Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting article the other day: Why We’re Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data. Like many headlines, this one exaggerates for the sake of effect, but Gomez does present some food for thought. He suggests that the human mind is as hard-wired to notice new information as a cat is hard-wired to chase a laser spot. He says that explains why some people get “addicted” to the Web.
He talks in terms of websites, but the allure of new information also extends to e-mail, watching TV, listening/watching/reading the news, and even to chatting on the cell phone. We’re all different and have our favorite forms of stimulation. Mine happens to be solving puzzles/problems. Last week I mentioned I had started doing some Word Jumbles to warm me up for doing my income tax, but I really got hooked on doing them. I didn’t worry about it too much, I just indulged until I finished the book so it would no longer sit around tempting me. But that excitement was powerful.
And power like that isn’t bad. It’s simply motivation we can learn to use wisely. I turned my fascination with problem solving into a career. My favorite nightmare used to be that I had to go on a business trip and couldn’t pull myself away from work to go home, pack, and rush to the airport. By now I’ve learned to be careful setting goals and making To Do lists…I recognize my tendency to be compulsive and simply plan around it. The trick is to have more than one thing that can grab my attention. For instance, it’s easy to pull myself away from projects to exercise every day because I have interesting DVDs to watch while I use my NordicTrack treadmill. It’s simply a matter of balancing one pleasure against another to be highly effective.
I learned this trick years ago when I stopped a preoccupation with food by finding something I enjoyed even better than eating. It took quite a while to find it…as the saying goes, “Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” But it turned out learning to play the piano stimulated the pleasure centers in my brain enough to do the trick.
Item #2 of the Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People is
The first step is awareness, not only uncovering what we really want in life so we have a direction to go in, but also noticing what grabs our attention so we have the power to get there.
What about you? What grabs your attention? How can you harness this power wisely? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
Thanks to bikehikebabe for commenting on last week’s post.
What grabs me is I want to be strong. At 75, it’s hard & I can’t meet my expectations. Here’s where “Change what you can…etc….& know the difference”, helps.
What grabbed me in this Post is about addiction to the Internet. In response to my doctor I said, “But the Internet said….” She said, “If I want 100 different opinions, I’ll read the Internet.”
bikehikebabe,
Thanks for coming by! One of my favorite phrases is “Doing the best I can with what I have left.” My mother-in-law used to love hearing that.