Stress Management - How Multi-Tasking can Decrease Effectiveness by 44% and Increase Your Stress

You've seen her - she's driving down the road and putting on her makeup at the same time. When I was in graduate school I used to read on the way to class - driving down the interstate at 65 miles per hour. What was really scary was when I mentioned my habit to some fellow students one day over coffee. Several of them nodded their heads and admitted they did the same thing.

I have to confess - I am constantly tempted to try to cram more activity into the same time frame. I knew I had gone too far, though, when I was brushing my teeth one day and noticed the toilet needed cleaning. I thought to myself, "Well, I have one free hand . . ." (No, I didn't do it.)

These may be extreme examples, but it has almost become a badge of honor - how many things can you do at once? In fact, some time management advisors actually suggest you do two things at once in order to save time and be more efficient.

Recent research indicates this may not be your best strategy, however. Why? Because you are likely to expend more energy and achieve less satisfactory results than if you focused on one activity at a time. Marcel Just, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University has used functional MRI, which is like a picture of the brain at work, to study what happens in a person's brain when they multi-task.

He asked subjects to perform two highly independent tasks that require two different parts of the brain. One task was language comprehension and the other involved mentally rotating objects in space. Without getting too technical here, he measured how many "brain units" were activated while subjects performed the two tasks separately and then at the same time.

He found that each task individually activated 37 units, each in different areas. But when subjects were asked to multi-task, rather than using 74 units (37 for each task), only 42 units were activated. This represents only 56% of the "brain units" that were involved when the tasks were done separately, or a 44% reduction.

What is the most likely result here? Decreased performance, oversights, mistakes, and inefficiency are the inevitable outcome. Not exactly what you had in mind when you started to do two things at once was it?

On the plus side, further research did indicate that people can learn to be more efficient at multi-tasking, but they never achieve the level of performance possible when focusing on just one thing at a time. There is an old saying that if you don't have time to do it right the first time, where are you going to find the time to do it over? Where in your life can you afford a 44% reduction in effectiveness? I thought so. Focus on one thing at a time and reduce your stress.

For more tips and tools you can use to manage stress, personalized for you, visit http://www.heartwisdomway.com/pssp

From Sherrie St. Cyr, LCSW, Life Coach and Stress Management Specialist. Sherrie has 20 years experience working with clients individually and in classes, workshops, and retreats to help real people manage stress.

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