Tag: Focus

Young anxious woman lying in bed staring at smartphone screen at night, reading about depression symptoms in internet, phone addicted female can not stop scrolling news media before bedtime. Anxiety.

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post

Author
Peter Biles
Date
September 4, 2023

Categorized
Addiction

Tagged
addiction, Cal Newport, dopamine, Focus, social media, Work, YouTube}

Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life

_{Turns out the solution is simple: don't use things that overstimulate you.} _{Peter Biles

September 4, 2023

2

Addiction}

Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work, now runs a YouTube channel/podcast where he offers advice about how to live and work deeply and effectively in the digital age. I’ve consistently found his thoughts interesting, informative, and inspiring. Last week, Newport released a fifteen-minute video on “overstimulation,” and talked at some length about the chemical dopamine, and how dopamine gives us the urge to do things we think will provide us with rewards. For instance, dopamine may compel us to take another inhalation of a cigarette, yank the lever of a gambling machine in Las Vegas, or even do something as apparently benign as refreshing your email tab. While there are many opinions and Read More ›

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post

Author
Peter Biles
Date
January 20, 2023

Categorized
Social Media, Spirituality

Tagged
Contemplation, Distraction, Focus, LinkedIn, Medieval, Monks, religion, social media, Tech, Wired}

Do You Struggle to Focus? Medieval Monks Did Too

_{New book shows how ancient monks fought distraction and what they can teach us today} _{Peter Biles

January 20, 2023

4

Social Media, Spirituality}

While the battle against constant distraction might seem like a new problem posed by our diffuse technologies, a new book from Jamie Kreiner argues that the struggle is perennial. The book is The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. Kreiner takes the problem of distraction and puts it into the hands of the religious recluses of late antiquity. It turns out they had a lot to say. Like us, they struggled to maintain vigorous work routines. They courted the opinions of other monks and writers on what a modern-day LinkedIn guru would call “workflow” or “hustle.” In short, they were not so different from us. In his review of the book for Wired, Matt Reynolds writes, Early Read More ›