Mind over Multitasking – What Would Buddha’s Mama Do?
Written by Peg Olivera
While I was pregnant, I wrote an essay on the challenge of mindfulness in a world of multitasking. A few months and a lifetime later I found myself sitting on the toilet at 3am, breastfeeding a newborn. It was then that I realized that when I wrote that essay, I had no idea what multitasking was!
Mindfulness became this sort of dreamy place that I once lived in simpler times; like the studio apartment I rented on Trumbull St. for only $700. It seemed, if not unattainable, certainly incongruent to my new world. Not only did life suddenly move faster and change more abruptly, it lacked the ebb and flow of a balance between being and doing. Having a baby eradicated the distinction between night and day. There was no off-season. All of my time was “exquisitely available” to my daughter, as Claire Dederer put it in the book Poser. The umbilical cord gone, my daughter and I remained tethered nonetheless.
Simply put, mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to everything that is happening to you from moment to moment. In mindfulness, you must bring your full awareness not just to the activity you are engaged in, but also to your inner experience of it.
This is a challenge for anyone, never mind a parent. Multitasking is ingrained in us. Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once. In fact, I just checked my Facebook page, mid-sentence. In my defense, many evolutionary psychologists have argued that multitasking has wrongly been given a bad rap. Women evolved to multitask, they say, stirring the pot while feeding an infant (only men needed to be highly focused for hunting, or risk being the hunted). In The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, Katherine Ellison reviews the research that motherhood actually improves women’s minds. Ellison’s bottom line is that having babies contributes to enrichment of the brain: the hormonal surge of pregnancy and the intense new experiences of daily interaction with their children lead to “neurogenesis” or the brain’s process of growing and changing through the development of new neurons. According to this research, neurogenesis strengthens a number of skills, including multitasking!
“Are you sweeping or singing?” my daughter, a mindfulness native, asked me. I, the mindfulness immigrant, was sweeping. And singing. Read more
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