Feeling Frazzled and Forgetful? Blame “Media Multi-Tasking”
Double-screening may be the source of your sugar cravings too
People talk about the pandemic being a time to move slower, but you feel busier than ever. Back-to-back zoom calls, with no commute to break up the meetings and think about the conversation you just had. You go from an online parent-teacher conference to Q3 planning without so much as a potty break. At the end of the day, all you want to do is lie on the floor and eat the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups you hid in the back of the freezer last October. For those of us who work mostly online, we’ve had a year of inputting information with very little processing time. The result? We may not remember much of what we’ve accomplished.
You probably know there’s no such thing as “multi-tasking”; that doing multiple things all at once is really just rapidly moving between tasks. But perhaps you didn’t know that all that switching switching switching without a break burns through the glucose in our brains (thus the hankering for candy) and leaves us spent. Now there’s research into a specific area of this phenomenon: “media multitasking,” otherwise known as double (or triple) screening. Research published in Nature in October found that, “Heavier MMT is associated with worse episodic memory, in part, because of a greater propensity…
