Quotes About Distraction

Being a football fan entitles us to a temporary, recurring retreat, a short holiday from real existence. Our lives can be in chaos and nothing seem fixed. Nothing except how we feel on a Saturday at 3pm, when we are elevated into blissful and infuriating distraction. What a privilege that is.

99 percent of us cannot multitask.

Set a timer on your phone for twenty-five minutes.

the constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present—tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you're never fully in the moment and enjoying what's now.

The great tennis player John McEnroe used this to his advantage on the courts. When an opponent was performing especially well, for example by using a particularly good backhand, McEnroe would compliment him on it. McEnroe knew this would cause the opponent to think about his backhand, and this thinking disrupted the automatic application of it.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing more. Consequently

focus of attention becomes distracted, when you notice you are no longer aware of the sensations of the breath, lovingly and gently bring your attention back to the breath (or body part or image). Getting distracted is just what our minds do. As we've seen, if you think of this mindfulness training as being similar to toning a muscle, we need to have both the contraction and the relaxation to achieve muscle growth.

When I as a fan and a viewer tune into ESPN, I don't want politics and I don't want to look at a person and have to think politics.

The minute viewers callin or write about your looks, they were not listening to what you were saying.

For all reality TV, and all the viewers of reality TV, just be entertained. Don't invest your feelings, your heart, your soul into reality TV. It is entertainment. And that's all that it should be.

I live in Greenwich Village in New York City, but I rarely write at home, where there's too much else to do.

I'm spending way too much time test running my Vine videos. I'll go into a room and close the door and be in there for an hour workshopping a Vine video that I never even post. So that's probably a huge time suck.

We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

We live in this era where we really enjoy being offended, although only on the Internet. I don't know how beneficial it is. I wonder if we live in an age where we don't have power, yet somehow feel we have virtual power. But I feel like it's a distraction from real life.

People are texting and smash into the car in front of them - I think there is some humor in that. And the virtual games. People are playing these virtual games, but they're real - I mean, the people are really playing, but it's not a game.

We need to re-create boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that didn't exist before.

You can't truly hear your own voice until the shouting around you disappears. New ideas and possibilities - our own ideas, our own possibilities - will occur only when we step away from the Virtual Panopticon.

You don't want to get so distracted, focusing on what the opposition is putting forth that you forget to remind America that the real issue is 8.3 percent unemployment, virtually no growth at all in an economy that has been in shambles for the last four years under Obama.

Even today, I am easily distracted by reading material and will pick up articles on virtually any factual material if I have the time.

I realised I had an issue with my mobile phone use when a friend started explaining the virtues of the Fast 800 diet and, while still engaged in the conversation, I pulled out my phone and ordered the book before they had finished their sentence.

they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.