The Attention Chronicles pair nuggets of research with small stories to help distracted and wandering minds find their way back home.
I. Small Change
Loss of habits, like loss of habitat, can leave a person wandering, cut off from the root, wondering what to do next.
We live in a time of excellent guidance about how to create and change habits, but there is a period between the end of one habit and the beginning of the next of which it is harder to speak. Maybe it lasts a week, maybe a decade. Habits break somewhere every day: a straight-A student falls in with a loose crowd, a marriage blows up, a pandemic shutters public institutions and sends everyone home. And so on. We make them, break them, and make them again, one minute, then five, then fifteen, and eventually: the new thing.
After as little as five minutes of a moderate-vigorous physical activity (i.e., running) four days a week, a class of second grade children was able to concentrate more, the teacher was able to complete more activities, math fluency increased, and the daily classroom routines and overall grades of the students . . . improved as a result.
— Julienne K. Maeda and Lynn M. Randall, “Can Academic Success Come from Five Minutes of Physical Activity?” Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice, vol. 13, no. 1, 2003, pp. 14-22.
I began by deciding that I’d try to put in only about six hours of solid writing each day. . . . [M]y body and brain were resisting even this level of effort. . . . Ninety minutes a day, then? No go. An hour? Forget it? Half an hour? Nope. But when I got to fifteen minutes, I noticed a dramatic shift in my body and my mood. . . .
— Martha Beck, Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live (Three Rivers Press, 2001), pp. 321-322.
Anyone can meditate for one minute, read one page, or put one item of clothing away. . . . [O]nce you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
— James Clear, Atomic Habits (Penguin Random House, 2018), 160, 163.
II. The First Five
Begin
I hold on to the memory of that delicious interval of life that had no alarm clock.
To wake meant to pass through the tissue from dream to memory of dream led by imagination --
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