Taking frequent brain breaks can help sustain cognitive focus. Patrick McAndrew returns to the podcast to offer some tools to help maintain high levels of mental focus throughout the day.

John, it’s interesting, and I’ll share with you that I think that I’m a pretty focused person and pretty diligent about blocking my time throughout the day and using my calendar to my advantage. But after talking with Patrick, our guest today, I think that I am actually not doing as great of a job at focusing my attention on various activities. I think I’m jumping between things a little bit too quickly and probably not giving each activity the dedication and commitment that it deserves. I don’t know how you’re feeling about that, but definitely some alarm bells are going off in my head right now.

Well, Julie, I’m always amazed at how responsive you are because you’ve probably been on the other end of it sending emails to me because I am not the world’s most responsive person. And the reason is when we listen to our guests today, Patrick McAndrew Look, I’ve been thinking about focus and attention for years now, and the ability to say no to one thing is being able to have a better yes. However, we are always pressured that there’s always something else that clamors for our attention. And I think just being reminded of some of the things that Patrick had to share with us, I mean, it just reminded me of some simple tasks that we can implement, some simple processes to make sure that our focus is where it belongs. But importantly for me is that it’s not about focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. There does come times when we need to give our brains a break, and I think that’s one of the biggest things I took away from today’s conversation.

I agree. I think for me, I’m always thinking of ways if there’s 5 minutes, we should pack it right, cross another thing off of that to do list, which I pride myself on. And I think being very diligent about those breaks and allowing our brain to recoup and repair itself is so important. And I’m right there with you. I think that that really was such a great reminder for me as well. So I can’t wait for our listeners to hear more of what Patrick has to share with us on the importance of focus and attention and and more importantly, the brain breaks that we all are in desperate need of.

Yeah, and I think when we think about how technology that now surrounds us is actually changing our brains, Patrick will tell us in today’s podcast. Our brains are actually changing. However, because of that, we need to make conscious decisions about how we’re going to manage our attention and our focus, and that’s what I’m really excited about. So Julie, we’ve mentioned Patrick’s name a few times. Why don’t you tell everybody who Patrick McAndrew is and why we invited him on our podcast?

Absolutely. Patrick is the co-founder and CEO of Hara. His mission is to give people the internal skills to own their attention, energy and focus. For the past five years, Patrick has dedicated his time to spreading knowledge of cognitive health with organizations and individuals. He has directly coached over 300 leaders to help them reclaim their attention and has worked with senior teams at Morgan Stanley, Pacific Life, Lincoln Financial and many more within the industry.

So Julie, let’s invite our audience in to listen to the conversation we have with Patrick about how our days should be a trade off between focused attention and brain breaks in order to really enhance our work performance and the quality of our life.

Hi, I’m John.

And I’m Julie.

We’re the hosts of the Hartford Funds Human-centric Investing Podcast.

Every other week we’re talking with inspiring thought leaders to hear their best ideas for how you can transform your relationships with your clients.

Let’s go.

Welcome, Patrick, to the Human-centric Investing Podcast.

Pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me, Julie.

You know, Patrick, the topic of attention is something that has really interested me over years now. In fact, we’ve done some client and advisor presentations on the topic, and I think anyone who’s done any basic research in this area realizes that attention is a wasting asset. It’s almost like we start out with a reservoir of it and we often talk about what we pay attention to. And I think paying attention is probably a pretty good analogy, right? Because once we use it, we kind of can’t get it back. You have you have gone even a step further to talk about different types of attention and maybe advising us a little bit about how we spend our attention during the day and things that we can do at least to make our attention last longer and specifically our focused attention. So kind of bring us into that discussion. Talk a little bit about your research into the topic of attention.

