How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend: A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life by Rachel Barr

Author:Rachel Barr [Barr, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Self Help, Psychology, Science, Neuroscience, Personal Growth
ISBN: 9780593970263
Publisher: DK
Published: 2025-08-25T14:00:00+00:00

Split-Screen Living

Attention is finite. It’s a currency we spend in ways both deliberate and careless. Every actor you pull up on IMDb, every Instagram post you scroll past, every tweet, text message, and ChatGPT request all compete for resources in your brain. Your brain will do the work of decluttering memory storage for you, selectively forgetting what it thinks you won’t need. But it’s up to you to ease the load on attention. This means recognizing when to step away, when to resist the impulse to check one more app or click one more link. Do you really need to ask ChatGPT what toenails are made of, or fall down a rabbit hole of never-ending Wikipedia hyperlinks? Is it worth spending the sole 15 minutes of break time you have swiping left or right on a revolving parade of disembodied faces?

With the entire world crammed into a screen, it’s easy to believe you can reach out and touch every corner of it. We’re pulled into this stream of constant distraction partially out of resistance to boredom. We really, really hate boredom. In fact, we flee from it with almost pathological intensity. That might seem like an exaggeration, but there’s a study that captures this perfectly.40 Participants were left alone for 15 minutes with only their thoughts and a button to self-administer electric shocks. All they had to do was sit there and think, and yet over half of them chose to shock themselves. One particularly restless fellow managed to press the button around 190 times in that brief span. 190 times! You have to wonder what was running through his mind, if anything at all by the end. If you’re out there, Mr. 190 Shocks, perhaps I can persuade you to give boredom a chance.

Boredom is one of the most important human experiences. It’s the nudge that gets us off the couch and into the fresh air. It’s the reason we finally pick up the phone and call the old friend we’ve been meaning to catch up with. It’s what drives us to learn skills, whether it’s coding, cooking, knitting, robotics—you name it. Boredom is like a magic open sesame, unlocking parts of ourselves we might never have discovered. And yet, we often fill those spaces with a scroll through TikTok, Instagram, or whatever app happens to be front and center on the home screen. Next time you catch yourself in that familiar pattern, put the phone down. Sit with the boredom. Let it percolate, and see where it takes you.

Boredom-induced scrolling doesn’t provide real engagement.41 It simply plugs the gap for long enough to stop boredom from performing its duty of inspiring action. This is reflected in our tendency toward media multitasking, where we hop from one digital activity to another. Watching TV while scrolling is a common example, but we can easily find ourselves juggling three or even four digital tasks at once. We might have a movie playing in the background, skim through an article on our iPad, intermittently text a friend, and mindlessly swipe through Instagram, all at the same time.

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