Notifications Are Destroying Your Brain

Long form doesn't just entertain, it literally trains your memory to hold onto goals. You could start with this video. If you finish this video, you just trained your memory. I look at it like this. Long form isn't just entertainment, it is actually medicine for your mind and it's training you every time you complete these videos. Meanwhile, on the other hand, short form chips away at your memory. But it's not the only thief. Even if you never scroll again, your focus will still be hijacked dozens of times every single day. That's the invisible damage of notifications, something I call the notification contamination. We live in a world where we are continuously contaminated with so many notifications. You see, the average person gets between 100 and 150 notifications every single day. You need to think of every single notification as someone tapping you on the shoulder mid-thought, like as if I'm filming this video and somebody's tapping on me and I'm trying not to address it and continue to prove my point. And the scary part is most of us allow it. The look away from the camera to talk to somebody tapping you, most of us will do that. There's this really cool research done by Gloria Marks. It takes 23 minutes to fully refocus after interruption. So when your phone buzzes or someone taps you on the shoulder during work, you don't just lose 10 seconds, which you would think, oh, it's just a few seconds. You're actually losing almost a half hour of clarity. Now, if you multiply that by the number of alerts you get on a single day, you're bleeding hours you never even noticed. But the damage runs even deeper than that. Each ping leaves what psychologists call attention residue, which is a mental ghost of the task you just checked. Which is why even when you complete certain things, you don't feel like they're actually fully done, because there's a residue of the interruption that stained the interaction of whatever you're doing.