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Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
By Srini Pillay
The ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits. Practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, for example, can enhance leadership effectiveness by helping you become more able to regulate your emotions and make sense of past experiences.1 Yet as helpful as focus can be, there’s also a downside to focus as it is commonly viewed.
The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy and make you lose control.2 This energy drain can also make you more impulsive and less helpful.3 As a result, decisions are poorly thought out, and you become less collaborative.
So what do we do then? Focus or unfocus?
Recent research shows that both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing us to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions.4
When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the “default mode network” (DMN). We used to think of this circuit as the “do mostly nothing” circuit because it only came on when you stopped focusing with effort. Yet when “at rest,” this circuit uses 20% of the body’s energy (compared with the comparatively small 5% that any effort would require).5
The DMN needs this energy because it is doing anything but resting. Under the brain’s conscious radar, it activates old memories; goes back and forth between the past, present, and future; and recombines different ideas.6 Using this new and previously in accessible data, you develop enhanced self-awareness and a sense of personal relevance.7 And you can imagine creative solutions or predict what might happen in the future, thereby leading to better decision-making too.8 The DMN also helps you tune in to other people’s thinking, thereby improving team understanding and cohesion.9
There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day. Here are some examples.
Using positive constructive daydreaming (PCD)
Positive constructive daydreaming (PCD) is a type of mind wandering that is different from slipping into a daydream or guiltily rehashing worries.10 When you build PCD into your day deliberately, it can boost your creativity, strengthen your leadership ability, and also reenergize the brain. To activate PCD, you choose a low-key activity such as knitting, gardening, or casual reading, then wander into the recesses of your mind.11 But unlike slipping into a daydream or guilty-dysphoric daydreaming, you might first imagine something playful and wishful—like running through the woods, or lying on a yacht. Then you swivel your attention from the external world to the internal space of your mind with this image in mind while still doing the low-key activity.
Studied for decades by psychologist Jerome Singer, PCD activates the DMN and metaphorically changes the silverware that your brain uses to find information.12 While focused attention is like a fork that picks up obvious conscious thoughts that you have, PCD commissions a different set of silverware: a spoon for scooping up the delicious mélange of flavors of your identity (the scent of your grandmother, the feeling of satisfaction with the first bite of apple pie on a crisp fall day), chopsticks for connecting ideas across your brain (to enhance innovation), and a marrow spoon for getting into the nooks and crannies of your brain to pick up long-lost memories that are a vital part of your identity.13 In this state, your sense of self is enhanced—which, according to organizational consultant Warren Bennis, is the essence of leadership.14 I call this the psychological center of gravity, a grounding mechanism (part of your mental “six-pack”) that helps you enhance your agility and manage change more effectively.15
Taking a nap
In addition to building in time for PCD, leaders can also consider authorized napping. Not all naps are the same. When your brain is in a slump, your clarity and creativity are compromised. After a 10-minute nap, studies show, you become much clearer and more alert.16 But if it’s a creative task you have in front of you, you will likely need a full 90 minutes of sleep for more complete brain refreshing.17 Your brain requires this longer time to make more associations and dredge up ideas that reside in the nooks and crannies of your memory network.
Pretending to be someone else
When you’re stuck in a creative process, unfocus can come to the rescue if you embody and live out an entirely different personality. In 2016, educational psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar found that people who try to solve creative problems are more successful if they behave like an eccentric poet than a rigid librarian.18 Given a test in which they had to come up with as many uses as possible for any object (such as a brick), those who behaved like eccentric poets had superior creative performance. This finding holds even if the same person takes on a different identity.
When you’re in a creative deadlock, try embodying a different identity. It will likely get you out of your own head and allow you to think from another person’s perspective. (I call this “psychological halloweenism.”)19
For years, focus has been the venerated ability amongst all abilities. Since we spend 46.9% of our days with our minds wandering away from a task at hand, we crave the ability to keep it fixed and on task.20 Yet, if we built PCD, 10- and 90-minute naps, and psychological halloweenism into our days, we would likely preserve focus for when we needed it, and use it much more efficiently too. More important, unfocus would allow us to update information in the brain, giving us access to deeper parts of ourselves and enhancing our agility, creativity, and decision-making.
SRINI PILLAY, MD, is an executive coach and CEO of Neuro-Business Group. He is also a technology innovator and entrepreneur in the health and leadership development sectors and the author of Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind. He is also a part-time assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and teaches in the executive education programs at Harvard Business School and Duke Corporate Education.
