The Myth of Multitasking (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.

It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday. Good morning,

my friend. I hope you're doing well.

Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and it is Frontal Lobe Friday.

Thanks, Lisa, for kicking us off with that. Hey, I've got a short message for

you today, but I want you to focus, okay?

Focus on getting your frontal lobes as efficient and effective as you can because

they are your command center of your brain.

When your mind directs your frontal lobes properly, your frontal lobes are the

executive office, the C-suite, the boss of everything else that happens downstream

in your brain and in your body and in your life.

It starts with mind, under control of spirit, as we've talked about.

We are a spirit-mind-down group of self-brain surgeons here.

We're not determinist reductionists.

We don't believe that we're all a bunch of neurons firing and that everything

comes out of electrical processes and we're just a random bunch of events happening

that have no real underlying purpose or meaning.

We don't believe that. We're created fearfully and wonderfully in the image

of the great physician. Hey, today we're going to talk about multitasking and

why multitasking is a myth and the different ways that it can hurt your life.

And we're going to understand the way that our frontal lobes are designed to

help us maximize our efficiency so that we can become healthier and feel better and be happier.

So we're going to talk about multitasking and the myth behind it.

But before we do that, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes,

there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first.

And my friend, there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works

smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, let's get after it. Hey, everybody, and by that I mean everybody

that I've ever known, including me, thinks that we can multitask.

We believe that we can do more than one thing at a time. And the truth is you sort of can.

I mean, you can obviously drive your car and listen to music and talk to the

person on the phone or check your phone while you're driving.

You shouldn't do that. You can obviously eat and have a conversation at the

same time. You can obviously watch television and do a Sudoku puzzle at the

same time. You can do those things. Okay.

But are you really doing more than one thing at a time?

The truth is, from a neuroscience standpoint, you're really not.

What you're really doing is switching back and forth because your brain can

only actually do one thing at a time in terms of directed conscious effort.

Okay. You have a lot of automated processes. Fortunately, our hearts beat,

we breathe, we have all kinds of autonomic things happening in our bodies that

we don't have to think about.

We have the gift of automated processes, the autonomic nervous system,

we call it, that keeps things rolling so we don't have to deal with things like,

do I need to breathe or do I need to worry about the acid production in my stomach?

Your body's going to take care of a lot of that. that God built you as an incredible

complex system of multiple different things happening at the same time that

you don't have to direct.

In fact, there's some pathologies. There's a disease called Andean's curse.

It happens with a small stroke in the brainstem that knocks out automatic breathing.

So those people literally have to be awake in order to breathe because they

have to think about every breath that they take.

And so those people don't have time to talk to you or think about anything other

than taking the next breath to keep them alive.

And for that reason, they require mechanical ventilation. They require tracheostomies

and artificial respiration, or they die when they fall asleep.

And it's not much of a quality of life if all you can do is think about taking your next breath.

So those people show us that it's not possible to multitask with life or death body parts.

Fortunately, God created us where those things are kind of automated.

But the problem is, we think because our frontal lobes are so amazing,

and because we have the ability to switch back and forth so rapidly between

multiple things, Thank you.

We begin to believe that we actually can have multiple things under our control

and command at the same time, that we can multitask, and that we're better at

it than other people, perhaps.

Most of us think we're really, really good at multitasking, but all of the research shows,

Google that, Google neuroscience research related to multitasking,

and you're going to see that what you really do is shift your focus and your

attention from one thing to the next.

Now, we've been talking about attention and focus a lot lately on this show,

and I'm writing about it in my new book, Self-Brain Surgery,

the handbook of self-brain surgery.

This is going to be your compendium of all these self-brain surgery operations

and all the science and all the data behind why we need to change our minds

if we want to change our lives and why mind is in control of brain and body and ultimately life.

It's a big deal, okay? But all the research shows that you might think you're

accomplishing many things at the same time, but what you're really doing is

switching back and forth.

And when we talk about attention and focus, we know that when we pay attention

to something in a particular way, we have the ability to make that thing more or less real,

to expand it or reduce it by focusing our brains on it and thinking about it

in a different way, in the proper way, in the right context.

But when you shift back and forth from one thing to another, there's a cost to that.

There's a problem with it. Now, you know this experientially already because

you've had lunch with somebody that you were really looking forward to catching

up with, or you have a few moments with your parents or a few moments with your

kid, and somebody's checking their email the whole time or switching,

looking at Instagram or Facebook the entire time, and you're having a conversation,

but they're not with you.

You've seen whole families at restaurants where everybody's looking at their phone.

