Breathing Exercises Can Help Multitaskers Focus
Multitaskers, who tend to do two or more things at once, get the most benefit from a meditation exercise. Here’s what can help you focus better if that's you.
The more you see your kids texting while wearing headphones or watching TV, the more you might worry that they’ll lose the ability to focus.
Everyone is adapting to a world with conflicting demands on their attention. Carrying phones around, for example, implies that you’ll be monitoring them constantly.
“Many people have had the experience where they’ve felt a phantom phone ring or vibration in their pocket,” says C. Shawn Green, PhD, a psychology professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies attention. “That means part of your attention is actively monitoring your phone, even while you’re trying to do other things.”
The effect may be similar when you work at a computer and keep checking your email or instant messages.
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That stress may be easier for some people than others. Research suggests that heavy media multitaskers — people who like to divide their attention between different kinds of media, particularly social — are different from light media multitaskers.
The differences have been difficult to study. Early evidence suggested that the first group may be more impulsive, and have trouble switching between tasks, because they fail to focus, but later research found no difference on the subjects of task-switching or impulsivity.
Impulsive people do, however, seem likely to have less ability to sustain attention over time. They may also have poorer judgment when risks are unclear, a common circumstance in adult life.
It’s an important issue, since being distractible can hurt performance in school, weaken social ties if you never seem to be listening, and make it harder to set and pursue goals.
Green’s research group has shown that 10 minutes of a breathing exercise can help anyone focus. You can try it at their website, counting nine breaths, including your inhale and exhale. Then count nine breaths again.
For the study, the researchers asked 1,700 undergraduates about their media use, culling 22 who spent appreciably more of their time taking in two or more kinds of media and 20 on the other extreme.
The participants came for research sessions on two different days. One day they took attention tests with 10-minute breaks for browsing the internet. On another day, they did 10 minutes of the breath-counting exercise between tests.
Heavy media multitaskers scored worse than light media multitaskers all around. Both groups posted better attention scores right after counting breaths. But the heavy multitaskers showed more improvement after breath counting.
Other research on meditation techniques backs up the idea that a brief session can have immediate benefits.
In fact, eight sessions of mindfulness training boosted scores on a standardized test and improved working memory in one study. Researchers randomly assigned 48 college students to a mindfulness class or a nutrition class. The classes met for 45 minutes, four times per week, over two weeks. Both groups took the verbal reasoning section of the GRE, a test to get into graduate school, before and after the study.
The research showed that mindfulness training resulted in about a 16 percentile-point boost on the GRE test, on average.
Other research suggests that it’s especially helpful if people who meditate learn and master the skill of self-acceptance, a key tenet of the Buddhist sources of meditation practices.
Besides meditation, people can sharpen their focus listening to music and absorbing nature, even in photos.
What if your daughter likes to play video games? It’s possible that mastering a challenging game improves learning ability, but it’s also possible she’ll mostly learn how to play games better.
Try to encourage her to take off the headphones, turn off the TV, put down the phone, and count nine-breath chunks for 10 minutes. If she really wants to use her phone, suggest she try meditation apps such as:
Updated:
January 05, 2024
Reviewed By:
Janet O’Dell, RN