Distraction is a vice that we all experience sometimes. Sometimes, however, it becomes catastrophic and makes life difficult for yourself and for everyone around you. Where is it coming from? And how to fight it?

There are situations in whichdispersingcan be beneficial. For example, for an absent-minded child or an absent-minded employee, others will do a lot, as if a distracted person adheres to the principle: "Never be good at something that is not right for you."

In the short run, being distracted helps save energy and effort, which can obscure long-term damage. Chaotic and inconsistent behavior can also have an evolutionary advantage! Such people behave less patternedly, which can lead (at least sometimes) to the formation of new, more adaptive responses. Chaos, as opposed to ordering, is more creative.

So, a beating up here is similar to a genetic mutation: a mutation is a mistake, but this error sometimes leads to new, better behavior. This could make a big difference for the evolution of the species. Perhaps that is why nature has not eliminated such a feature as staring.

Negative effects of beating up

In everyday life, however, distraction is a curse. Maybe it's cute for a 5-year-old, maybe just annoying for a 15-year-old, but definitely harmful for a 25-year-old. A distracted, disordered partner, business associate or associate is a real bane. Even when he does something right, he has gotten everyone used to it that you have to check after him.

A distracted person, however, causes the most trouble - these are material costs (e.g. lost items, requests for payment) and social costs (e.g. conflicts with others, unsettled issues). The first psychologist to seriously try to explain the distraction was Sigmund Freud. It was he who introduced the concept of anal personality to psychology. Freud believed that between the ages of one and three, character traits are formed, which then reveal themselves as either orderly or messy.

Freud's views are controversial, because he believed that the main factor shaping the personality at this age is so-called cleanliness training - teaching a child to potty. When, under the influence of his parents, a 2-year-old stops making poop in a diaperimmediately and goes to the potty, this forms an important quality in his character: the ability to control reflexes, strong will. And when he educates her, he will also be able to control his impulses, so for example he will clean up after himself, take the necessary items, remember about his duties before he runs after something new. Unfortunately, it may also be that parents allow their child to run in a diaper until the age of five and take care of themselves whenever they feel like it.

Such a child will not be able to oppose his impulses: he will start doing something, but will not finish, because in a moment he will do something else, he will make a mess, spread (also money), live in chaos, as if they are stimuli and impulses they guided them, and it did not guide them.

A two-year-old's personality can distort differently as well. If parents start teaching cleanliness too soon, or the training is too strict, the child will become overly prone to impulse control. Such children will grow up to be pedantic, perfectionist and formalistic adults who must be extremely orderly, controlled, and structured around them, being stingy and erratic. The slightest deviation from the established order causes fear in them, so they check several times if the door is closed, the iron is turned off, etc.

Problem

Something always falls over, spills, breaks or breaks. I just can't see that I am placing the pot on the gauze or the glass askew on the edge of the table. My memory is tragic: I leave my shopping bag in the store, I forget where I attached my bike, I must have lost hundreds of pairs of glasses. I can leave my credit card on the counter in the store, so the phone number for blocking the card is coded in "favorites". Only that I lose my phone as often as my card … and maybe that's a good thing, because when I go for a new one, it usually turns out that I have a few unpaid bills. Calls for payment are my bread and butter, and latecomers are my middle name. I have promised myself a million times not to put coffee on the pile of invoices on my desk, to do the things that have to be done right away. But I still act like the last orphan.

Scattering or rebellion?

Freud's views have grown to believe that absent-mindedness can also be a manifestation of rebellion. A mess in a teenager's room is not only a distraction, but also a poster: "You cannot force me, I will not listen to you and what will you do to me?" This is the message of scattered clothes, lost pencils, plates not taken to the kitchen and an unmade bed: "I will not be a trained dog."

If chaos is an expression of rebellion, it is rooted in conflicts between adults andkids. A child who cannot, is afraid or is unable to express his objection in a more mature way (e.g. in conversation with his parents and by creating compromises) or in open clashes and always loses with his parents, will rebel in a hidden way: a mess , smoking, having premature sex, swearing and breaking other adult standards. As these habits become established over the years, they will become part of the personality. As one of the clients of the psychotherapy office said: "Drinking alcohol while driving a car is twice as pleasant, and I hate cleaning."

This will be useful to you

Currently, there is a fashion for the so-called mindfulness - various types of training aimed at developing an attentive and conscious perception of the world. These techniques have been known and practiced for a long time, e.g. by meditating yogis.

Distracted people should also know how the brain works - when it needs a break, how long it can work without fatigue, which gives signals that it is exhausted and starts to fail. More down-to-earth activities are helpful: using calendars, creating he althier habits (e.g. not postponing, making a habit of checking a task afterwards, putting things back), limiting the number of items you carry with you, creating to-do lists, etc. These habits are most easily shaped in children. Another strategy works well for children: “My daughter lost something at school every now and then. In the end, we agreed that at the beginning of the school year we would buy her everything she needed, but if she later lost something due to her own inattention, she would buy it back from pocket money. One day she came home without a hat. As she noticed, she ran to school and found her. Today, the amount of things she gets lost is much smaller. "

Personality change by changing the environment works quite well. According to this belief, if you want to organize your thoughts, first organize the world around you and your interior will adjust to it. If you live fine, your inner world will also be orderly; if you live in chaos, you will also have chaos in your head.

Disordered personality

Being distracted may have causes independent of upbringing. If we look deep into the human soul, it turns out that some personality traits have a biological basis and are dependent on temperament, drives, etc., and not on upbringing. Conscientiousness is such a genetically determined personality trait. For biological reasons, some people possess this trait to a high degree and others to a low degree. The former are organized, trustworthy,Disciplined, punctual, thorough and obligatory, while others are inattentive, weak-willed, lazy, unorganized, impractical, carefree and sloppy. Research shows that this trait evolves with age: as people mature, people become more conscientious. This is optimistic because psychologists have found that a high level of conscientiousness goes hand in hand with an extended life.

Problem

Attention wink

In one experiment, people were asked to look at letters that quickly appeared on the screen. Their task was to detect if there was a blue letter among the blacks and if there was a letter K immediately after it.

Some of the respondents had a problem with this: they could spot the blue letter correctly, but did not know what followed. Psychologists call it attention blinking - with some people focusing on one thing "wipes out" other stimuli from their consciousness. And this is how a scatterbrained person works: he forgets about his credit card, because he is just packing his purchases, unless he focuses on remembering the card, but then he forgets his bags.

Unfortunately, this mechanism may intensify under the pressure of time and emotional tension. This means that if someone really wants to remember what they heard on the phone, they will forget where they put that phone away.

The matter is complicated by the fact that chaos causes stress, so distracted people live in increased stress, which may increase their tendency to forget about various things … The circle is closed.

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Psychology