Is Multitasking Actually Leaving You Overstimulated and Depressed?

Life gets a little hectic in September. Kids go back to school. Work demands ramp up as you reset your focus after a summer that may not have been as rejuvenating as you had hoped.

Before long, you may find yourself multitasking. This may be your typical mode of operation throughout your life, or you may only fall back on it when you feel your to-do list is too long.

Either way, there’s one important question we hope you’ll ask. Is multitasking actually helping you?

What Are Some Signs of Multitasking?

If you’re not sure whether you have a tendency to multitask, consider these signs:

• You have a high number of tabs or windows open on your screen, causing you to easily lose your place.
• Frequently, you have to ask for more time to complete your work or get back to people, even your friends and family.
• You constantly check your phone for texts, emails and other updates that, when we really think about it, can probably wait.
• Seemingly, everywhere you look, you see sticky notes.

As you can see from those examples, modern technology plays a role in multitasking. While smartphones have certainly made our lives more convenient and nimble, they’ve also made us easily distracted beings.

What Is the Harm in Multitasking?

For many people, multitasking feels natural. They’ve been doing it so long that they can’t imagine navigating their daily lives any other way. Some folks even believe it’s an essential part of their personality.

We can all benefit from appreciating some facts about the harms of multitasking and its associated behaviors:

• Multitasking increases our stress levels.
• We may sharply experience anxiety because of this behavior.
• It becomes harder to live in the moment, and those around us will often notice that we find it difficult to remain present.
• The quality of our work suffers.
• Our ability to learn decreases.
• Memory’s essential components, processing and recall, become less reliable.
• We make ourselves more susceptible to depression.
• Burnout becomes likely.

Clearly, the downside of multitasking illuminates why we should avoid the practice.

What Is Overstimulation?

Multitasking can frequently leave us feeling overstimulated. We can think of overstimulation as a kind of stress or anxiety. Here are signs you’ve become overstimulated:

• Increased heart rate
• Realizing you’re anxious or highly stressed
• Dizziness
• Irritability
• Insomnia
• Inability to focus
• Ringing in your ears
• Panic attacks
• Depression

Long-term overstimulation is not good for anyone’s health. You’ll enjoy a happier, fuller and likely longer life if you decrease your potential for overstimulation by avoiding the practice of multitasking.

Has Multitasking Been Conclusively Debunked?

This high level of distraction makes us seem like we’re getting things done. In fact, we’re just overly busy. When we’re too busy, we can easily feel like we’ve lost control of our daily lives.

Over the last few decades, researchers have thoroughly studied multitasking. They have found that the practice is largely detrimental.

In 2019, a co-authored journal article in Cerebrum offered, “One critical finding to emerge is that we inflate our perceived ability to multitask: there is little correlation with our actual ability. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”

Further, the authors state, “We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another.”

In summary, multitasking is actually an unattainable goal and an unfortunate behavior.

What Is the Solution to Multitasking?

We all have an alternative. After all, we’re not built to multitask. Instead, we can single-task, which is what we actually do when attempting to multitask. We move one task forward a bit, then another. Ultimately, multitasking is merely inefficient, back-and-forth single-tasking.

Fortunately, this means we can think of consciously single-tasking as multitasking’s solution.

Do You Need a New Form of Stimulation to Help You Get Back on Track?

None of us needs to live an all-over-the-place life. And some of us just need a nudge to get ourselves back on track. That nudge may help you get out of a period of recurring depression that has recently arisen.

What’s this gentle nudge? We call it transcranial magnetic stimulation. We offer this modern therapy at WIN-TMS. Our therapy sets itself positively apart from other attempts to address depression:

• This therapy does not require medication.
• It’s convenient.
• More than 80% of our patients report improvement in their lives.
• Insurance covers our treatment.

To learn more about TMS therapy in Milwaukee, talk to us today.