[MUSIC] So we've been talking about the fact that our attention is really fragile, that our bottom of attention can be stolen. And because attention is limited, we're missing out on all the good things in life. And so how can we protect our fragile attention and be more present? Luckily we have our PSYCHPROTIPS, they're back again. And all our PSYCHPROTIPS this time focus on the concept of what's called attentional hygiene. This is kind of physical hygiene, where you wash your hands, you're doing that for your attention. You're using a whole host of strategies to kind of control your attention and minimize distraction. PSYCHPROTIP number one for how we can do this is to make sure your phone this kind of constant stealer of our bottom-up attention, just make sure it's not around you during really important tasks. I think so many of us do homework or do interesting conversations with other friends with our phone sitting right beside us. And we assume that if it's just off or if it's flipped over if we're not looking at it it's not affecting us. But the data suggests just the opposite, and this is true for your joy, but it's also true for your academic performance. This is something that Ward and colleagues looked at directly. They compared college students' performance on a kind of standard IQ test or a memory test, you can think of this, the memory tests basically you're taking a history test where you remembering historical facts, and they just varied whether or not these students had their phone right next to them or pretty far away. In fact, they had these phones in three different locations either nearby them, on a desk, right inside their bag beside them, so it's you can't see it but you know it's there versus you leave it in another room. And so here's student's performance on this memory test, right, bigger bars are better performance. And this is what happens, basically, you're doing almost twice as good on this memory test when your phone is far away from you, that's working memory. But even when you do an IQ test, you actually look like you have almost a third higher IQ just because your phone is far away from you, right? How many times have you all taken a test or done some tough homework assignment with your phone right near you? You might have done 30% better according to this study, right? So lose your phone, get it out of there, right? And so this is what we don't want, when you're doing homework, get the phone out of there. But if you have to have your phone with you try not to be using it when you're engaging an important task. And this includes social tasks, right? Where you're interacting with other people. If you have to have your phone there though there are other PSYCHPROTIPS that can help you. And one of the biggest ones is that you can take control over your phone settings and your notifications. One of the biggest ones is to get rid of the kinds of phone stimuli that tend to activate our bottom-up attention. There's a reason that cell phones have these bright colors and things like that, and you can shut those off. In fact, go into your settings and actually shut off the color on your phone, do that for a day and notice how little your phone is distracting you. How much less it's kind of compelling your attention to look at it, just by making it black and white. But an even bigger thing is to make sure you're managing your notifications. Just shut them off for everything and you won't get in the middle of a class a ding when you're trying to pay attention or the middle of your homework, it just shuts off the opportunities for this bottom-up attention stealing. But a final PSYCHPROTIP that can be really important is to be paying attention to how you're using your phone and how it's making you feel in terms of your attention. We need to be a little bit more mindful about our cellphone use. We often kind of pick up our phones and interact with it without thinking about it. But there's evidence that if we do feel mindfully we might actually be able to use our phones better, right? We don't have to get rid of our phones completely, but we might be able to use them better. And this is the argument that the journalist Catherine Price [INAUDIBLE] makes. She has this lovely book that I wish all of you could read called How To Break Up With Your Phone where she argues, you don't have to break up with your phone, but you have to take it to kind of couples counseling. And one of the ways she recommends taking your phone to couples counseling is to whenever you interact with your phone immediately use an acronym that will help you try to interact with your phone more mindfully. And that acronym is WWW, which stands for what for why now and what else. You pick up your phone when you find your phone in your hand, that's when you think, WWW, what for? Was I using my phone for something? Maybe you were checking your email or maybe you were checking the weather, or maybe it just wound up in your hand and the way that it does when we're feeling bored or anxious and something, was there a purpose, or did you just find it there? Why now? What was the cue that got you to do it? Were you bored? Were you anxious? Did you have something to do? What's the emotional context that causes you to reach for your phone? And maybe the most important one is the last one, what else? That's the opportunity cost question. What else could you be paying attention to or doing? Are you missing the beautiful summer scenery around? Are you not talking to your friend? Are you not paying attention to your homework? What are you missing because you're interacting with your phone? Catherine's work has argued that the act of doing this means we can still interact with our phones, but it means we're not missing as much overtime. We're not missing the information that we could be or we're not missing the kind of mind processing that we could be using to do our homework. We're not missing the kind of good things in life that we could be noticing, like paying attention to delicious stuff we're eating rather than paying attention to our phone. So finding these ways to interact with our phone more mindfully is an important way to kind of be able to get all the wonderful things that comes from using our devices but not do so in a way that destroys our attention. [MUSIC]
