Read This Story Without Distraction (Can You?)

Stop what you’re doing.

Well, keep reading. Just stop everything else that you’re doing.

Mute your music. Turn off your television. Put down your sandwich and ignore that text message. While you’re at it, put your phone away entirely. (Unless you’re reading this on your phone. In which case, don’t. But the other rules still apply.)

Just read.

You are now monotasking.

Maybe this doesn’t feel like a big deal. Doing one thing at a time isn’t a new idea.

Indeed, multitasking, that bulwark of anemic résumés everywhere, has come under fire in recent years. A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that interruptions as brief as two to three seconds — which is to say, less than the amount of time it would take you to toggle from this article to your email and back again — were enough to double the number of errors participants made in an assigned task. To read more from VERENA von PFETTEN, click here.

Drew Tillotson, PsyD. Sex Addiction Therapist in San Francisco, works to help people in understanding the forces within that cause them to use sex as a way of coping with difficult emotions, increased stress, and fears or insecurities about their abilities to be emotionally and sexually intimate with others.