And yeah, they're in the same place and they're talking amongst themselves and

they're eating a meal together, but nobody's together because they're all dividing

their attention and focus with something else.

And you know when you're on the other side of that table how that feels.

The person is not really with you.

They're really in some other mode. They're really in some other world.

They're really connected with other people instead of with you right then.

It's not multitasking, okay?

It's dividing and reducing the attention and focus that you can pay to a particular thing.

So people think they can start two projects at the same time that they can drive

the car and listen to the radio effectively, that they can scroll through social

media while having a meal with their folks,

that they can respond properly to emails and work on their computer while they're watching a TV show.

They can listen to somebody talk while also jotting down some notes about a

meeting that they have coming up or a to-do list or something else.

They think, we think, that we can do these things.

And the real question is, what's the cost? The science shows multitasking takes

a big toll, a huge hit on productivity.

When you're doing two things at once, neither of them actually gets done as

well or as effectively or as sort of efficiently or as accurately as you would like for it to be.

You'll miss nuance in a conversation with somebody else if you're scrolling on Instagram.

You will miss nuance and detail in an email that you're writing if you're also

watching the latest episode of Blue Bloods or whatever it is that you watch

on your television. Thank you.

Research suggests, it's very clear now from the neuroscience research that's

out there, just Google it, you can find tons of information.

Multitaskers are more easily distracted. They have trouble focusing their attention

even when they're not working on multiple tasks at once. Remember one of our

Ten Commandments of self-brain surgery.

What you're doing, you're getting better at. So if you train your brain that

it needs to be trying to divide its focus and shifting its attention back and forth,

growth it's going to become better at shifting

its attention back and forth and the cost of that is it's

going to become less good it's going

to become worse at staying focused on

a particular thing so think about this your kid comes to

tell you something really important and you try to pay attention to

them but at the same time you're thinking about this email you just got you're

thinking about something you need to get done you don't want to forget you're

thinking about did i post that story on instagram or not and you're not really

listening even though you're actively not doing more than one thing at a time

because your brain is ready for that next switch.

It's looking for the next thing that you've trained it to do by constantly trying to multitask.

So you become more easily distracted. You have trouble focusing your attention,

even when you're not trying to multitask.

So there's a cost to having one foot in one place and another foot in another place.

So research shows clearly there's a connection between multitasking and easy distractibility.

And the link basically between those two varies a little bit between person

to person. So some people are better at it than others.

But the real question is, do you want to be good at not being very good at the

thing you're trying to be good at?

That sounds pretty heavy, doesn't it? But you train your brain.

What you're doing, you're getting better at. Here's another thing that research shows.

Multitasking actually slows you down so that you're slower at each of the things

that you're trying to do.

It's very clear from the science now that if you do one thing until it's done

and then switch to another thing, you'll be more effective, efficient,

accurate, and speedy at both things. Okay?

So, while it seems kind of counterintuitive, you tend to work slower and less

efficiently. when you multitask.

There's a thing the psychologists call task switch costs.

It's what we just talked about. Task switch costs. When you switch,

your brain has to take a second or a nanosecond or a millisecond or some amount

of time to re-engage with the current process.

So there's a task switch cost, a negative effects that comes from switching back and forth.

You're using some of your microtubules and some of your energy and some of your

cellular respiration products to re-engage the new task from the one you just

switched away from instead of just staying focused and getting the task done.

So in some ways, as we've talked about, you're thinking about thinking about

the thing for a second before you're actually thinking about the thing,

which then slows you down.

So it actually drains your productivity and the impact that you have on other

people and sometimes harms the relationship that you have with other people,

when you try to multitask.

When you focus on a single task that you've done before, your brain can sort

of switch into autopilot. That's synapses, right?

We talk about how you create synapses to automate processes that your body gets

good at, but you can't engage synapses if your attention is directed somewhere

else because you're trying to build new synapses over there.

So autopilot, synaptic reproduction frees up mental resources,

but switching back and forth bypasses that process because you've got to re-engage

conscious effort and thought to re-engage the thing that you switched back to.

So if you're constantly doing that back and forth, then you have this task switch

cost that's draining your productivity, efficiency, effectiveness,

and speed, and harming your relationship with other people.

Because no matter how many times we do it, nobody likes it when somebody else

is not paying attention to you.

Nobody likes it when somebody else has one foot in your conversation and one

foot in Facebook. Nobody likes that.

Multitasking is directed by the frontal lobes, the higher executive functions.

That's why we're talking about it on Frontal Lobe Friday.

These tasks, these functions control and manage the cognitive processes and

determine basically when, how, and in what order certain tasks are performed.

