A Consumer Health Interactive Radio piece by Laurie Udesky

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Laurie Udesky: Technology: Computers, BlackBerries, cell phones -- they click, beep at us, and play catchy tunes. They let us talk on the phone while eating lunch, firing off a series of instant messages, and checking our email. But have these gadgets brought us more downtime, more connection, helped us work faster and better? Or have they just driven us to distraction? Labor unions have an old term for the new demand for higher production. In a word, it's called speedup. Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell, an expert in Attention Deficit Disorder, calls it "crazy busy." The bottom line, according to Hallowell, is that multitasking is bad for us -- and it's getting out of control. I'm Laurie Udesky.

Udesky: I asked Dr. Edward M. Hallowell about how our relationship to inanimate objects is unhinging us. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School, says that our love affair with technology has in many cases distorted our priorities and we don't even know it.

Dr. Edward M. Hallowell: This female patient of mine asked me, 'Do you think it's normal that my husband brings his BlackBerry into bed with us and lays it next to us when we make love?' And I laughed. To me what was more striking than doing it was the woman's asking me whether or not it was normal. It just suggested to me that we've lost all perspective of who's in charge and what the priorities are.

Udesky: Admittedly, says Hallowell, such an example is an extreme one, but he says that the phenomenon of letting technology control us is not. He says people think that their ability to go back and forth between checking email, answering phones, and hammering out a memo on the computer makes them more efficient. But, he argues, it has the opposite effect.

Hallowell: You find people checking their email 25 times an hour. There's no need to check your email that often. You get a certain fix, a certain high about getting a new message and discovering what it is. There's a kind of excitement in there, and you avoid the drudgery, the pain, the agony of doing a sustained piece of work without taking a call or checking your email, working on a paper, working on a proposal. You know that takes the capacity to bear with some frustration and to tolerate some sense of, "This isn't going quite the way I want it to" …

What happens now is that [when] people feel the least bit of frustration, they just go get another bit of stimulation. They check their email; they make a cell phone call. They grab something else. And they think they're doing great work because they're so busy, but in fact the work they're doing is mediocre.

Udesky: Hallowell says that the stimulation one gets from using electronic gizmos simultaneously has a certain shelf life.

Hallowell: You cannot sustain an adrenaline high indefinitely. People talk about it as if you can do that all day. You can't do it. Physiologically, you can't do it; the chemicals run out and then you crash. Nature gives us adrenaline to help us in a crisis -- you know, when we're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. But what a lot of people try to do in the workplace is to create that feeling of crisis all day, and A: You can't do it, and B: It leads to bad work.

Udesky: Researchers have begun to document how fragmented our concentration at work has become. In a small study, University of California at Irvine researchers observed 16 information technology workers at an investment firm for three days. The workers, which included managers, developers and analysts, spent an average of only three minutes working on any single task before switching to another one. Casual interactions with other workers averaged about four and a half minutes, and people spent about only two minutes using an "electronic tool or paper document before switching tasks."

The more fragmented work life is, the more it leads to stress, frustration, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Hallowell says that there are simple exercises you can do at work to relax:

Hallowell: The part of your brain in the prefrontal lobes that makes choices, perceives shades of grey, prioritizes, [is] the so-called executive function. And if you become frazzled, if you begin feeling frantic … the primitive parts of your brain, the emotional centers of the brain, they sort of shanghai the frontal lobes. They divert neurons away from the executive functions. So one of the things you can do to take back the frontal lobes to give them back those neurons is to do some relatively simple organizing task like write a simple memo, or straighten up your desk, do something like that that will reengage your frontal lobes instead of just perseverating in the emotional stew that you’ve put yourself into.

Udesky: Of course, if you're working on a boring task, there's always the temptation to respond to the beep of a new email or the soothing chime of your cell phone. Hallowell advises that if you have something important to do, turn off your beeping cell phone, instant messenger, and email, and get to work. For Consumer Health Interactive, I'm Laurie Udesky.

First published June 6, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Consumer Health Interactive