Yes. So thank you very much for setting this up, John and Julie, I really want to speak on the topic of helping people get a sense of how they can bring more focus and clarity and direction to their mind. So I think for many of us today, with so many of the things that are happening, we feel like we’re being pulled in many different directions and we can feel incredibly busy. But then at the end of the day, we question where we actually committed our time and our attention. So my intent is to share some some practices and some thought provoking ideas that will help you reflect on on how you’re managing your attention and how you’re managing your day so that you can actually dedicate your attention on your time to the things that really matter. And the framing that I just want to share with just at the at the outset is. Well, first of all, you mentioned, John yeah, that there’s different types of attention, and I think that’s something that’s important to recognize. So we are ideally in this constant dance between intensity and rest or narrow focus, narrow attention on broad attention. So, for example, we’re here in this call on the screen. This is very narrow attention. I’m listening to you. My eyes are very narrow. I’m in this state of being kind of very vigilant and aware. And I’m also at the same time blocking out everything else around me. And that’s really helpful for me to be fully immersed and engaged in this. But after this call, I’m going to have to take a moment and I’m going to have to just sit back and look out the window in front of me and just not act alone will clear my head. And that’s where we shift from this narrow to this broad attention. And that broad state of attention is very helpful because it suddenly starts to bring together all of the things that happened while I was in that very narrow focus state. And the challenge today is that we don’t get enough opportunity to move in and out of that. We are actually over focused all the time, and that’s what’s fatiguing us. So a lot of people will talk about focusing on multitasking as if those are the two kind of planes that we operate on. But really very few people today are actually multitasking. What they’re doing is they’re far beyond that. So if we think about where focus is one form of our attention, where there’s one objective like I’m speaking about here, I’m engaged with you guys blocking everything out, multitasking will be that I’m here. But then, you know, a glass fell over and I’m trying to sort it out on the table. That’s kind of that dynamic as well. But then there’s the third, which is where most people are, which is continuous partial attention. So that’s where you’re continuously, partially attending to everything at once. So that’s where I’m on this call, but I’m also checking my phone. I’m switching to another time to check my inbox. I got a notification. I’m looking out the window. There’s many things which are happening. And this is where most of us have arranged our attention on a daily basis. So we’re never really attending to any one thing. We’re always checking everything. And if it’s five, ten, 15 minutes elapse where I haven’t checked that thing, I just my attention comes back to check in on it again. And this creates a habit in the mind so that any time I focus on one thing, I anticipate that I’m going to go to something else. And that’s why it increasingly becomes very difficult to focus. So when I started out on this path, I had a business and I couldn’t seem to get stuff done. Like I had all the drive in the world, I had all your marketing agency in New York, and I would arrive and I would check my Instagram, my LinkedIn, my Facebook, The Guardian, Sky Sports. And after 25 minutes of going down that rundown of all the checking, then I would get into work done. I was like, I need a coffee. I go down, I get a coffee from Grand Central. I’d come up, then I go through the rundown again, checking everything again, another 25 minutes, and then I do a little bit of work and then I check the other stuff now because I had to check in the stuff that I checked 25 minutes ago. And you see how this pattern starts to build itself and this starts to create this perpetual cycle in the mind. So what I’m kind of suggesting and trying to explore is, is how do we move out of that space? Does that resonate with you guys, that that theme, that topic of continuous partial attention?

Very much so.

Yeah, 100%. In fact, last week I was on a flight and the Wi-Fi was down and I almost kind of had a panic attack thinking I’m not going to be able to check my emails for a few hours. I didn’t plan for this, and I kind of had to go through my own, you know, stages of grieving very quickly and then get to the point where I said. Does it really matter that I’m not going to see my emails for a few hours? And obviously the answer was no, But I just and it was kind of a moment with myself to say, Wow, this is getting to a point where maybe isn’t healthy? And I read a book and it was the first time in a focused way for 2 hours I actually read a book. I’ll tell you, I read books on flights all the time, but it’s 10 minutes on the book. Then it’s email, then it’s a text, then it’s back to the I mean, it’s this constant hopping around because usually there’s there’s wi fi and it was unbelievable. So I just experienced it last week and it was not by design. It’s only because it happened to me. But I, like I said, it’s very much resonating right now and the timing of this conversation is just perfect. But I think that it’s so ingrained in us that we have to be connected and we have to respond. And I think in some ways we’re our own worst enemy, or at least I am. I’ll share that with you. So it’s very, very interesting, everything that you’re sharing with me, it’s hitting home right now.