So you have to choose consciously, which takes effort, to decide what you're

going to focus on and how you're going to focus on it.

And when you're going back and forth, you have a constant sort of goal shifting

and rule activation process that's happening that's requiring you to spend mental

energy not doing the things you're trying to do, but deciding which one you're going to do.

So moving through the stages back and forth has a significant cost in terms

of overall energy, mental drain, you'll be more fatigued, less effective,

and sometimes actually harmful. Remember our first commandment?

I will not harm myself. I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own

demise. Well, guess what?

Multitasking actually causes you to make mistakes. It causes you to harm yourself.

So I'm not saying don't ever listen to the radio while you drive your car.

I'm I'm saying you need to be aware that there's a cost to splitting your attention.

Multitasking, multiple studies have shown, reduces performance,

decreases GPAs in students who try to study for more than one thing at a time

or multitask in class, do math homework while they're in their history class.

They don't do as well on testing as if they just focus on the place and the

time that they're in right now.

Adults, and not just college kids, but adults have lower performance while multitasking.

We found a study in 2018 showed that adults made a lot more mistakes when driving

if they're also doing something else.

So they're making wrong lane changes without signaling.

They're missing stop signs. They're missing a turn because they're focused on

something else, talking on the phone, listening to music, something that's distracting

them from the task at hand.

Now, brain function has been shown to be affected negatively by people who constantly

train their brain to try to multitask.

People doing several things at once have cognitive decline faster than those

who don't engage in that type of behavior.

And almost everyone that's been studied overestimates their ability to multitask.

Most of us think we're really good at it. But the truth is the people who do

it the most are actually worse at it than people who infrequently multitask. Why?

Because your brain is getting trained to be switching back and forth,

and that means you're having to think about the fact that you're getting ready

to switch back and forth, and you're having to use mental resources to pull that off.

So people who chronically multitask

also become more impulsive than their

peers they have lower levels of

executive control and they're more easily distracted more easily frustrated

and less effective overall because they tend to downplay the risks associated

with tackling multiple things at once so you have limited cognitive resources

we all start with a certain set of cognitive tools,

and we don't have more than that, and we can't make more than that.

And when we multitask, we decrease them and make them less effective.

So we become worse at goal setting, completion, task appropriate,

choosing of tasks, and completion of those tasks. And we harm relationships.

So giving you this big picture idea of what our frontal lobes do and how we

can and mess them up, and now I need to give you some strategies to deal with it.

Now, I want to bring this home on the spiritual side, because I constantly encourage

you to spend the first 15 or 20 or 30 minutes of your day with the Lord,

to learn how to have some quiet time.

It's been shown numerous studies that if you spend the first part of your day

calming your mind, getting your distractions under control, and listening to

some music, spending some time in the Word, doing some things to prehab for

your day against the inevitable,

traumas and dramas and tragedies and difficulties that we'll have,

that you have a better relationship not only with God but with other people,

and you're much more effective at your work when you get that quiet time under

control. But here's what happens. This happens to me.

I sit down for my quiet time. I put some headphones on. I play the Bible app,

and I'm listening to the Bible.

And I think, well, while I'm doing that, I'll just check some email.

While I'm doing that, I'll do this.

Then I've got my Bible study happening, but I'm also trying to engage with the outside world.

And then that means I'm not as effective at listening and letting the word do

some healing and work on me.

Because I'm dividing my brain. Yes, I'm checking the box of spending that time,

but I'm not really engaged.

I'm not really engaged in the prayer. I'm not really engaged in worship because

I'm also trying to do something else.

This is my problem with churches that have coffee and a donut and all that stuff

happening and encourage people to use their cell phones to take notes.

And I don't have a problem with that, but I'm saying a lot of those people,

they're taking notes on their cell phone, they're drinking a cup of coffee,

they're eating a donut, they're listening to the worship, and they also,

well, while I've got my phone open, I need to check this Instagram post.

I need to check my email real quick, just real quick, because you're taking

yourself out of worship.

You're switching from one thing to another, and there's a task switching cost.

Associated with that. So what do we do?

Number one, spend some time training your brain to have 20-minute or 15-minute

or 30-minute chunks of time when you only do one thing.

It will feel impossible at first, but what you're doing, you're getting better at.

So use a 20-minute rule, 15-minute rule, 30-minute rule, whatever you want to do.

Start with five minutes. And I get emails all the time from people that say,

hey, I'm really trying to take captive all my thoughts, but I'm really struggling.

I can do it for a little bit and then I fall apart.

