Why distractions aren’t always bad

Have you ever found yourself somewhere other than where you meant to be?

Maybe you sat down with a fairly clear plan for the next hour, and then somehow you were making tea, or reading about something that had nothing to do with the thing you’d sat down to do.

Or perhaps something difficult had happened, and you noticed you were scrolling without ever really deciding to.

Either way, there often tends to be a part that stings more than the drifting off itself did.

Because maybe you told yourself you were being lazy, or that you’ve got no discipline, or that everyone else seems to manage this perfectly well.

Or maybe you simply decided you were avoiding again, and that you really ought to be dealing with things properly by now.

So perhaps you tried to force your way back into it, and lasted about ten minutes before wandering off again.

Which is a fairly disheartening loop to find ourselves in, isn’t it?

If any of that resonates in any way, it might be worth wondering:

What if our attention going elsewhere isn’t always the failure we’ve been told it is?

And what if distractions can actually be helpful at times?

Most of us have picked up the idea that staying with things is a sort of virtue.

That being able to hold our focus for hours, or sit with whatever we’re feeling, is the mark of someone who’s got it together.

So going elsewhere tends to get read as evidence of something lacking in us.

Maybe discipline, or seriousness, or the willingness to face things properly.

Which is probably why the self-criticism arrives so quickly when it happens.

Because we’ve been taught it’s a character problem, and that the answer is simply to try harder.

So maybe we download an app, or set a timer, or simply promise ourselves we’ll be more present next time.

And sure, that might work for a little while sometimes.

But if it really worked the way we’ve been told it does, most of us would probably have “sorted this out” years ago.

Here’s the part that tends to get missed in all this:

Our attention doesn’t usually go elsewhere for no reason at all.

More often, it seems to move when something’s going on with the system underneath it.

Maybe we’ve been at it a while, and there simply isn’t much concentration left to work with.

Or perhaps we haven’t eaten in a few hours, and our blood sugar has dropped away without us noticing.

Or maybe we’re already overstimulated, and there just isn’t room for anything else to go in.

And then sometimes what we’re facing simply feels bigger than what we’ve got available for it.

Which might be a task that’s difficult or unclear, or a feeling or sensation that we haven’t got the capacity to be with right now.

So our attention has a way of moving toward something easier or more familiar when that happens.

Which can look a lot like laziness or avoidance from the outside, though it seems closer to our system stepping back from something it doesn’t feel ready for.

Now, there’s a fair bit of advice about staying with things rather than reaching for something else.

And honestly, there’s a lot of sense in that.

Because avoiding everything difficult does tend to catch up with us eventually.

But it also does seem to assume something that isn’t always true.

Which is that we’ve got the capacity to be with the thing in the first place.

And some days we simply don’t.

Maybe we’re already stretched thin, or we’ve had a hard week, or there’s more going on than our system can hold at the moment.

So on days like that, being told to stay with it can feel like being asked for something we haven’t got.

This is where distraction might start to look a bit different.

Because our nervous systems can’t really work through much of anything from a place where they’re already overwhelmed.

They tend to need to feel reasonably safe first.

And when we’re nowhere near that, stepping away for a while can be what gives us some ground to stand on again.

There’s the other kind too, where we’ve been stuck on something for hours, go off and do something else entirely, and then the answer turns up while we’re washing the dishes.

Because our minds do seem to keep working on things in the background, once we stop gripping them so tightly.

So stepping away isn’t necessarily us running from anything.

Sometimes it might even be just what makes it possible to come back with a bit more of ourselves available.

Now, obviously, not every distraction leaves us better off, and most of us likely know that already.

But some of them actually do seem to give us something back sometimes.

And what seems to separate the two is whether the distraction brings us back toward ourselves and a felt sense of safety, or if it takes us further away from ourselves and simply numbs us out.

Because some things settle us enough that we return feeling a bit more like ourselves than when we left.

While others leave us further out than we started, and somehow less in touch with what we were feeling before.

The odd part is that we can’t always tell which is which beforehand.

Something that helped last week can leave us hollow this time, depending on what we needed when we reached for it.

But our bodies do often tend to tell us afterwards, if we check in.

So rather than deciding in advance which distractions are allowed, we might simply notice where we’ve landed when we come back from one.

Whether we feel closer to ourselves, or further off.

And then, of course, see if we can listen to what our body needs this time and the next time.

Because being able to listen and attune to our body’s unique needs and capacity is probably what will help us determine whether distracting ourselves is helpful or harmful in the moment.

None of this means we never stay with anything, of course.

Because a life spent going elsewhere every time things get uncomfortable does tend to leave a lot unresolved.

But forcing ourselves to stay with everything, regardless of what we’ve got available, isn’t necessarily much kinder either, is it?

So it seems to come down to capacity and attunement more than principle.

Some days, maybe we’ve got enough to stay with something hard, and those are probably the days to do it.

And other days maybe we haven’t, and stepping away for a bit could be what actually helps.

The tricky part is that most of us have been taught to judge the behaviour rather than check what we’ve actually got available.

So the next time you catch yourself going elsewhere, you might try getting curious about it rather than cross.

You could ask what’s actually going on underneath.

Maybe you’re tired, or hungry, or you’ve had more than usual coming at you.

Or perhaps there’s something in front of you that feels bigger than what you’ve got available for it just now.

And if it turns out you do need to step away for a while, it usually helps to do that properly.

Because half a break with the difficult thing still sitting there in the background tends to leave us neither rested nor any further along.

Whereas actually letting ourselves have it often does more than forcing our way through would have.

You might also let yourself off the hook a little here.

Because our attention was never really built for the kind of sustained holding we tend to ask of it these days.

And needing to step away sometimes is probably a good deal closer to normal than most of us have been led to believe.

Remember: Our attention tends to go elsewhere for reasons, even when we can’t quite name them. And sometimes stepping away is what gives us enough safety to come back to something we couldn’t face before.

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