Ever catch yourself fidgeting? Do you gnaw at the tip of your pen while you work? Are you prone to staring out the nearest window, more immersed in the sights and sounds outside than the computer screen in front of you? Have you been guilty of bouncing in your chair to the beat of your favorite song while tackling tasks? Two pieces of good news: you’re not alone, and you’ve picked up the right book!
Nearly everyone becomes distracted when they try to maintain concentration for a long period of time. Behavioral scientists tell us that many of today’s jobs, schools, and lifestyles put us in unnatural positions— literally: neither our brains nor our bodies were made to focus for countless hours on end. We were made to move around. The long periods of sitting, the lack of changes in our physical and mental scenery—they’re enough to test anyone’s attention reserves.
Commanding yourself to “Just focus!” isn’t enough to boost your concentration on your work: we all know this because we’ve tried it untold times. Often, the solution to wandering thoughts or a fading attention span isn’t found in orders or instructions to ourselves, or even in words at all. We can feel it in our bodies—they want to move!
Where we once fought those urges to move, doodle, stare, and daydream, more and more of us are realizing that the only way out is to give in to our fidgety urges. Research increasingly confirms it: let your body move, your brain daydream, your hand doodle, and you’ll become more productive, more creative, and more engaged over the long haul.
Fidgeting is the body’s way of dealing with the sedentary habits that have become increasingly common in twenty-first-century life. For the most part, we have trained ourselves to sit and concentrate when we perform any kind of task—to address the challenge by pressing the focus button until we’re done. You may even agree that a key sign of a great work ethic is a person’s ability to labor over a task without any sign of distraction until the work is done. This approach may look appealing, but it’s not very efficient or effective: neuroscience tells us that the more repetitive and boring a task is, the more likely your brain is to tune out. When we sit stationary in front of a computer screen for hours on end or stuff hundreds of envelopes in one sitting, we’re practically begging our minds to start wandering. When they wander off on their own and focus is completely lost, experts estimate that it can take as long as 25 minutes for us to return our full attention to a task, wasting precious time and exhausting our limited resources.
We should be fidgeting instead! Long misunderstood as a telltale sign of an undisciplined mind, fidgeting is enjoying a complete rethinking by cognitive and behavioral researchers, educators, and maybe even a parent or two. In this book, you’ll come across familiar fidgets, some others you’ve never thought of, and maybe even a few you’ve been doing all your life without realizing it! In reading through them, you’ll understand a bit better just what you’re getting out of that doodling or pacing and discover some new ways to fidget that just might be perfect for you.
So what counts as fidgeting? According to Purdue University, fidgeting is what we’re up to when we do two things simultaneously: one activity focuses part of the brain on the most important action, while the second utilizes an entirely different part of the brain and body to dispense with static, or built-up, frustrated energy. That second activity—the fidget—frees up the main part of the brain to devote its focus to the important project at hand. Even though it seems counterintuitive, distraction and loss of focus often arise not because we’re out of energy, but because we’ve got too much mental and physical energy that isn’t used up in the process of doing whatever it is we’re focused on. When our feet start tapping or our eyes begin to roam around, our bodies are telling us they need somewhere to release all that excess energy. They need to fidget.
In fact, allowing yourself to fidget in any way—doodling across a notepad, rubbing a smooth stone, kicking the legs of your chair— promotes more creative thought, speedier learning, and improved focus. Studies have also found that fidgeting enhances concentration, relieves stress and anxiety, and inspires creative thinking. The key may be finding the fidget that works best for you. Different fidgets connect with different parts of our brains and bodies, solving different problems and demonstrating different benefits. Repetitive fidgets, like toe tapping, can be calming, while playing with something that clicks can jolt your attention back to a task. As long as the movement, activity, scene, or sound doesn’t distract you or require your full attention, just about any fidget will help boost your productivity and expand your potential.