Zoë’s Reviews > Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again > Status Update

Our bodies think that lack of sleep is an emergency, so they prepare by raising blood pressure, wanting more fast food, wanting more sugar for quick energy, etc.

Keeping that in mind, I paid attention to how I felt when I did get enough sleep, and I really did seem to eat healthier without effort, just because I felt like it.

It should go without saying, yet needs to be said: "you are more efficient when you are rested... it takes you less time to do things."

Rest is not the opposite of productivity; it's in many ways the prerequisite. Now if only I could learn to implement this in practice.

"One day I woke up w/o any alarms after sleeping for nine hours and realized that I didn't want any coffee. This was such an alien sensation.... Then it finally occurred to me what I was feeling—I had awoken from my sleep feeling fully refreshed. My body didn't feel heavy. I was alert. As the weeks passed, I realized that I felt like this every day. The last time I remembered feeling like this was when I was a child"

"After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn't care.... I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace.... I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back!"

"It was hard. I didn't particularly enjoy it. But the next day, conscious that I had to retrain my habits, I made myself do the same. And so it went on, day after day. I struggled. I disciplined myself.

By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come... and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it."

"Once I knew [about flow], I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been."

Oof. A bit harsh for those of us with young children.

"We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner's vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—"

"Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she's not going to get into flow bc it's too easy. If she's suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won't get into flow either because she'll freak out."

Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.