And it creates a boomerang effect. You know, so we we feed the cycle because we keep getting immediate feedback for everything we’re putting out. So we send a message on teams, it comes back to us, we send an email, it comes back to us, we send a text message, it comes back to us. And there’s an obligation and an onus that I need to serve the people who need me. So I liken it to our modern tamagotchis. So Tamagotchis, which were very popular back in the day for children, these toy digital animals where they needed constant attention, care, water, food. And if they weren’t nurtured all the time, they died. So we have these many virtual personas, and we place their health and their well-being above our own physical health and well-being. We place their needs and their desires to say, life beyond our own. And this is where then we fail to create like systems or processes. Because just like you spoke about, you were on that flight initially, it was you were in the anticipatory mind that you were going to be able to be on all the time and then when you weren’t. That shift was a shift in your body where suddenly it said, I can relax. I can actually chill out. I don’t have to be in this kind of frazzled state of mind. So if we take this back to where people are engaged in their work and in their in their day to day lives, you know, if you wake up and if the first thing that you do is you check your inbox, you’re signing up for your internal state to be dependent on whatever the needs are for you. So your. And if you do that on a day by day basis, you start to lose your own internal anchors, you start to lose your own stability. You have nothing to come back to. So you had to find on that flight something to come back to within yourself. And that’s very nice. That’s very grounding. It starts to develop like this relationship between Julie and Julie, whatever that self is, that’s something there. You start to know yourself and understand what you need and different moments. And if there’s no space for that, then what we end up doing is we end up in this constant stream of intensity, but it’s actually at a much lower level because we get fatigued, We can focus for a bout of time on something and then we get fatigued, but we often neglect that, that fatigue. We say to ourselves, I need to be productive all the time. And we end up shifting towards checking the news, checking the markets, checking our social platforms. But it’s a mindless checking. So what I’m suggesting is introduce brain breaks into your day. So when you feel that fatigue and you want to go towards looking at the sports, looking at the news, because when you’re looking at the news, you’re just skimming the headlines. You don’t even have the mental wherewithal to go deep into the article. You just want to skim the headlines and see what everything’s going on. It’s just this it’s just this kind of stimulation. Just let’s stay going. Let’s keep let’s keep everything moving. Whereas if we give ourselves 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes to get up from the desk, to move to squat, maybe you can’t squat. Maybe that’s a practice to get to. Maybe we had some people that they started introducing a little practice that every time they got up for a water or went to get a drink, they’d had five push ups and one guy lost. I was never intending that my program, the momentum, my program be a weight loss program. But one guy came back to me and he said, we lost 30 pounds over the course of eight weeks because every time he was every time he was getting up, he was taking a little walk around the block. Then he was coming back to do his work. And he felt so much better in the past he would just get a snack and sit at his desk and go on his phone. And even that act of eating the snack becomes a mindless act because you’re mentally engaged on the phone, you’re mentally engaged on the screen in front of you. So what we want to do is we want to create this dance where we go in and we come out, we go in and we come out and that comes back to what we spoke at the beginning, John, which is this narrow attention and this broad attention And that broad attention is to come back to a break, which could simply just be to sit in your chair and look outside, which could simply be to go and pet your dog, to go and move your body, to go and get a glass of water, to close your eyes and just sit in the chair. But you have to start choosing that you’re not going to go for the easiest option all the time. You’re not just going to go for this base option of picking up your phone every time after each call, because that is simply just a habit. It’s not actually what you want. It’s just it just became a habit and you never questioned it. So my recommendation is just to explore this, to take a brain break. And it’s a momentary thing for each and every individual. It’s different in the context of where they are. Some teams that I work with are in corporate offices, so for them it’s even just getting up. Take a little walk around the office floor, getting a drink of water and coming back. They might take the elevator down, a walk around the block. For others who work at home, they’ve told me that they’ve gone out and shot a couple of hoops outside, petted their dog, played with their kids, took a little walk outside. But that’s not being unproductive. That’s being more productive. It’s less productive if you fragment your attention and keep checking your phone because you keep filling your head with all the noise of the world rather than allowing it to process and then to come back and focus in on something.

