BSO, FOMO and SQUIRREL!! – How to stop an addictive brain…

Our addiction to distraction is the real subject of this article – BSO, FOMO and SQUIRREL are just the nicknames for it.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all experienced something that takes our mind off what we are doing. Whether it is an email ping, a quick question from around the water-cooler, or even this article.

The Dilemma of Attention Deficit.

And I do believe we are all at risk of becoming attention deficit if we are not careful. Over 2,000 managers and over 3,000 full time workers, across a variety of industries and company sizes, were surveyed by Harris Poll as just one example, as to where their distractions came from and what percentage of time was impacted.

The results showed:

38% of employees were distracted by social media
23% from email
39% said being on the Internet and
50% on the mobile and texting

What is that doing to business productivity and results? is one question we might ask. But another is what is it doing to each of us and how is it preparing us for the future?

Considering it takes someone between four minutes to twenty minutes to get back on track after being derailed by a distraction, for businesses this is worrying and for each of us this is scary!

There is so much to distract us today. In fact, as I’m sitting here writing this my office door is open to the outside, the sun is streaming in, my cat is purring at my feet, I can hear the birds tweeting (no Trump!) and the postie just dropped some mail in my mail box. What is my immediate thought?

By default, my brain is telling me to stop doing what I am doing and go and check the mail box.

To stay where I am and complete this article is driving me crazy

And that’s because I am expecting something to be delivered and I believe it is waiting for me. Why can’t it wait? So I decide to do a little self analysis.

Why is holding back from checking the mail box driving me crazy? [insert anything here, reading emails, following links down rabbit holes… you get my gist]

What is going on in our brains when this happens to us? Can we do something about it?Are we actually addicted to distraction, bright shiny objects, fear of missing out or squirrels?

And therein lies the answer.

Our Addiction to Distraction.

Our reward system is activated through the release of a neurotransmitter in our brain called ‘dopamine’. Most of us have heard of this and whenever we have thoughts, or experiences that we enjoy, or that meets any of our human needs (safety, adventure, significance, connection with others, personal growth and giving to others), our brain releases this dopamine chemical and we tend to go back for more – sometimes even upping the ante and wanting greater amounts of more.

From an evolution perspective, this ‘dopamine hit’ helps us repeat those very activities that ensure our survival – sleep, food, sex. I mean if we didn’t gain some kind of reward from these for all these centuries, we wouldn’t do them and as a species where would we be today?

In fact, it could also be said that our survival relied on us being so acutely aware of what was on the competitive landscape that our primitive brain was actually on the lookout 24/7 looking for those bright shiny objects as part of it’s protective role (e.g. sleeping with one eye open) so that danger didn’t take advantage of complacency.

But we aren’t in the caveman days anymore and whilst we don’t have a geographical landscape to scan, our reliance on scanning the internet, emails and apps is increasing at a rapid rate, and by default threatening our very intelligence.

How does it impact us in our sales leadership?

Being high on dopamine may sound really cool – always being ