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Mindfulness for Organizations: Action Addiction with Rasmus Hougaard, Managing Director, The Potential Project
Action Addiction
Nowadays we have entered what could be called an attention economy. Just a few decades ago three of the fundamentals of business was to have actually time, then have the ability to plan and prioritize your time, and to have the right competencies. What we see how where our attention is under siege constantly is that a strong, calm, and clear attention is becoming just as important for our organizational and business success.
When we are bombarded with information all the time the brain by default wants to solve all of it, engage with all of it at the same time, which makes us multitask. When we multitask we’re losing the sense of what is important in this moment and what comes out of that is that we all become, more or less, action addicts. Action addicts is when we are addicted to action and it comes from a very simple neurological phenomenon, a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Every time we accomplish one small task, whether that’s replying to an email or sending a text message, a little bit of dopamine is released in the brain. Now dopamine is a reward drug it makes us feel well, but it’s also highly addictive. So what happens is that we want to do more small tasks. And that way action addiction is created.
Now mindfulness can really help us to get away from action addiction because that lowers our craving for dopamine. But also mindfulness can help us by day to day, moment to moment stay focused on those tasks that are really important for us to perform.
Performance Breaks
A really powerful way of avoiding to become action addicts is to keep what I would call performance breaks. Performance breaks is a 45 second break that you keep every one hour and really simply what you do is you set a timer to remind you every hour so you don’t forget. And when that timer goes off you just let go of your work for a moment, take deep three in breaths and three out breaths focusing your mind on just this moment. And then you return to work again. What it will help you to do is to get out of the action addiction role. Get out of just doing things and refocus on what is really important right now. Basically resetting your mind every one hour.
Email Techniques
Mindfulness can very much change our way of dealing with emails. There are specifically three things in our way of dealing with emails where mindfulness can help us. The first thing is not to do emails first thing in the morning, simply because when we get up in the morning our mind is most fresh, most focused, has the biggest sense of priorities. The moment we open our inbox we’ll be bombarded with 50 details that have come in since last night which will make us more detail oriented and it will make us oriented towards the past instead of the future. The second thing we do around emails is to kill all of our notifications. When we kill notifications we don’t get unnecessarily interrupted and start to shift our attention every time an email pops up. The third thing that I would strongly recommend is, in general, to close down your email application when you’re not using it. Email is one of the biggest factors of multitasking and action addiction. So if you actually allow yourself time slots during the day, maybe an hour or two once in a while where you shut down the email, you’ll be able to more impactful focus on whether it’s a conversation or it’s an important report you have to write. So allocate time slots for emails and time slots where you can focus on other important things.