Ecstatic Gathering

Why do you have a short attention span

How can that be? “If we look at work in terms of switching projects, as opposed to the micro view of switching screens, we find people spend about 10½ minutes in any work project before being interrupted — internally or by someone else — and then switch to another work project,” Mark said.

Yes, but then we go back to the original work, right? Wrong, Mark said. Instead, when we are interrupted on project two, we switch yet again to a different task — call it project three. Unbelievably, her research has shown we are also interrupted on project three and move on to project four.

“And then you go back and pick up the original interrupted project,” Mark said. “But it’s not like you’re interrupted and you do nothing. For over 25 minutes, you’re actually working on other things.”

(At least I can tell my boss that when I miss my deadline.)

“However, there’s also a switch cost,” Mark added. “A switch cost is the time it takes you to reorient back to your work: ‘Where was I? What was I thinking of?’ That additional effort can also lead to errors and stress.”
How to focus

Why is all of this a problem? After all, it’s called multitasking, thought by many to be a highly prized skill for coping with the demands of the information age.

“With the exception of a few rare individuals, there is no such thing as multitasking,” Mark said. “Unless one of the tasks is automatic, like chewing gum or walking, you cannot do two effortful things at the same time.”

For example, she said, you can’t read email and be in a video meeting. When you focus on one thing, you lose the other. “You’re actually switching your attention very quickly between the two,” Mark said. “And when you switch your attention fast, it’s correlated with stress.”

Blood pressure rises. Heart rate speeds up. Psychological measures of stress also show negative outcomes, she said, such as more fatigue and mistakes and less productivity: “The more people multitask, the more errors they make.”

Who did this to us? We did, of course, with the help of tech culprits such as social media, tablets, and television. But Mark blames email the most.

“To me, email is probably the worst because it’s become a symbol of work,” she said, adding that her research has found a direct correlation between email and more stress.

“We cut off email for some workers in an organization for one workweek,” she said. “Using heart rate monitors, we found that they became significantly less stressed and were able to focus significantly longer.”

(I find myself pausing to look up flights to Bora Bora. Oh, right. They have email there, too.)

“There’s no way that a person can just completely cut off from technology and work in today’s world,” Mark said. “So let’s learn how to live with it in a way that maintains our positive well-being.”
How to increase your attention span

Regaining your focus requires you to be mindful of how you are using technology, Mark said, a daunting task if you consider the average American spends at least 10 hours a day on screens.

Paradoxically, you can use technology to help, she said. Schedule rote work for the first part of the day when you’re not fully alert, then use technology to block distractions when you’re at your mental best. At night, offload tasks from your brain by writing them down and then put the list away.

Distracted by social media sites? Hide them, Mark said: “Take the icons off your desktop and bury the apps on your phone inside folders, where it takes an extra effort to find them. Leave your phone in another room or put it in a drawer and lock it.”

It’s also important to learn when to take a break. “If you have to read something more than once or if the words are just not registering, it’s time to stop and replenish,” she said.

The best break is a walk in nature: “Just a 20-minute walk in nature can help significantly relax people,” Mark said. “And we found it can help people produce significantly more ideas it’s called divergent thinking.”

Too cold to walk outside? Do something engaging that takes no mental effort. “I have a friend who is an MIT professor, and his favorite activity is matching socks,” Mark said. “Another friend likes to iron. Ideas can incubate and then we come back to the hard work, and we see it with fresh eyes.”

Farmers worldwide are experiencing this firsthand. Climate change causes rising temperatures, heavy rainfall, severe storms, and extended periods of drought.

Many crops fail due to these extreme weather conditions. This has consequences not only for the farmers themselves, but also for the food they produce, and thus for global food security.

Yet the food sector itself is partly responsible. What’s going on? We will try to explain on the basis of these 3 points:
Monoculture harms biodiversity

Our current, mainstream form of agriculture, in which farmers only grow one crop on one piece of land, depletes the soil and negatively affects biodiversity. Like the large palm oil plantations in Indonesia or the vast fields of grain in the United States. Monoculture causes soil exhaustion, while healthy soil is vital for CO2 absorption. Harmful chemicals exacerbate this problem.

A monoculture also scares off bees and other essential pollinators. Without the help of these hardworking critters, our future food supply is in serious jeopardy.
Food sector emits a lot of greenhouse gases

The food sector is responsible for more than a third of greenhouse gases worldwide. This concerns all links in the process: the way we produce, process, package and transport food, up to and including consumption.

