🗞️ The Wellness Briefing – Edition No. 14: “The Myth of Multitasking” | September 30, 2025
3 minute read
Quick, high-impact wellness insights for ambitious professionals. Delivered Tuesdays.
Welcome Back to The Wellness Briefing
We live in a world that celebrates busyness. Many professionals wear “multitasking” like a badge of honor. But the evidence is clear: every switch between tasks carries a hidden cost.
The more we try to juggle, the more we erode focus, accuracy, and energy. Multitasking feels productive, but it’s usually performance sabotage in disguise.
Let’s begin.
🧠1 Insight Worth Reading: Research from Stanford found that people who multitask heavily have more trouble filtering irrelevant information and switching between tasks efficiently. Their brains actually become worse at focusing.
Read full article on Stanford Report.
Key findings from the 2020 Stanford study
Worse memory performance: Participants who identified as heavy media multitaskers performed worse on memory tasks, echoing the findings from previous research.
Relationship to attention lapses: The study found that lower sustained attention ability was also linked to memory failures. This suggests that the memory deficits in heavy multitaskers may be related to more frequent lapses in attention.
Brain activity measurements: Using EEG technology, the researchers monitored participants' brain waves and pupil sizes during memory tasks. They observed that heavy media multitaskers had brain activity patterns consistent with greater distraction and less sustained attention.
💡 What That Means for You: If you’re feeling “scattered,” it’s not a lack of discipline—it’s the cognitive tax of too many pivots. Your output may feel faster in the moment, but quality and retention suffer. Protecting focus is protecting results.
âś… Try This: Batch your day into 90-minute focus blocks. One task, one priority, one outcome. Then take a true break before the next sprint.
🎯 Pro Tip from the Guide: Elite athletes don’t train distracted—they train with intention. Apply the same principle to your work.
💬 Coaching Cue: Productivity isn’t about doing more things—it’s about doing fewer things better.
The Approval Matrix: What’s genuinely productive, what’s performative busyness, what’s secretly draining.
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See you next Tuesday.
– Michelle