Distraction is Critically Damaging

What is distraction? In general sense, distraction means being trackless. Track is a path. It can be a path to success, achieving something, managing something, getting something and so on.

The whole thing can be visualized through a metaphor. A man wants to reach a destination. For that, he brings a map and finalizes a plan with necessary resources.

One good day, he starts his journey. In reaching his destination, he may be obstructed by many things. For example, he may wrongly choose a map and thereby follow a wrong destination, necessary resources may be erroneously calculated, there may more traffic on the road, his vehicle may breakdown, an accident may occur and he may get injured and so on.

Distraction will certainly cause the person some damage in terms of money, convenience, safety. In general sense, the person will be greatly disturbed and even, in some cases, he may fail to reach the destination as well. But that is not always the case. Distraction can also be a catalyst for changing chronic bad habits. The later paragraphs will try to discover how.

What is habit?

Habit is an activity which is done repeatedly. Almost 95% of our daily activities repeat every day whether it is good or bad. Distraction happens when a person can not do these in a regular fashion.

For example, a man starts a new diet plan but he fizzles out after few days. Many factors can make him distract such as foods, hunger, luxury, ill plan, wrong plan even stress, frustration, anxiety as well.

There are three important element in each habit; a cue, routine and reward. A cue is something that makes somebody crave for that.

For example, it can be a mouth watering flavor of a delicious dish, coming from a roadside restaurant, which forces people to purchase that food.

Here, flavor is the cue, which forces to do the activity repeatedly. That means it becomes a habit because of that great smell. The reward is the satisfaction after having it.

How does distraction take place?

Distraction will take place if three elements of habit change. For example, if the flavor mentioned earlier changes or it becomes a bad odor. Secondly, if the routine changes, it will affect the habit of taking that food. Another thing is that reward. For example, if somebody one day has stomach upset, it will surely affect the intention for taking that food again.

What happens when a person gets distracted? Generally, it will certainly create disturbance, arrogance, resistance, protest, violence and even worse situation in many cases. Think of a child’s tendency to crave for a chocolate, watching cartoon or other pursuits. If it is deprived from these, it starts to protest.

Distraction can be used to kill bad habits

It can actually be used as a medicine against bad habits. A person may get rid of a bad habit if s/he can distract himself/herself consciously from that very bad habit.

For example, a chain smoker smokes daily for ten times. He can consciously reduce that number gradually. He knows himself that he is being distracted.

Moreover, he can look out for his smoking timing as well. He may feel like smoking in joyous moment, tense moment, or in a frustrated moment. He may become conscious about that and purposefully distract himself.

In spite of strong trigger, he tries to resist. If the habit has already been a pathological one, it would be really tough. But distraction with the mixture of strong will power, belief, motivation and desire surely has the capability to win against the odds.

Distraction will cause severe discomfort but in the long run, it will be paying. The rule is that one has to distract the cue, routine or reward in order to attack a bad habit.

Why is knowledge about distraction more necessary than that of attention?

Actually, paying attention to something will be easier when there is a consciousness about the things which cause distraction in us. Sometimes, a necessity is felt to pay more attention on one thing but somebody is not aware of the things which cause distraction. As a result s/he can not focus properly and only trying to pay attention does not become successful.

For example, a parent is trying to develop study habit in her kids. For that, she may fix starting time, ending time, subject matter and so on. A teacher may try to find what causes distraction among the students who can not ultimately become excellent. Distraction is a set of points but attention is a single point which gets to be prioritized and focused.

For finding out that one single point of attention, one needs to be meticulously vigilant about other points of distraction, which is no doubt a daunting task.

Why is purposeful or intentional distraction becoming more relevant in the age of digital criminalization?

In the digitized and globalized world, people do most of their activities by smart electronic devices like smart phone. By simple clicks, they fulfill their needs.

Human perception, sense of ethics and most decisions are greatly influenced by digital contents which are available on social media, digital media or other digital communications.

If criminals can take control of these, they can easily manipulate an individual’s or a group’s decisions. The world has seen how democratic elections have been influenced in developed nations and a whole lot of well educated and informed folk have been diverted from exercising their civil right.

If criminals steal and take control of remote important information, they can utilize it in various ways. For example, they can destroy the general trust, confidence and spread malice among the mass.

Distraction is literally killing us | Paul Atchley | TEDxYouth@KC

Moreover, distraction may be used to create blindness among a group of people and force them virtually to accept a wrong decision or get a wrong thing done.

Can purposeful distraction be severe in digital age?

Distraction and emotional disturbances are interconnected. If a person or a group of people get distracted frequently by criminal means and the person or group is not being aware of that it may cause huge dissatisfaction, unhappiness, disorder, conflicts, communal riots and so on. The long term effect is critically damaging.

Last Words

At one hand, distraction is an impediment to developing good habits or being excellent at anything. On the other hand, it works as a catalyst to change bad habits. So, managing distractions properly is crucial. If an individual wants to remain focused at one point in life and reach to the culmination of excellence, s/he must be closely aware of points of all possible distractions and must try to remove all of these.