We know that meat production emits significant amounts of CO2 and growing rice produces a lot of methane. But transporting food by boats or planes is also extremely polluting. And finally, waste: not only does waste processing release a lot of greenhouse gases, but plastic litter also causes great damage to the environment.
Forests disappear in favour of agriculture

About 80% of all forests that are being cut down worldwide, have to make way for agricultural land. In the Amazon, for example, trees are disappearing at an alarming rate to make room for soy plantations. The wry irony is: forests are indispensable in the fight against climate change because they absorb CO2.

These are just a few examples of the problematic relationship between the food sector and the climate crisis. Cordaid is trying to turn the tide through various projects. For example, in Bangladesh, we support Rohingya refugees to help them reuse waste and we support 22.000 shea butter farmers and plant new trees in Burkina Faso.

1. Control your attention, not your emotions

Like anything painful, our automatic response to difficult emotions is to try and control them — usually in an attempt to escape them or “fix” them.

And this tendency to control makes sense given how good at exerting control we are in most areas of life:You’re good at exerting control and generating creative solutions at work.
You’re good at exerting control and fixing a leaky drain under the sink at home.
You’re good at exerting control and asking for help at the grocery store when you can’t find something.

In many areas of our life, it’s helpful and productive to exert control over our problems. But here’s the thing…

Emotions aren’t under our direct control.

Go ahead and try it:I want you to take control of your mood right now and make yourself really happy.
Or, if yourself stop feeling anxious, go ahead and just stop feeling so anxious.

Of course, these are ridiculous experiments to run because you don’t have a happiness dial you can just adjust at will. Or an anxiety button you can just turn on and off.

You can only control your emotions indirectly, primarily through how you choose to think and what you choose to pay attention to.

For example:If you’re feeling ashamed about a mistake you made at work, focusing your attention on replaying the details of that mistake over and over again is going to make you feel even more ashamed. On the other hand, if you can switch your attention to correcting the problem or learning from it, you’re likely to start to feel better much faster.

When you try to control things you don’t have control over — like your feelings — you’ll only create more pain and suffering for yourself in the long run.

Emotionally strong people take control over their attention and what they choose to focus on. Instead of letting their mind bounce around according to the whims of instinct, they practice holding their attention on what matters and avoid getting sucked into unhelpful thought patterns like rumination or worry.

If you want to be more emotionally strong, validate your emotions and control your attention.

“Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.”

Charlotte Brontë

2. Practice compassionate self-talk

Most people associate emotional strength with toughness and being hard on themselves.

This makes sense because as children this is what most of us learned: If you wanted to be strong a strong student, a strong athlete, a strong musician — you had to be strict and hard on yourself in order to achieve.

Unfortunately, this toughness approach doesn’t work really well with difficult emotions. And in fact, the harder you are on yourself for feeling bad, the worse you’ll end up feeling.

For example: If every time you feel anxious, you start criticizing yourself for being weak and not strong enough, now you feel ashamed in addition to feeling anxious. Which means your overall level of emotional distress is much higher.
If every time you feel sad, you judge yourself as selfish or self-centered, well now you’re going to feel guilty on top of feeling sad. This means that dealing with your sadness in a healthy way and moving on from it is going to be much, much harder.

Here’s the bigger point:

When you respond to painful emotions with negative self-talk, you train your brain to be ashamed of feeling bad.

Emotionally strong people realize that it’s actually much more helpful to be compassionate and understanding with yourself when you feel bad. In other words, they practice compassionate self-talk.

Now, if that sounds a little woo-woo or new-agey, it’s not at all. Self-compassion simply means applying the same standard of kindness and support that you would give to a friend who was struggling to yourself.

For example:If a friend was feeling sad for no apparent reason, you wouldn’t tell him to “stop being such a baby and get over it.”
If a friend was feeling afraid, you would tell them they were weak and that they should just “stop it.”

True emotional strength comes from gentleness, not criticism.

“Words matter. And the words that matter most are the ones you say to yourself.”

David Taylor-Klaus

3. Use values, not feelings, to make decisions

Emotionally strong people listen to their emotions but never take orders from them.

Unfortunately, our cultural attitude toward emotions tends to be one of extremes… Most people see emotions either as silly and to be ignored or gotten rid of or that they are quasi-mystical experiences guiding us toward truth and ultimate enlightenment.

In reality, emotions are much more mundane. They’re a survival mechanism that adapted over hundreds of thousands of years. And while they’re quite useful in some situations, they’re just as often unhelpful in others.

For example:If you’re walking across the street, hear a super loud noise, and fear causes you to quickly look and notice a car that’s about to hit you, that’s a very useful instance of an emotion.
But if you’re sitting in a meeting wanting to share a creative idea but then fear of other people thinking your idea will be stupid pops up and causes you to hold back, that’s not so useful.

The point is simply this:

Your emotions will lead you astray just as often as they will guide you.

Emotionally strong people know that in the face of difficult decisions, it’s best to listen to their emotions. But ultimately, they use their values and reason to guide their decisions, not the emotional whims of the moment.

