I think we all know this but don’t want to say it aloud – multitasking doesn’t work.

It feeds whatever happens in the brain that makes us more intense and anxious.

It rewards us for not focusing and leads us to look for even more ways to become distracted.

After letting our digital devices define how we live, there is an awakening coming not to throw them away – hey, they’re also great additions to life – but to recognize that even if we can multitask, are we willing to keep paying the psychological price for doing so.

My students surprised me this week when unprompted they complained about a world that is forcing them to lose focus – The popular app TikTok was mentioned – I had to be revived!

And there was great sentiment that they are being played by those who want their business in the attention economy.

It got worse (I mean better) – one student said she deleted her TikTok app a few months ago and has read three books since (the most in years, she says).  Others admitted downplaying their time on the addictive app.

Some thought that their younger siblings were in worse shape and called them “iPad faces” because of parents and schools rushing the use of digital devices.

I came away with the thought that perhaps we’re all being played for fools by people and companies accentuating increasingly short attention spans.

Look what I found – a modern-day, real-life definition of the ravages of stress:

“We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren’t problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They’d get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response”.                                                                                            – Daniel Levitin

Anxiety was good in pre-historic days to stay alive, but it is killing us when the same intense responses happen many times a day due to more frequent lesser threats because of the way we chose to live.

Most stress is unnecessary.

When I am verbally attacked, I really have the urge to fire back.

Each time I do, I lose.  Each time I resist, I set up an unexpected victory.

Some people don’t mean to be insulting (and some do).

Others are bullies, let’s face it, the world has bullies of all ages.

If you make it far enough not to get into an insult-match, start asking questions.  Insults are emotional and don’t stand up well to rational questions like “what makes you say that” and “give me some examples”.

An insulting person may not be a friend you want but sometimes you can’t get away from them so standing back and making them explain their emotional tirade even lets them know that it is time to change the subject.

Apple founder Steve Jobs famously said “customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them” when his planning team wanted to research customer needs.

Big companies like Proctor & Gamble spend millions testing consumers and fail more often than succeed – and remember when Coca Cola decided that it was time for New Coke after doing research that was clearly wrong when the product failed.

This is important because in our lives we chase things that we think we may want but cannot know for sure until we get it.

Curiosity, it turns out, may be a better roadmap to our future desires so every day we feed our curiosity, we learn more about what may be important to us.

That’s what many of my students say – I tell them I need their 100% attention during class and recognize that if they have to check for messages, they can do so by stepping out of the classroom.

Imagine being thanked for asking them to stow their phones (and by stow I mean out of sight because yes, there is research that shows even if a phone that is turned off sits within your sightlines, you will keep checking it no matter whether that it is off).

Learning to live with technology is where most of us are right now – asking for undivided attention is not a punishment — it can be a reward.

It doesn’t take long to discover that spending more time with people in our lives that we may be neglecting is not the short answer.

What people crave is more focus not necessarily more time – the world is busy, life is hectic, almost everyone has the same problem of needing more time.

Activities and conversations that are so focused not even a mobile device can interrupt it.

People feel guilty when they know they are struggling to spend more time with those who matter in their lives but less time and more focus is where the sweet spot is.

In one of my recent NYU Music Business classes we were discussing voice activated listening (Alexa) — a student discovered research about how senior citizens improved their loneliness by interacting with a smart speaker.

Keeping in mind that the number one use for smart speakers like Echo is to listen to music.

But the seniors in this study talked to their artificial “friends” and treated them as they would a human.  Even saying hello when they walked into the room with a smart speaker.

Imagine the power of humans listening and responding to each other if artificial intelligence is a potent but less adequate alternative.

My NYU music business students are always interested in discovering and unlocking the dormant powers they have and may not even realize.

Nothing can pick up your day today more than acknowledging all the hidden powers we all have that can help us get through the ups and downs of daily living.

The power to deal with adversity – no course necessary, everyone has a pretty place to start.

The power to get along well with others – a hint, make it about them.

The power to make others happy – which makes us happy in the process.

The power to care about others and get the negativity off of us.

The dormant power within is there ready to go – hit start.

Author, physician and resilience expert Amit Sood says pursuing happiness will make you miserable.

Better to focus on caring.

And the core building block of caring is resilience.

Therefore, chasing happiness through books, blogs, videos, courses and even psychologists is a useless task.

Patterning happiness in the brain begins with increasing our awareness of caring for others.