So, Patrick, I think, you know, the world, especially in the last ten years, has encourage us to be narrowly focused as much time as we can, right? We know that there’s no such thing as multitasking. So we try to discipline ourselves just to focus on one thing at a time. But so I think we actually have a harder problem with this broader attention that you talked about. And I guess my question for you is, is there any research in terms of how long at any given point should we be narrowly focused, like, can I be narrowly focused for 3 hours if I’m working on a project? Or is that a you know, even if in the middle of a project, I’ve given 30 minutes or 60 minutes to really intense thought on something, any recommendations or ways I can identify that it’s time for a brain break, as you mentioned.

Well, I’ll give you some honest truth here, John. I’ll give you a few different perspectives. So on average, we switch context every 3 minutes. So we’re way off the mark. You know, so the average person is engaged on average with the task for 3 minutes before they switch to a completely different context.

Wow.

And it takes us, on average, 23 minutes and 15 seconds to circle back to the original point of focus. So if you think about the pretty much everybody in the corporate landscape is incredibly wasteful of their time and energy and attention. They’re occupying themselves with mental stimulation, but they’re not really moving the dial the way that they’re capable of. And that’s because this has become a cultural and kind of entrained way of doing things. So we’re where we’re all implicit in it because we’re all doing it to each other and we’re all part of like units and systems. So it’s very hard for an individual to step out on their own and do something different. So that’s one thing to recognize. We switch contexts every 3 minutes, and that means that I’m working on this one project and now I switch and I check the markets and I check the markets and then I switch and I message my friend. It’s constantly requiring whole new faculties of mind, solve problems to think through the dynamics. And that’s extremely exhausting. And that’s why we spend hours working for minutes. So the days are getting longer, but we’re accomplishing less. So that’s a that’s a baseline there. Now, let’s look at it from a whole other spectrum of life. I was sitting on a flight with a physicist and a physicist can’t go to Google to find the answers for their questions. They simply go through this particular lady. She goes through the computations. She was in Harvard for a week working on a set that she was dealing with. Very interesting project. And I was sitting beside her on a flight from Boston to Charlotte. She told me she didn’t actually have a smartphone for a long time, but she brought it on board about five years ago. We met about a year and a half ago and she told me she doesn’t have she she can’t do the problems like she used to. She used to be able to sit and give 3 hours, three and a half hours to a problem. Now, she said after 45 minutes, she really struggled. Her mind starts craving something else. It doesn’t have bandwidth to go as deep. And Nicholas Carr wrote about this In the Shallows. He was the chief the editor of editor in chief for the HBR. And he spoke about how, like in 2010, something was starting to change in his brain. So our brains are changing and our attention spans are fragmenting. That’s that’s the truth. And we best acknowledges. But it’s up to us if we’re just going to go with the tides or if we’re actually going to take our own and we’re going to take responsibility, because I believe that this is the next leap in our own development. You know, when when processed food came around and suddenly every store was filled with candy bars, and every time you went to a gas station, there’s processed food everywhere. Somehow we had to create some sort of a mental mechanism, a new model of the world to say this is very appealing, but this is not how I choose to live. So I’m not going to eat this. You know, we created a distance in our identity between the very appealing foods because we had a sense of the health that we wanted to have and how we wanted to feel. The same is being demanded of us now with how we organize our mind, because there’s a lot of low quality information out there and we need to start being able to see differentiate between the kind of processed, low quality information and the high quality information, which is going to help us get to where we want to get to, because we’re living in a global village and we feel like we need to be aware of what everybody is up to, but it doesn’t make such a difference.

Patrick I’m guessing many of our listeners are thinking, you know, obviously so many of us run our days through our calendar, right? We just have to give in client meetings and firm commitments and team meetings and, you know, all of the things that we have during the day. Do you believe in or advocate for time blocking or, you know, putting these mental breaks on one’s calendar? Will you talk us through kind of using the calendar to your advantage? I know there’s a lot of talk about that and, you know, a lot of different schools of thought, but I’m sure there are many people thinking, how can I use my calendar to my advantage or use that as a tool to help me with this? Since so many of us are so indoctrinated in our calendar process?