Think about it: How often would you exercise if you only listened to your emotions and how you felt in the moment and ignored your values and commitments to health and wellbeing?
How many creative projects would you actually produce and finish if you only listened to your emotions and how you happened to feel about creating and ignored your values and commitment to creativity?
How many incredible relationships would you pass up if you listened to your fearful feelings about asking someone out and ignored your values and commitment to put yourself out there more to find a satisfying relationship?

Listen to all your emotions but don’t blindly take orders from them.

Emotionally strong people are able to resist the pull of unhelpful emotions because they’ve spent time discovering and clarifying their values. As a result, they’re able to make decisions that are good for them in the long-term rather than just impulsively acting on whatever feels easy in the moment.

“Motivation often comes after starting, not before. Action produces momentum.”

James Clear

4. Set (and enforce) healthy boundaries

It’s hard to set and enforce healthy boundaries…It feels scary to tell your manager that you won’t stay late again to take care of someone else’s work.
It feels awkward and embarrassing to ask your partner for something different in your sex life.
It feels sad to say no to your family member who always asks for money (and never repays you).

But it’s even harder to live without good boundaries…The chronic stress and burnout that comes from always taking on extra work and staying late
The persistent low-level dissatisfaction and lack of intimacy that comes from doing the same old thing in sex year after year, decade after decade
The habitual frustration, conflict, and resentment that come from reinforcing an unhealthy habit in a family member and then constantly expecting them to change.

Emotionally strong people know that you can’t be emotionally healthy if you never stand up for yourself and your own wants and needs.

Unfortunately, setting and enforcing healthy boundaries is a classic short-term/long-term problem: Like eating a healthy diet, studying in school, or investing your money instead of spending it wastefully, what feels easy in the short-term doesn’t usually lead to great results in the long run. And what feels difficult in the short term often leads to much better outcomes in the end.

So too with setting and enforcing healthy boundaries…It’s hard to ask for what you really want.
It’s difficult to say no to people and enforce those boundaries.

But here’s the thing…

Just because it feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad.

Saying no to an overbearing manager or manipulative family member feels bad in the moment. But don’t mistake the fact that it feels bad for whether it’s a good decision or not.

If you want to become more emotionally strong, practice communicating your wants and needs assertively and having the courage to set (and enforce) healthy boundaries.

“” No” is a complete sentence.”

― Annie Lamott

All You Need to Know

If you want to become emotionally strong, work to build these 5 habits: Control your attention, not your emotions
Practice compassionate self-talk
Use values, not feelings, to make decisions
Set (and enforce) healthy boundaries

Martin Scorsese is arguably the greatest living filmmaker, with a body of work spanning more than five decades that includes stone-cold classics such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. As a result, every new Scorsese film is justifiably anticipated – and his new one even more so.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in a Scorsese movie for the first time, Killers Of The Flower Moon – which premiered at Cannes film festival this month – is set in Osage County, Oklahoma. It’s an area named after the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe that discovered oil on their land in the early 20th century. That oil made them the richest people per capita in America by the 1920s. Sadly, opportunistic white Americans exploited this new wealth by manipulating the Osage people and murdering them on a large scale to steal their assets.

The film focuses on two men who were real figures during this shameful period of American history. That’s local cattle baron Bill Hale (De Niro) and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio). We meet them when Ernest has returned from war to a job chauffeuring rich Osage people about the place. While on shift, he meets and quickly falls in love with charismatic Osage woman Mollie (Lily Gladstone). From the start of their relationship, Bill – known to many local white and Native people as “King Hale” because of his prominence – suggests that he and Ernest should make sure Mollie’s wealth is ‘safe’ and that her family are not taken advantage of. This really means that gradually, Mollie’s family should be killed off for Bill and Ernest to take their money. It’s a heartbreaking story and all the more brutal for its surface-level simplicity. Its complexity lies in the sinister ways a network of local criminals goes about conning and then killing the Osage community.

Now on his sixth collaboration with Scorsese, DiCaprio plays Ernest skillfully as an uneducated, possibly developmentally challenged man. It’s unclear whether he’s damaged as a consequence of the war or if he was always somewhat slow, but he is often notably confused by some of Bill’s orders. That said: he’s definitely not oblivious to what is going on and is usually the conniving middle man in commissioning murders. De Niro, in his 10th Scorsese film, is especially chilling as the bloodthirsty puppet-master Hale. He’s beloved by the Osage people and often speaks their language fluently, all the while engineering the destruction of their culture. Mollie, a bright and calming presence at first falls ill with diabetes, a situation which Ernest slowly aggravates by administering poisoned insulin. Gladstone is assured and vulnerable as Mollie, a devastating counterpoint to DiCaprio’s grotesque Ernest.

