“When walking, walk. When eating, eat.”
– Zen proverb –
If someone asked you to finish an urgent project, and then kept adding more urgent projects for you to complete at the same time, would you feel stressed? Your answer is likely yes because when demands exceed abilities, stress typically follows.
This stressful juggling of tasks is also known as “multitasking”. It’s an epidemic in our technology-addicted society and it’s time to understand how it’s negatively impacting our minds, bodies and health.
This post will teach you that:
- multitasking doesn’t actually exist (doing more than one thing at a time is actually not possible, as you’ll learn),
- trying to juggle multiple activities at once is a stress on the body and brain, and
- multitasking puts stress on the body which can impair digestion and negatively impact your body and mind in other ways.
MULTI-TASKING DOESN’T EXIST
Let’s get clear about “multitasking”. It simply doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. When you ‘multitask’, you’re not actually doing multiple things at once. In reality, you’re switching between tasks (albeit in some cases, quite quickly). Unfortunately, this fast-paced juggling uses up the same glucose (aka energy) in your body that your brain needs to simply focus.
Think about a fitness class where you have to run back and forth between obstacles. This is what you’re doing to your brain when you’re asking it to run back and forth between tasks. If you apply this analogy to juggling multiple projects at once, neither task is getting completed to the best of your ability, the entire act of juggling leaves you mentally and physically exhausted, and simply, you end up, to some degree, activating your Stress Response.
MULTI-TASKING WHILE EATING COMPROMISES DIGESTION
When your body is under stress, it produces a chemical response that tells your body that its life is at risk. This Stress Response compromises all major systems in your body – reproduction, immunity, repair, digestion, and more. The circulation of blood (which contains oxygen and nutrients) intended for those systems is shunted so that instead, the blood can go to your brain and muscles in order to fight or flee.
Now think about when you multitask while eating. You might be trying to eat while watching TV, driving, texting, reading, Googling, walking, arguing, etc. Multitasking while trying to digest food is like having a huge project to complete, but you keep getting interrupted with little side tasks. This means digestion (your body’s big project) doesn’t get done well or at all. Why? Because:
- you’re likely not anticipating food which signals your body to create powerful little digestive enzymes that help digest food (because your focus is elsewhere),
- you’re likely not chewing properly which isn’t helping to break foods down into easily digestible components,
- sufficient acid is not being produced in your stomach, helping to break down food into digestible components, and
- your team of digestive organs are working overtime trying to make up for what your stomach is now unable to do.
When it comes to digestion, this lack of circulation can keep you from properly digesting food which means your body and mind (those 100 trillion cells) are not getting the necessary vitamins and minerals and fuel they need to do their jobs properly. This can wreak havoc on your digestive system, your intestinal lining, and gut flora, resulting in several other problems such as leaky gut, allergies, fatigue, depression, cognitive imbalance, and also more serious disease.
If that’s not enough to convince you to slooooow dowwwwwn and do one thing at a time, I’m sure you’d agree that multitasking also keeps you from paying attention – to your environment, to others, and to your body. And having space to be able to listen to your body is a critical component to achieving optimal health. Multitasking, without a doubt, gets in the way of an individual’s ability to listen to their body. You cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. Your body and brain were simply not built for it.
👩🏫 Do you know how much Hidden Stress you’re putting on your body and brain? Test your stress smarts by taking the What’s Your Hidden Stress Score Quiz.
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