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for asking, actually, because one point I would make is that some of these concepts might seem kind of difficult to implement or feel like they can’t be applied, but I tell you they can. I’ve worked with many advisors who can, and I found that their practice has grown instrumentally because they were the biggest obstacle at the front of their practice because they weren’t clear enough in their mind. And when they started to implement what we did, their practice grew. They worked less. They did better work. They had more time for family and everything thrived on their health and their energy was better. So some small adjustments here can lead to huge, huge impacts. So some small things that they did was they didn’t take calls every morning. So maybe two mornings a week they would delay their meetings until 1030, 11 a.m. and that would give them the time to do the deep work that they needed to do. So if you are able to and you in a position to delay those morning meetings, that’s a really helpful step because then, you know, you’ve done the good work and then you can start to deep dive into the collaborative and reactive work that’s necessary throughout the day. I would also recommend trying to create some space at the middle of your day, if you can, to get outside to move. Of course, you can be moving for meetings, but still this can be quite a sedentary job where it’s it’s difficult to kind of move your body. And, you know, there’s there’s there’s people that I know that do have an afternoon moving practice where they exercise, they swim, they get outside, they go for a walk. And if that can be done, even if you can take meetings like video calls while you’re out for a walk with people who are closer to you and your internal team. So it doesn’t affect necessarily your client relationships. I would encourage it because all of this, you know, the body is so connected to the brain, how fluid and healthy and dynamic the body is shapes how sharp and agile the mind is. So you must manage both in tandem. They’re opposing forces, but they must be met together. So, yes, if you have if you have a lot of calls blocked up, can you try and create like five minute, ten minute segments in between calls? And it’s just a chance to get up, to move, to squat, exercise. All of that releases the body and you can arrive in feeling more clear and ideally not having looked at your phone. So if you can do it where you can also reduce 30 minute calls down to 25 minutes, 45 minute calls, down to 40 minutes. Just try and keep shaving the time a little bit. And the save time is not to get more work done. It’s to try and retreat from it just in retreat for 5 minutes. And I promise you, I promise you it’s what will save you. It’s what will give your mind much more clarity. You don’t need to keep doing more. You need to do less, but better.

Well, Patrick, we’ve come to the point in our podcast where Julie and I like to focus attention on our guests. And you just happened to be our guest today. So if you are ready, we’d like to participate what we call a lightning round. So I don’t need you to focus on a lot. I want top of the mind answers to the questions that Julie and I are going to post you. There’s no right or wrong answers. It just helps our listeners get to know Patrick McAndrew a little bit better. So if you’re ready, I’ll turn it over to Julie to get us started.

I’m excited. Let’s hear it.

Okay. On a scale of 1 to 10, how good of a driver are you?

7.5.

Do you use a paper to do list or a digital to do list?

Both, actually.

Okay.

What’s your favorite holiday?

An active holiday skiing, hiking, free diving, something like that I like.

I like that

Patrick, if you could travel to anywhere in the world, where would you prefer to spend your time?

I’m very intrigued by South Korea or Taiwan. These are two places I’d like to go to. So maybe one of those places.

What’s the best age?

Oh, I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t arrived there yet, actually. I think it’s ahead of me.

That’s a great answer. I don’t think we’ve ever had an answer before.That’s awesome.

No, So that I love it.

How about when you rather read a book or listen to an audible book?

read a book, sure.

What’s the ideal outside temperature?

mmm, Probably like. Probably like 15 degrees, 15 degrees Celsius. I’m not sure what that is in Fahrenheit.

HAHA how about Patrick, are you a dog person or a cat person?

Dog person.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

I was. I was very much an extrovert in my youth. Then I became more introverted in my mid-twenties, and I’m kind of balancing them out together now.

Patrick, we can’t thank you enough for joining us here today on the Human-centric Investing Podcast, and thank you for letting us learn a little bit more about the human centric side of you. And for our listeners that are interested in learning more about Patrick and his work, please feel free to check out the Momentum Mind program. It’s a community and training program for leaders who want to move from a fractured mind to a momentum mind, helping them focus amidst distractions and move twice as fast without wasting time and energy. Patrick, thank you again for your time today and sharing all of your insights with us.

It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Great questions. Great conversation.

Thanks for listening to the Hartford Funds Human-centric Investing Podcast. If you’d like to tune in for more episodes, don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube.

And if you’d like to be a guest and share your best ideas for transforming client relationships, email us at guest booking at Hartford Funds dot com. We’d love to hear from you.

Talk to you soon.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the guest who is not affiliated with Hartford Funds.