I have about 20 different screens open at work, 5 days a week.  The task bar at the bottom of my screen gets so crowded with PowerPoint presentations, websites (some relevant, some awesome geeky news stories), Excel documents, and other programs that I need another task bar that I then toggle to.  Sometimes I actually interrupt live conversations because I see a email pop-up out of the corner of my eye.  I’ve seen others do that too and it’s always funny to see them battle against being rude and satisfying their curiosity.  I am kind of proud about my multi-tasking. I watch G cook and it drives me nuts.  He spends half an hour chopping onions, and then starts to boil water.  It never occurs to him that these two things can happen at the same time (ok, so this multi-tasking point is valid – you should boil water before chopping onions!).

Recently, however, I noticed that the constant stream of thoughts I usually get when I sit down on the cushion to meditate are similar to the constant stream of thoughts I get at work, especially while multi-tasking on projects.  So, I started thinking – can multi-tasking be bad for you? And going further, is it impacting the quality of my meditation?

Doing a little research, it turns out that many people have thought about this and found that multitasking is actually bad for you. It negatively impacts your productivity, your ability to focus, and your mind (read more here).  Studies also found that multitasking not only makes you more distracted while doing it, but interestingly, had deleterious effects when not multi-tasking.  Clifford Nass, a cognitive scientist at Stanford, found that high multi-taskers were bad at filtering irrelevant information from relevant information, had diminished powers of mental organization, and difficulty in switching between tasks.

Switching tasks also generates pulses of stress hormones, an arousal pattern that likely helped our ancestors during millions of years spent looking for food while avoiding predators but is now triggered by every incoming instant message. There’s a risk of stress levels becoming constant and high, which, besides threatening basic health, is known to hurt memory.

PBS

This quote is from one article amongst many that listed the largely negative impact of multi-tasking on our minds.  When I did more research on multi-tasking’s impact on meditation, I ironically had much more luck on the impact of meditation on multi-tasking. It seems that instead of recognizing that multi-tasking is an illusion of productivity and bad for you, people are trying to use meditation to multi-task better.  According to David Levy, a scientist at the University of Washington, people who participated in an 8-week mindfulness meditation were able to stay on tasks longer and make fewer task switches, while reporting less negative emotion after multi-tasking.  Study participants who meditated also demonstrated improved memory for the tasks they performed (read more here). In effect, after mindfulness meditation training, they were better multi-taskers. Or said another way, they multi-tasked less (by focusing on one task more) and therefore they were more productive.

So after this research, it was clear that multi-tasking was stressful and less productive, however, I didn’t validate that it can actually ruin your meditation (besides impairing your ability to focus, which I realize, is related). I know what I feel though, and it seems like the more I multi-task, the worse my meditation becomes during the evening.  Perhaps it’s because I’m more stressed and it’s harder to focus.  But, I think it’s deeper than that.

I’m starting  to think about it in the context of habit formation.  The Tibetan  word for meditation is gom, which means “to become familiar with.” Familiarizing our minds with a specific focus helps to train our mind and ultimately control it. I think that by multi-tasking, I’m becoming familiar with a state of mind that is the exact opposite of meditation.  (The very word multi-tasking is a misnomer when it comes to our thoughts. We cannot think of two things at once, but we can think about many things rapidly, switching from one stream of thought to another.)  By switching my focus to many different things constantly, I’m becoming familiar with a state of stress and anxiety. I’m practicing my way out of the ability to focus.

So I’m going to test out not multi-tasking and actively focusing more at work.  I’m going to shut down all the PowerPoints, Excel documents, and websites I have running (I think my overtaxed laptop might be happier too), and focus on one project at a time.  I’ll then see how my meditation goes. I’ll keep you posted!

Photo credit: Ryan Ritchie