Notes
1.Louise Wasylkiw et al., “The Impact of Mindfulness on Leadership in a Health Care Setting: A Pilot Study,” Journal of Health Organization and Management 29, no. 7 (2015): 893–911; Megan Reitz and Michael Chaskal son, “Mindfulness Works, But Only If You Work at It,” hbr.org, November 4, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/11/mindfulness-works-but-only-if-you-work-at-it; Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, and Gitte Dybkjaer, “Spending 10 Minutes a Day on Mindfulness Subtly Changes the Way You React to Everything,” hbr.org, January 18, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/01/spending-10-minutes-a-day-on-mindfulness-subtly-changes-the-way-you-react-to-everything; Christina Congleton, Britta K. Hölzel, and Sara W. Lazar, “Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain,” hbr.org, January 8, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/01/mindfulness-can-literally-change-your-brain.
2.Todd F. Heatherton and Dylan D. Wagner, “Cognitive Neuro science of Self-Regulation Failure,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 3 (March 2011): 132–139.
3.Roy F. Baumeister, “Ego Depletion and Self-Regulation Failure: A Resource Model of Self-Control,” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 27, no. 2 (February 2003): 281–284; C. Nathan Dewall et al., “Depletion Makes the Heart Grow Less Helpful: Helping as a Function of Self-Regulatory and Genetic Relatedness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 12 (December 2008): 1653–1662.
4.Jinyi Long et al., “Distinct Interactions Between Fronto-Parietal and Default Mode Networks in Impaired Consciousness,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 1–11.
5.Marcus E. Raichle and Deborah A. Gusnard, “Appraising the Brain’s Energy Budget,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 99, no. 16 (August 2002): 10237–10239.
6.Carlo Sestieri et al., “Episodic Memory Retrieval, Parietal Cortex, and the Default Mode Network: Functional and Topical Analyses,” The Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 12 (March 2011): 4407–4420; Ylva Østby et al., “Mental Time Travel and Default-Mode Network Functional Connectivity in the Developing Brain,” PNAS 109, no. 42 (October 2012): 16800–16804; Roger E. Beaty et al., “Creativity and the Default Network: A Functional Connectivity Analysis of the Creative Brain at Rest,” Neuropsychologia 64 (November 2014): 92–98.
7.Christopher G. Davey, Jesus Pujol, and Ben J. Harrison, “Mapping the Self in the Brain’s Default Mode Network,” Neuroimage 132 (May 2016): 390–397.
8.Beaty et al., “Creativity and the Default Network,” 92–98; Fabiana M. Carvalho et al., “Time-Perception Network and Default Mode Network Are Associated with Temporal Prediction in a Periodic Motion Task,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 (June 2016): 268.
9.Christopher J. Hyatt et al., “Specific Default Mode Subnetworks Support Mentalizing as Revealed Through Opposing Network Recruitment by Social and Semantic FMRI Tasks,” Human Brain Mapping 36, no. 8 (August 2015): 3047–3063.
10.Rebecca L. McMillan, Scott Barry Kaufman, and Jerome L. Singer, “Ode to Positive Constructive Daydreaming,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (September 2013): 626.
11.Benjamin Baird et al., “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation,” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (October 2013): 1117–1122.
12.Jerome L. Singer, “Researching Imaginative Play and Adult Consciousness: Implications for Daily and Literary Creativity,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3, no. 4 (2009): 190–199.
13.Jeroen J. A. van Boxtel, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, and Christof Koch, “Consciousness and Attention: On Sufficiency and Necessity,” Frontiers in Psychology (December 2010): 217; Christopher G. Davey, Jesus Pujol, and Ben J. Harrison, “Mapping the Self in the Brain’s Default Mode Network,” Neuroimage 132 (May 2016): 390–397; Roger E. Beaty et al., “Creativity and the Default Network,” 92–98; Carlo Sestieri et al., “Episodic Memory Retrieval, Parietal Cortex, and the Default Mode Network: Functional and Topical Analyses,” The Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 12 (March 2011): 4407–4420.
14.Adi Ignatius, “Becoming a Leader, Becoming Yourself,” Harvard Business Review, May 2015, 10.
15.Srini Pillay, Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 2017).
16.Nicole Lovato and Leon Lack, “The Effects of Napping on Cognitive Functioning,” Progress in Brain Research 185 (2010): 155–166.
17.Denise J. Kai et al., “REM, Not Incubation, Improves Creativity by Priming Associative Networks,” PNAS 106, no. 25 (June 2009): 10130–10134.
18.Denise Dumas and Kevin N. Dunbar, “The Creative Stereo type Effect,” PLOS One 11, no. 2 (February 2016): e0142567.
19.Srini Pillay, Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try.
20.Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no. 6006 (November 2010): 932.
Reprinted from hbr.org, originally published
May 12, 2017 (product #H03NKH).