Well, try it for one minute. Try for one minute. Every thought that pops into

your head, focus on it, think about it, biopsy it, decide if it's true,

decide if it's helpful, decide if it's compassionate, and decide how you're

going to respond to it for one minute and then see how it feels.

And then you can do two minutes and then you can do five minutes.

And then before you know it, you're going to have this surprising arrival of

mastery that we're going to talk about next week on Theology. you Thursday.

Okay. So number one, limit the number of things that you're willing to try to

multitask. Make some decisions today.

I'm going to do this thing, this conversation with my spouse,

this moment with my child, this time of folding laundry, this time of doing a work project.

And I'm not going to switch to my email while I'm doing that for 20 minutes.

I'm not going to check Instagram while I'm having this breakfast with my spouse.

I'm only going, I'm going to put Put the phone away.

I'm going to engage with them for 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever.

So limit the number of times you switch. That'll train your brain to start paying

attention and digging in more thoroughly in this moment, at this time,

with this person, for this purpose, or with God for this time.

Batch your tasks, okay? Bundle things that you do.

Like if you're constantly checking email, for example, then do that for 30 minutes.

Like go, I'm going to spend 30 minutes in email. I'm going to clear everything

up, send everything, respond to everything.

And then I'm not going to check email again until tomorrow or until this afternoon or whatever.

Email is a highly organized way for other people to set your agenda,

by the way. Brenda Burchard said that.

So batch these things. If you're going to check Instagram, spend 30 minutes

on Instagram and then don't spend another 30 minutes on it for X number of hours

or until the next day, right? So you make a deal with yourself.

You make a vow to yourself that I'm going to do this thing now.

I'm really going to do it. I'm going to spend some time, make my posts,

send my emails, do whatever.

Then I'm going to switch to that lunch meeting that I have and be a hundred

percent and present with that person at that time.

Limit distractions. So don't try to read your Bible while you're listening to music.

Spend some time with worship music and getting that right half of your brain

connected, then read your Bible and spend that time with your left language

cortex digging into the Word and seeing what happens.

But don't try to do both at the same time.

And get that mindfulness thing going where you're bringing to mind the things

that you want your brain to do, like telling your brain, telling your body,

calming your mind, using your mind to control brain and body.

And be mindful about the things you're going to do. I'm about to have this conversation.

I'm going to spend 30 seconds right now before that person gets here and think

through how that conversation should go.

And I'm going to purposely turn my phone off or put it on airplane mode.

I'm going to purposely set myself up for this conversation, this time, this moment.

Be as effective as I can be.

You know what? People will start noticing that when I spend time with her,

she's really with me. When I spend time with him, he's really there.

And God will notice too. This has to do with a couple of scriptures.

Luke 9, 62, Jesus said, this sounds kind of like a harsh teaching,

but he said, nobody who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom.

So Jesus is saying right here in this moment, like, hey, I want both hands on the the plow.

When you're talking about living your life for me, I don't want you looking

back over your shoulder and trying to be here and be there at the same time.

He's saying, focus, dig in, commit, follow this plan.

I want you to plow this row and not be looking back over your shoulder.

Paul said in Philippians 3.13, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold

of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining toward what

is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize, right?

So he's saying, hey, there's some stuff in your past.

And if you've been through trauma or major drama or tragedy or some massive

thing, part of your multitasking might be that you want to be in this moment

with your family, your friends, your career, your life now.

But you also constantly want to be in that other moment, in that other place.

And you're plowing up the ground of that trauma again.

And what the word would say is that your brain can't actually do both of those

things at one time, friend.

And maybe one of the reasons you're not making the kind of progress you want

to make right now is that you're dividing your mind.

And it's not time to, I'm not saying you can forget everything.

I'm not saying you shouldn't work through trying to heal.

I'm saying the healing process starts with where you are now,

informed by where you've been and looking forward to where you're going.

But you got both hands on the plow because guess what? No matter what you've

been through, your life is now.

God's got a calling and a purpose for you. Trying to multitask all the time

is diminishing your effectiveness and resilience and your ability to be here

now and do the things that you need to do.

What you'll find is what you're doing, you're getting better at.

The more you focus on learning how to do one thing at one time until it's done

right and done well, or until that moment is passed and it's time to do something

else, you'll be better at all the things that you do.

And that, my friend, is how you change your mind. And that is how you change your life.

You don't have to multitask. And the truth is you really can't.

So let's reduce the amount of time that we're spending in more than one place.

For doing more than one thing.

And let's start doing those things in a way that honors God,

helps other people, and leads us towards healing, meaning, purpose,

and yes, maybe hope and happiness again.

And the good news about all that, my friend, is that we can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

Or if you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,

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And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.