Negative Effects Of Multitasking

Have you ever caught yourself texting with a friend of yours while trying to focus on a boring lecture at school? Or listening to music while preparing for midterms? Maybe sometimes you scroll down your Facebook news feed while eating? If you are familiar with at least one thing mentioned above, congratulations! Most probably you like multitasking – dealing with more than one task at the same time. Some people are proud of such a “skill” but actually it does not bring us any good. In fact, multitasking reduces our productivity, overall performance at school or work and negatively affects our health. That is why multitasking has a negative impact on us. Kelly Bruno in her article Why Your Brain Can’t Multitask states that our brains can focus on only one particular task. When we think that we perform two or more things at once, we just switch our attention from one to another that costs our brains a lot of efforts and energy. Constant activity change can raise level of cortisol (hormone of stress) that later can lead to hostile behavior. What is more, multitasking can cause the production of adrenaline that can make our thinking unclear and fuzzy. Recent study of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health showed that continuous increase of these hormones in our blood can be dangerous also for our health: frequent headaches and insomnia, for instance. According to Jason M. Watson and David L. Strayer, most people (around 97-98%) cannot multitask even if they