Cognitive Fatigue - Context Switching

This is the start of a series of episodes that dive deeper into potential factors that can contribute towards the experience of cognitive fatigue, which at best can leave us experiencing occasional brain fog or mental tiredness and at worse could be a large contributor to burnout. 

Today's episode focuses on the role that context switching can play and how that can appear in your day to day life.

An exercise that can be used to increase focus and reduce context switching for a few minutes is the exercise of "Engaging the Senses" and can be listened to by clicking the link below;

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2569749/episodes/18879080

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hello and welcome to another episode of Small Steps with me, your host Stephen Davis from Interactive Therapy. The next few uh episodes are going to focus on the breakdown of a topic that I encounter more and more frequently in my work, that of cognitive fatigue. Now when I talk about cognitive fatigue, I'm referring to issues with concentration and focus, brain fog, maybe feeling disproportionately exhausted, or mentally sluggish, and struggles with decision making, amongst other potential issues. The idea for this series was triggered when listening to a client describe the impact that increased use of AI was having in the workplace. And this inspired me to look into the concept of AI fatigue, and a little research into the topic highlighted ways in which the use of artificial intelligence tools could be impacting well-being. But the foundations of AI fatigue, or AI brain fry as it's also referred to, are not that dissimilar to general triggers for cognitive fatigue. So I chose to address cognitive fatigue in its general state. If you recognise any of the symptoms of cognitive fatigue in yourself, then hopefully the small steps in the coming weeks will provide you with some alternative paths to improvement. In today's episode, we'll focus on what is called context switching and how this can play a big role in contributing to cognitive fatigue. The term context switching can probably be best described in relation to an action that you've most likely heard of, that of multitasking. It's important to be aware that activities that we engage in trigger responses from the brain, and dependent on what that task involves, specific networks in the brain will be fired up in order to help us understand what we're doing, recall how we may have done this activity or something similar in the past, and then carry it out, whether that be a mental or physical action. So an example. Imagine you're doing something simple, like laundry. Now there are natural processes that the brain will go through carrying out each stage of this activity. It will begin with determining which clothes need to be washed, separating clean from dirty clothing, for example. Then from that initial sorting, you may make a determination about the specific type of clothing that you're washing. Is it a dark or light load? Is there clothing that requires a hotter wash or a cooler wash? Or are there specific garments that are made from a certain type of material? Once these determinations are made, the items will be collected together, put in the machine and the necessary wash program started. These are the kind of cognitive processes and neural pathways that will be fired to work through and close this activity loop. But now imagine that you're in the middle of organizing your laundry and you get, say, an email notification on your phone. Now it would probably not surprise you to know that the neural processes needed to organise a load of washing differ from those required to understand and process and then respond to an email. Not only that, but awareness of this notification may then remind you of something that you still need to do. It could be answer a question that you had or require you to take further action. So what does this all mean? Well put simply, the laundry process that you were just in has been hijacked by another activity. You were busy with the laundry one minute and now you're busy with an email. So much so that you may actually temporarily forget about your washing. This second task has taken your brain onto a completely different neural pathway to the pathway needed to do laundry. And then imagine your phone lights up again with a text message. The context switches once again. Now even if distraction is fleeting, the disturbance for your brain can be significant. So much so that a break of focus from a task that requires deeper concentration can lead to an individual requiring 15 to 20 minutes to get back into the same mental space they were before the distraction took place. Another problem caused by continual context switching is that you may leave a trail of half done activity loops behind you. In this example, a load of washing that still needs to be started, an email that you've read but not responded to, and a text message thrown in for good measure. Three open loops that require completion. This is incredibly tiring for your brain. What's more, this kind of sequence of events is becoming ever more commonplace, making it a large contributor to cognitive fatigue over time. So for this exercise, I'd like to encourage you to carve out a short period of singular focus. Start with 5 or 10 minutes, and over time increase the amount of these moments throughout your day before extending the amount of time spent engaged. Now there are steps that you can take to enable this moment of focus. Firstly, select a time of day and the activity that you're going to engage with. Be concrete. Aim for something small. And if possible, not involving a device. But if you do need your device for reading, say, or journaling, then ensure notifications are turned off. So put it on a do not disturb mode. Consider whether you could also benefit from carrying out your activity in a specific environment. Maybe you need a quiet room, and there's something like that in your house, or in a local library. Or maybe somewhere out in nature is more beneficial. There's an exercise that's already on the podcast, the engaging in senses exercise, which may be perfect for this purpose. And I've included a link to that episode in the description below. Be aware that when first trying out this exercise, you may find yourself switching focus without the need of external disruptions. This may be a sign that your focus is so used to shifting that it now just happens automatically. But this really reinforces the importance of doing such an exercise to regain your focus. Should this happen, simply guide your attention back to the activity you have chosen to focus on and continue from where you left off. All the best.