and you allow your natural capability. If your brain offers you these insights you then take and go out there and use them to really lead your field and change the world.
Read How To Get Happiness Hormones Free?
4. Join the 5 a.m. Club
Well, that brings me to the fourth excellent habit to beat digital distraction which is to join the 5 a.m. Club. You know as you begin your morning you’re gonna set up your day to focus your morning routine is so fundamentally important to the quality of your attention and the character of your performance that you get to live through that day. You know a lot of people wake up. I was in a hotel recently in Los Angeles and I saw people on the treadmills which is fantastic. Again not judging just reporting and they were walking on the treadmills but they were watching the news. I see a lot of people early in the morning they’re drinking their coffee and they’re scanning their email. For a lot of people the first thing they do in the morning they check their social media feeds. Well, you can do what the majority does or you can change the world and be legendary. You don’t get to do both.
Credits: YouTube
Read How To Wake Up Early Morning Without Using Any Alarm
What does it mean to be digitally responsible?
It is our responsibility to use digital technology in a way that doesn’t harm others. We should be aware of the impact that digital technology has on our health, environment, family and society at large.
- Never spread fake news
- Ignore and stay away from baseless comments
- Don’t fall into smartphone addiction
Final Thoughts
Hope that you could learn how to beat digital distractions. If you want to become successful, you must beat digital distractions and spend your valuable time on creative work. Never waste your valuable time on unnecessary things.
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Mathukutty P. V. is the founder of Simply Life Tips. He is a Blogger, Content Writer, Influencer, and YouTuber. He is passionate about learning new skills. He is the Director of PokketCFO.
He lives with the notion of “SIMPLE LIVING, CREATIVE THINKING”. He Believes – “Sharing is caring.” and “Learning never ends.”