###### 🔑 Multitasking fractures our Focus Our [[💡 Focus & Concentration|Focus]] is often fractured, both by corporations and by choice. - TV and phone - TV and eating - Homework and YouTube - Social media in class - On the phone while out with friends - YouTube interrupted by advertisements - Notifications from multiple apps at once [[Social Media]] platforms like YouTube, reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok are especially aggregious. Before we’ve finished one thing, we’re pulled toward another, with little continuity between them. We’re pulled from the adorable, to the infuriating, to the thought-provoking, to the violent like a hooked fish. It destroys our attention span and wrecks our nervous system. But doing many things at once actually **diffuses** our attention. Even if it’s just two things, we don’t get a 50-50 split. The more we try to do at once, the more exponentially diluted our attention becomes. We don’t go in multiple directions at the same time — we go *nowhere*. > [!info] > In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjun that in order to control the mind he has to control the sense organs. He tells Arjun to think of his senses as five horses, each of them running in a different direction. Take the horses and attach them to a chariot. If you control them, the chariot goes where you want it to. Don’t, and it goes nowhere or even breaks. We often never notice what we lose by using our attention this way. We don’t notice what we don’t notice, so in order to really see it we often have to deliberately slow down, way down, and see what happens when we pay very close attention to one thing. This could be during [[🕯️ Meditation 🧘|Meditation]] or while [[👟 Walking|Walking]] or exploring, while we eat or even [[🧘 Pratyahara#Kaya Shtiram (Body Stillness)|sit perfectly still]]. [^1]: