Over-allocated Attention and the Associated Stress - DBR 077

Our attention is over-allocated by a nexus of events. This episode is what to do about that.

 

I'm gonna acknowledge something that I'm not a big fan of. Apparently April is stress awareness month. So, if you weren't aware of stress, stress is a thing. I think most of us are aware of it.

 

I don't want to be a curmudgeon but oh my word. Yes, I'm already aware of all of the different months that have some awareness attached to that.

 

About stress…

My promise to you is: if you practice good attention management, that will lead to a new level of productivity for you. That productivity will interact with your level of stress around 1) your to-do list and 2) the information that you need to manage such that your level of stress will go down.

In this episode, I'm going to try and do a couple of different things.

 

One is I'm going to tell you a little bit about stress. I’ll give you a great resource around stress.

 

Two is we're going to talk about a really strange notion in our modern world; it's called contentment. If you've never heard that word before I get it, and we'll talk about what that is. Stress versus contentment and achieving some sense of peace, calmness, and clarity. And dare I say it, happiness?

 

This is all based on our attention and the fact that we're at a nexus of events. These events are colliding such that the world is putting us, more precisely our attention, under intense pressure. The intensity of pressure is something that we have not dealt with before, as a culture, as a society.

 

There’s an attention-based stress challenge. Society and culture are placing huge demands on us. It's not a published demand; nobody notified you that this would be happening. That set of forces is the third thing that we'll talk about today.

 

What is stress? 

• Stress is the difference between our expectation and what we experience in reality
• In this sense, it is closely related to frustration. The feeling is like frustration
• The Myth of Stress – Andrew Bernstein
• The only way to deal with it is to learn new expectations (not easy)
• Our stated expectation – this is just a busy time (month, quarter) – is not reality
• Also, there seems to be an unstated assumption that we’ll just get better at this as a culture or society. Another false expectation

Contentment

• Example of escalating expectations: the notion of a 'prom-posal'
• The only term I can come up with at present is: child inflation.
• Contentment is counter-cultural
• The present culture has associated contentment with inability - inability to achieve - or poverty, inability to pay for it. We don't want to be seen as incapable of living up to this cultural Norm

The factors around our attention

• Fact 1: the level of attention getting is higher than ever. We’re all trying to get each other’s attention. The level is rising
• Fact 2: our levels of information and communication are continuing to rise
• Fact 3: more of us are using our attention as our productive asset
• Fact 3.5 we are the most entertained society in history And entertainment is a pleasant deployment of our attention.
• We feel trapped in our frustration over attention

My hypothesis is that we wandered into this situation and, therefore, we don't have good tactics to deal with it. That's what I do: give you good tactics to deal with the information- and task-based claims on your attention. That will lower your stress and help you perform better in work.

 

Email me with comments or questions: [e-mail]

 

And connect with me on LinkedIn to see occasional announcements on episodes and other stuff: www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble (please mention the podcast).