🧠 If you have notifications enabled, disable them immediately!

For deep work, you need to disable absolutely all notifications on your phone: messages, social networks, newsletters.

“I just don't pay attention to them! It doesn't distract me!” — if you think the same way, you simply don't realize how notifications steal your attention. We describe not reality itself, but only our experience of perceiving it. You are not “not distracted,” your brain is simply hiding this process from your consciousness.


Psychologists conducted a test using MRI. People were shown cute slides with puppies and kittens for 10 seconds, and between them, for fractions of a second, they inserted photos of snarling animals. In the interview after the experiment, no one remembered seeing a threat. But the tomograph showed the opposite: for those milliseconds, people's amygdala (the emotion control center) flared up, triggering the ancient “fight or flight” reaction. The body instantly spent resources and prepared for an attack, although consciousness noticed nothing.

It's the same with your phone, smartwatch, and laptop:

— The brain is always on alert. Your subconscious reflexively reacts to vibration or a screen flash. As in the picture experiment, your attention resource is already spent, even if you consciously decided “not to look.”

— The attention leakage effect. In 2017, it was proven that the physical presence of a smartphone in your field of vision, even face down, already reduces your cognitive abilities. The brain burns energy in the background to actively suppress the urge to check the phone.

— The switching penalty. After each such micro-distraction, it takes us on average 23 minutes to fully return to a focused working state. That's a lot.


I'm already going to turn them off...

📲 MAX 👮‍♂️ VK ☺️DZEN 🙃 SETKA ✈️ TG #research #effect #brain #attention