Or, welcome to executive dysfunction 101 for writers and other creative types, a Shelf Life in which I tell on myself. Today’s and Thursday’s Shelf Lifes are for all the folks who want to be writing but find they have a hard time sitting down and just writing. Today’s article is on the internal causes of distraction—the things that cause you to lose focus and how to recognize those. Thursday’s Part II will focus on strategies to mitigate or even eliminate distractibility and improve focus.
Perhaps this is you. Perhaps you have a story idea and you have set aside some time to work on it. The time you have set aside arrives and you sit down at your writing implements, whatever those are, to begin. Now, fast-forward seven minutes. Are you:
Typing away at your story?
Or are you:
Browsing Facebook?
Organizing photos of your pets into albums?
Unloading the dishwasher?
Answering an important work email from earlier that you forgot about till just now?
Deeply engaged with six browser windows open to different baby name websites, searching for the perfect name for your main character’s nephew’s girlfriend?
Texting the family groupchat about Thanksgiving plans?
Swapping the summer clothes out for the winter clothes?
If any of the latter things, you might have a problem with executive dysfunction. I’m pleased to tell you there’s a little blue pill for this problem. It’s called Vyvanse. They give it to you if you have ADHD. In the interest of full disclosure, I have ADHD and I’ve tried medications for it but ultimately decided the side effects of those medications and their drug interactions with some other stuff I have to take did not work well for me. So I live with partially managed ADHD and that’s fine. I still get a lot of things done. I’m very productive. You already know this about me.
Part of managing ADHD without the assistance of medication is understanding why I’m distractible, what distracts me, and how to mitigate my distraction triggers. So that’s what I’m sharing today.
Or you could just go get some Concerta. A little Ritalin, just for fun. A little bit of Adderall in the sun. Mambo Number Vyv(anse).
The neat thing about focus is that many or most of us can do it under certain circumstances but many or most of us cannot do it under all circumstances, at will. For instance, if I am engaged with something that is keeping my attention, that I’m interested in, and that is providing periodic rewards in the form of a dopamine release in my brain, then I can stay focused on that thing almost indefinitely. Anyone who has ever sat mesmerized in front of a videogame for eight hours straight or devoured an entire novel in one sitting is nodding at this.
However, I can’t simply turn that same level of focus onto something I’m not interested in or that does not provide intermittent dopamine rewards, or that makes those dopamine rewards too challenging to get. This is why I can’t sit down at my work computer in the morning and focus on work for eight hours straight to the exclusion of all else, only stirring from my trance state at 5pm. That sometimes can happen when I have a particularly engaging work task or project to do, and then I feel really great at the end of the work day and I’m like, “oh man why can’t I do this everyday? I’d never be stressed about work! I’d always be ahead of the game and on top of everything!”
Focus doesn’t work that way; or not for everybody. You can’t achieve indistractible focus by wanting to. You achieve indistractible focus when what you are doing rewards your brain for its focus. When your brain is not receiving rewards you get distracted because your brain starts looking for something to do that will be more immediately rewarding.
Writing a novel means putting down 60,000 words or so and it’s going to take time. Many writing sessions over weeks or more. The dopamine hit from finishing the novel, achieving, is far off. Further, writing a novel is hard. It requires a constant flow of generative thinking. It requires making yourself emotionally vulnerable. It requires a degree of confidence that one’s thoughts and ideas are interesting and worth committing to paper.
You know what’s easy, and quickly accomplished, and requires no generative thinking? Doing the dishes. It’s not fun or interesting but it doesn’t require you to put your brain through the emotional and intellectual ringer. That’s why you have all the energy in the world for doing the dishes when you’re supposed to be working on something challenging—like writing your novel—but when it’s time to do the dishes you would rather be doing anything else. You might even be standing over the sink scrubbing thinking, “man I wish I were working on my novel right now.”
If you get a lot of creative ideas when you’re engaged in an activity that prohibits you from writing them down—like when your hands are in the dishpan or you’re out walking the dog—come to that activity prepared to take voice notes in your phone.
Okay, anyway. If you’ve ever wondered why you can have infinite focus for a video game, even a silly, simple one you play on your phone—actually especially a silly, simple one you play on your phone—it’s because video games are designed to be (what my therapist likes to call) “dopamine machines.” They’re built from the ground up to reward your achievements on a timetable that keeps you engaged.
Drafting your novel or attending to your work tasks are not activities that were engineered purposefully to release dopamine into your brain on a schedule so they require more effort from you to stay focused on them. Think about this the next time you get angry at yourself from being distractible at work when you’re never distractible from a movie, TV show, or novel.
Some people—I know several of these people, in fact—enjoy the act of writing to the degree that writing is a dopamine machine for them. These people can stay focused on writing for long periods of time without getting distracted and it is perfectly normal for the rest of us to envy them bitterly. One of my friends told me that, for him, writing a story feels the same as reading one, or watching a movie, or playing through a D&D campaign: It’s an enjoyable and rewarding activity of watching a story unfold.
The rest of us cannot bottle what he has so we will have to do our best.
Human brains naturally seek the easiest route to what they want. Brains want rewards and brains want to avoid discomfort. That’s literally it. I mean brains do a lot more than that, sorry; but for the purpose of today’s Shelf Life that’s literally it. Seek reward, avoid discomfort. Immediate reward is more favorable than delayed reward. More reward for less discomfort, good. Less reward for more discomfort, bad. That’s it, that’s brains.
Do not quote me on any of this. I’m not a brain scientist.
But let’s pretend for a little while longer that I’m something of a brain scientist or even know one single thing about the brain (I think it’s gray?). For the purposes of this Shelf Life only. In the cognitive-behavioral therapy model there’s this concept of the behavior chain that goes like this:
Trigger (an external thing that happens)
Thought (what our brain does in response to the trigger)
Action (the action we take in response to the thought)
Consequence (external response to our action)
I like to use this analogy from my real life to explain it, which is that my partner likes the house to be very cold when he sleeps, so he set the programmable thermostat to drop the temperature from 10pm to midnight and then stay chilly all night and only come back up at 8am. I have come to associate “cold” with “time to sleep,” which has conditioned me to get sleepy and go to bed at the same time every night.
Trigger: House temperature drops.
Thought: “Hmm, it’s cold. I’m sleepy.”
Action: I get ready for and go to bed.
Consequence: Insomnia remedied.
Here’s another example of that behavior chain, more relevant to today’s topic. I’m writing and I get to a tricky point. I’m not sure what to write next and I need to engage my brain in some challenging generative thinking.
Trigger: A challenging moment in my writing session causes me discomfort.
Thought: “Hey, you know what’s not challenging and uncomfortable?”
Action: I open up instagram to look at videos of dogs.
Consequence: Distracted.
Hilariously, I literally just did the thing I’m talking about. I forgot where I was going with that train of thought and rather than take a minute to plan out the rest of this essay in my mind, I instinctively opened a new browser tab and navigated to Reddit and to be quite honest I would probably still be there scrolling if this hadn’t come up in my feed:
So that was eerily apropos.
Alright. I want to say, for the record, that all of the above is not the only path to being distracted. Ever had a splitting headache? Can’t focus well with that going on. Going through a nasty breakup? Physical discomfort and emotional discomfort from outside sources (ie, emotional discomfort other than that which comes from your manuscript) are also real distractors but they’re not the ones I’m focusing on today—in large part because I don’t have advice to help you master those. I can’t do anything about your headache. I can come over with wine and chocolate and trash talk your ex, but that’s a bandaid, not a remedy. I can, hopefully, help with mastery of those distractions that come from within. Those are the kind I’m good at.
I hope this has been a useful primer on the roots of distraction and loss of focus. On Thursday I’m going to share some of my strategies for remaining focused through distraction triggers and regaining focus when I become distracted (all the time). Between now and then, if focus and distraction are challenges for you, be thinking about your distraction behavior chains and what your triggers are. Recognizing them when they happen is the first step.
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