Sarah

“simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“If you’re not sleeping well, your body interprets that as an emergency,” Roxanne said. “You can deprive yourself of sleep and live. We could never raise children if we couldn’t drop down on our sleep, right? We’d never survive hurricanes. You can do that—but it comes at a cost. The cost is [that] your body shifts into the sympathetic nervous system zone—so your body is like, ‘Uh-oh, you’re depriving yourself of sleep, must be an emergency, so I’m going to make all these physiological changes to prepare yourself for that emergency. Raise your blood pressure. I’m going to make you want more fast food, I’m going to make you want more sugar for quick energy. I’m going to make your heart-rate [rise].’…So it’s like all this shifts, to say—I’m ready.” Your body doesn’t know why it’s staying awake. “Your brain doesn’t know you’re sleep-deprived because you’re goofing off and watching Schitt’s Creek, right? It doesn’t know why you’re not sleeping—but the net effect is a physiological sort of alarm bell.” In”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“He has analyzed what happens to a person’s focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. I asked him why. He said that “we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.” If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.” Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“the more a child is read storybooks—something the parents, more than the kid, choose—the better they are at reading other people’s emotions.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again