Emotional Multitasking

April 30, 2018

Greetings from the valence,

Scientists have shown that our brain can really concentrate fully on only one thing at a time.  When we do many things at one time, something suffers.  We often have to access different places of the brain for different activities.  Combine that with the eyes and hands and whatever else the body must coordinate and the best we can accomplish is doing one thing poorly while being distracted by the other.

We can fool ourselves into thinking we are good at multitasking by doing simple things we already have built in on autopilot.  Making toast while talking on the phone.  As soon as things get more demanding the success rate goes down.

I have finally given in to the notion that I am not the exception to this rule.  My effectiveness, and my satisfaction about the effort, goes up when I can fully focus on a task at hand.  I will admit that even knowing this I am constantly challenging the truth of it by doing at least one too many things at once.

And so I will share here that I take some strange satisfaction that I am a master of emotional multitasking.  An easy example is being embarrassed that I that I burned the toast while I was talking on the phone but in the same moment so happy that no one was in the kitchen to see it.

Emotions come as they are needed, and almost always come in clusters.  Sometimes conflicting clusters, some more amenable.  We are designed to function pretty well even when we are emotionally multitasking.

When he was about ten years old, I lost my son Harrison in Tijuana.  Just writing that sentence gave me a brief shudder of terror.  One minute he was standing right next to me, and then he was gone.

When I found him five minutes later I multitasked emotions at the Black Belt level.  I was elated to see him, angry that he had wandered off, and somewhere in that hysteria, afraid of having to explain the whole thing to his mother.

Or this smorgasbord; winning a raffle. You won: happiness.  Your friend lost: sadness.  You won: pride in the victory.  You won a random drawing that required no skill or effort other than entering, which is what everyone did: humility.

There is some happy moments that will move you to tears.  Seeing your daughter take her first step and in that moment knowing she is on her way to being independent from you.  This kind of ‘bitter sweet’ moment is what seasons the best parts of our lives.  If I knew how to practice for it I would do it.

“I don’t know how to feel.”  I heard this after my Dad passed away.  Grief raged of course, and in the same experience there was a relief, almost a gladness, that his suffering was over.  In truth we do know how to feel, we are simply using a capacity we are not always comfortable with.

There is a more common example of multitasking your emotions which I stumbled on this week while reading about procrastination.  Sometimes when we are faced with a task, say writing an essay at 5:00 a.m. Monday morning, we become paralyzed by dueling emotions.  On the one hand we are eager to do the task, but in the same moment we are afraid of failing or doing less than our best.  The result can be procrastination, sometimes until almost 7:00 a.m.

I am playing a little fast and loose with the definitions of emotion.  Depending on who you ask there are between four and seven core emotions and the everything else is a derivation of those.  Regardless, we experience them singly and in groups on a regular basis, and quite often even the conflicting pairings offer a rich experience. 

One of the most common exercises in this mode is nostalgia; feeling slightly sad about being happy in the past.  As enjoyable as it is sometimes, I have to resist it.  It is too easy to forget how much there is to enjoy in the present when dwelling on the good times that are now only clicks of the synapse.

One way to stay present is to practice being happy or grateful about more than one thing at a time.  It is part list making and part being completely aware of the fullness of life.  What comes of a few minutes of this is a wide range of emotions, including joy, but also all of those that contrast happiness, that make happiness what it is. 

I will tell you here, that if you are going to procrastinate, it’s not a bad way to pass an hour.

Hope this finds you a master,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith