Don't Text While Driving - Breathing Space Blog

A sad story, but all too true: texting while driving is a death wish.

Distraction and Under-Perfomance - Breathing Space Blog

From a USA Today article: "As social media's become nearly inescapable on college campuses, a pair of recently published studies supports what many professors already have concluded: Students using Facebook or text messaging during a lecture tend to do worse when quizzed later."

Distraction and Under-Perfomance - Breathing Space Blog

From a USA Today article: "As social media's become nearly inescapable on college campuses, a pair of recently published studies supports what many professors already have concluded: Students using Facebook or text messaging during a lecture tend to do worse when quizzed later."

Costly Distractions - Breathing Space Blog

Writer Marta Vogel tells us that early man examined his food to ensure it 1) was dead and 2) had no insects. 21st century man barely looks at his food; he's fixated on the package. Corporate giants figured out that consumers could become thoroughly hooked on "package literature."

Recognizing our craving for information, advertisers offer alluring product packaging. The average cereal box contains about 2,000 words, equal to eight pages of a book. Generic products, at the same basic quality as mid-level brands, were once sold by vendors who knew that people might not buy "wordless" cardboard and risk incurring "package deprivation."

Package deprivation? It's no surprise today that most of our population -- not just kids -- wears clothes or accessories with slogans and messages on them. Attraction to labeling and packaging robs you of breathing space. Minute bits of extraneous data have a cumulative impact.

Other symptoms of information overload abound. Do you attempt to think, converse, study, or even make love with distractions? Do you go through the motions of attempting to concentrate with office noise? Do you attempt to converse while on the Web or watching TV? Do you "need" to wind down before bed time in front of a screen? You deserve a break today. Eat healthy food and have no reading material or screens in sight.

Understanding the Zeigarnik Effect - Breathing Space Blog

When interruptions predominate, little work gets done, observes Paul Radde, Ph.D. author of Thrival. Radde says "Cell phone use is not just plain rude, it is mentally distracting and abusive to others. Cell phone use captures the brain's interest in completing the conversation, so whether the user is broadcasting or simply within earshot, the Zeigarnik effect kicks in. This is the same desire for closure that makes the effects of multi-tasking akin to the effects of post-traumatic stress."

The Zeigarnik effect is characterized by the tendency for people to remember interrupted tasks better than those that have been completed. "Once taken off one task, without completing the transaction," Radde observes, "the mind continues to seek closure. If you have a number of things going, but none of them to completion, you have these tensions tending toward completion -- and that is stress-provoking."

Understanding the Zeigarnik Effect - Breathing Space Blog

When interruptions predominate, little work gets done, observes Paul Radde, Ph.D. author of Thrival. Radde says "Cell phone use is not just plain rude, it is mentally distracting and abusive to others. Cell phone use captures the brain's interest in completing the conversation, so whether the user is broadcasting or simply within earshot, the Zeigarnik effect kicks in. This is the same desire for closure that makes the effects of multi-tasking akin to the effects of post-traumatic stress."

The Zeigarnik effect is characterized by the tendency for people to remember interrupted tasks better than those that have been completed. "Once taken off one task, without completing the transaction," Radde observes, "the mind continues to seek closure. If you have a number of things going, but none of them to completion, you have these tensions tending toward completion -- and that is stress-provoking."