Distracting Ourselves

Anyone who has ever worked with young children, at one time or another, has resorted to distraction as a way to sooth an upset child. I know I sure did. In fact, I once considered myself the king of distraction. I was confident that if I was given five minutes I could always find a way to divert an upset toddler, be it with attractive friends, toys, silliness, song, or stories. 

Parents typically learn very early in their journey that distraction can be their friend. At the start of each school year, I would ask parents to provide us with tips for how their child was best soothed when sad or angry, most of which could be classified as distractions -- a favorite song, being read to, bandaids. Even being held or cuddled could, looked at one way, be considered distractions.

Over the years, I found myself moving away from distraction as a soothing technique, however, as I began to see it as both manipulative and as a way of teaching children to deal with their feelings by stuffing them. The therapeutic approach, after all, encourages us to not avoid our emotions, but rather to examine them, to feel them, and to understand them by way of finally moving beyond them. As convenient and effective as distraction could be, I worried that by distracting children, I might even be sending the subtle message that there was something wrong with their emotions.

This doesn't mean that I've given up on distraction altogether, just that it isn't the first thing I whip out of my tool belt. Today, I'm more inclined to sit with the child as they are experiencing their emotion, preventing them from hurting themselves or others, but otherwise simply being with them while assuring them that they are heard and understood. I might try to help them put words to their feelings, to assure them that there is nothing wrong with how they feel, and that I am there to provide whatever kind of comfort they need from me. I don't automatically scoop them into my arms, but I ask them if they want me to hold them, then honor their answer. I echo their words back to them. And I gently assure them that mommy will come back, that the hurt will subside, and that they will eventually emerge on the other side where friends, toys, silliness, song, and stories await.

Lately, however, I find myself reconsidering the double-edged sword of distraction. 

On the one hand, we live in an age of distraction. Many of us carry small computers in our pockets that we use to distract ourselves from our day-to-day anxieties, depressions, and boredoms. When I take a moment to examine my own smart phone use, I find that a great deal of it is spurred by an urge to distract myself from worry or fear or loneliness or to avoid something like a chore or a difficult conversation. I tend to think that this is true of most of us. And it's not just our phones. We live most of our lives in a miasma of distraction. I mean, it's so pervasive that we use distraction to distract ourselves.

This, of course, can so often become a vicious cycle. As we escape one feeling by distracting ourselves, say, with a headline or a chat, we find our shoulders tensing, our hearts beating, and our palms sweating as we experience new unpleasant emotions from which we must distract ourselves. This, at least in part, explains the endless scrolling and clicking as we strive to distract ourselves to some sort of peace of mind that never comes. Phone and text conversations often work in the same way.

On the other hand, distracting ourselves from our negative emotions is an essential survival skill. We can't just sit with our fears and sadnesses all day long. When we are overly stressed, for instance, few of us would deny that the distraction of a beach holiday might be just the thing we need. When the world is feeling a bit dull and gray, a night out can work wonders. Coffee with a best friend is a distraction we all need sometimes. Life would be unbearable if we could never distract ourselves into new perspectives and ways of thinking.

Indeed, distraction is a big part of how the human brain works. Not long ago, I wrote a post here about what is called "artificial intelligence" in which I quibbled with the idea that it could be called intelligence at all, at least not intelligence that is comparable to human intelligence. In part, this is because while computers "think" in linear ways, human brains rely upon distraction. My biggest concern about AI is not that we will somehow learn to install human intelligence into machines, but rather that our educational system is increasingly trying to install machine intelligence into humans.

The French have an expression, L'esprit de l'escalier, which more or less translates into English as "genius in the stairwell." It is the phenomenon that we've all encountered, while, say, taking a shower, in which brilliant ideas, solutions, or comebacks occur to us when we are completely distracted by something else. We often cannot think properly, or feel properly, as long as we remain fixated on the chore or problem or anxiety at hand. It often seems that it is only while distracted by something else that we are fully capable of thinking clearly.

Distracting ourselves with screen-based technology may not be the healthiest kind of distraction, just as jangling keys in front of a crying toddler might not be the healthiest approach to their unpleasant emotions. But distraction itself ought not be off the table. I think it matters how we distract ourselves.

For instance, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I like to put my phone in a drawer and head out for a long walk, preferably in nature, but even an urban hike will do. A long, hot shower or soak in the tub is usually a healthy distraction. I've found that quite often, a child can better self-sooth in a quiet corner or during a quiet turn around the empty playground -- distractions that don't necessarily compel the mind into new channels of fretfulness, but rather free them to do the kind of background problem solving and processing that characterize the way human brains most effectively work.

We've come to think of distraction as a real and present negative. Teachers in standard schools are forever strategizing about how they can prevent their students from being distracted. Some even punish them for their distractibility. It's a sad thing that so many educators simply do not understand how a healthy, thinking, human mind actually works. We thrive both intellectually and emotionally on distraction. When it is denied us, we suffer.

We bemoan the distractions of the modern world, and when I look around at all those heads bent over smart phones, I see distraction at its worst. Yet we forget, I think, that there is an infinity of distractions to be found on a solitary woodland hike as well. It's not distractions that are a problem, but rather that we must be thoughtful about the distractions we choose.

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