There’s a remarkable sensitivity in the disintegration of Ernest and Mollie’s relationship. Ernest may be ruthless – he’s perhaps the most despicable character DiCaprio has ever played – but we feel his pain as he loses everything, just as we feel the pain of the Osage Nation as they have their way of life destroyed.

These days, Scorsese seems to exclusively make long films but this 206-minute epic is lengthy even by his standards. Thankfully Killers Of The Flower Moon earns its runtime, even if it lacks the pace of The Irishman (which is 210 minutes but feels like half of that). Each conversation between De Niro and DiCaprio is an exercise in clever euphemism and while some may find the tempo a bit too stately, the story of an entire people’s eradication deserves to be told in full. This is among Scorsese’s most important works.

Other things to note include an exceptional support cast, featuring Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, and Jesse Plemons as the Bureau agent who investigates the Osage murders, and director of photography Rodrigo Prieto’s stunning camerawork. With deft skill, Prieto showcases the beauty of the open country while setting it against the moral ugliness of the townsfolk doing Bill’s evil bidding. Popular music from the 1920s, Native American songs and Robbie Robertson’s bluesy score help round off this remarkable Western, a film that will linger in the minds of its audience for a long time.

DETAILS

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro
Release date: October 6 (in cinemas), TBC (on Apple TV+)

There are three key abilities and skills required for building resilience and regaining control over anxiety: self-awareness, self-regulation and self-expression. Self-awareness (know thyself) is all about understanding how our mind and body work, how our experiences shape us into who we are, how environments affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, being able to tune into different levels of intelligence and intuition, and knowing the difference between what is in our control and what is not so that we are not worrying about things that we cannot do anything about.

Self-regulation is our ability to manage our emotions, stress response, nervous system, behaviours and responses, and thinking patterns. This is a key part of good mental health and wellbeing, as we either know how to control our emotions, or they control us. Most addictions, compulsive behaviours, emotional eating or drinking, or risk-seeking behaviours are our attempts to self-regulate, it’s just we do this through harmful processes because no one has ever taught us anything better.

Self-expression is about doing the right things and doing things right. Being able to act in line with what meets our needs and does good for us, the ability to communicate those needs to others, to express and release our emotions in a healthy way, and to perform at our best regardless of external limitations.

Building resilience and self-regulation

If we want to build more resilient organisations that foster employee wellbeing, it’s crucial to include practical tools and self-regulation skills in our ways of working, our personal development opportunities, and workplace design.

There are three neuroscience-based ways we can help to regulate our anxious nervous system: top-down, bottom-up, and outside-in.

The top-down approach is calming down your emotional lower, limbic (or mammalian) parts of the brain by tapping into the power of our human neocortex, prefrontal parts and outer layers of our brain. This involves reasoning, logic, visualisation, having the right information and knowledge, planning and acting on it, and avoiding uncertainty.

The bottom-up approach is calming your brain through the body. This involves having quality sleep and rest, regular exercise and a healthy diet, maintaining the right posture, having the right daily routine and living in sync with your body’s circadian cycles and rhythms.

The outside-in approach is regulating our mind and body through our environment. The way we feel when we are on the beach watching the sunset, how listening to different types of music can induce different emotional states, or why some people energise us while others drain us, are all examples of the impact of our social environment on our physical and mental wellbeing.
Switching off your panic and anxiety attacks

It is important to be able to engage in regular practices that can help us to restore our nervous system to equilibrium, which takes time and patience.

In a moment of panic, however, we can switch off our response with specific grounding exercises and breathing practices. For example, four-eight breathing is one of the most effective tools:

This involves counting the length of your inhales and exhales, starting with an inhale to the count of four, and exhaling for the count of four. Then with every round of breathing, you keep inhalation the same, but add one number to your exhale, until your exhale becomes twice as long as inhale, for example:Inhale for a count of four, and exhale for four.
Inhale for four, exhale for a count of five.
Inhale for four, exhale for six.
Inhale for four, exhale for seven.
Inhale for four, exhale for eight.

Why does this work? Well, because inhale is governed by a sympathetic nervous system (stress, or fight-flight response), while exhale is governed by parasympathetic (rest and digest part of our autonomic nervous system). By consciously controlling our breathing, we can override an automatic response of our autonomic nervous system and regain control over our emotional state.
Redesigning the future

In summary, the way we live and work in the modern world is so far away from how we have evolved to thrive through millions of years of evolution.

If we want to stop unnecessary suffering and poor physical and mental health, it is time to reimagine our environments and ways of working in a way that promotes human sustainability. The future of health and wellbeing is in redefining our relationship with ourselves and the world around us.