100 Days of Wonder — Day 8
Autopilot
For the next few posts, I want to talk about living in autopilot. I had a client mention to me recently about how internally distracted she is at the moment. She can be watching TV or helping her kids and then suddenly realises she hasn’t really been paying attention for who knows how long. ‘Why does this happen, and how do I stop it?’
We all know this feeling, don’t we? So much of our life is in autopilot. Unconsciously going from one activity to another. One responsibility to another. One obligation to another. Now, however, the ‘busy work’ of many of our days is gone, which should, theoretically, leave us more time to think, to focus, to ‘be.’ But of course we are in the midst of a pandemic, and so our brains are continuously managing new thoughts — processing processing processing. And while most of that processing happens behind the scenes, some of it pops into our consciousness too, distracting us, tugging at us, pulling us out of the moment.
So why does this happen? A bit about your brain. (Hello, brain!) That 3lb mass of grey matter is an efficient beast — or certainly tries to be. It’s constantly weighing up decisions, determining if they can be managed in autopilot or if they require some deeper consideration. And to do this it makes a lot of assumptions, but when there is a great deal of uncertainty, assumptions become harder, and distractions grow. (Daniel Kahneman does an amazing job of explaining a version of two system thinking in more detail in his masterpiece Thinking Fast and Slow.)
The best way to describe this is to use your laptop as an example. Most of the time our laptops are in sleep mode, waiting to be called into action. It does this to save battery power (as do our noggins) but there is a lot still going on in the background. It’s receiving emails, running programs, sharing your personal data with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica — the usual. Your brain is similar. It has areas called the basel ganglia and the default mode network (sounds like something managed by the IT department, right?) and these just chug along doing their thing, helping keep you alive. They’re the parts of your brain that let you continue to breathe while you sleep or helps you walk and chew gum at the same time. But as soon as we are awakened — choke on our gum or trip on the curb — the frontal lobe and its powerhouse, the prefrontal cortex, is engaged. This is good, as this part of our brain is associated with executive functioning and decision making. But that shift and subsequent thinking takes energy, and our brains are efficient (read:lazy), so it avoids this shift if it can.
This autopilot is helpful in most circumstances as it keeps us from becoming overwhelmed by all the stimuli we are exposed to on a daily basis, but it’s a balancing act. Too many assumptions and we miss things we should’ve seen. (Most rear-end collisions stem from distraction.) Too much stimuli and the prefrontal cortex wants to take charge again, which can lead to stress and sometimes overload — a bit like when you ask your computer to do eighteen things at once and you get the ‘spinny waity wheel’ (that’s a technical term isn’t it?!) Or even worse, the blue screen of death. And so it goes, this miraculous cerebral dance, every millisecond of every minute of every day — a balance between paying too little attention and too much attention. And also a tug of war between being present and being ‘somewhere else.’
So how do we get the balance right? Some ideas on that tomorrow! But in the meantime, give some consideration to the wonderous miracle that is your brain, and, until then, #GoInWonder.
(I write on Medium about what moves me. Feel free to pop on over to HATCH for more workplace related content.)
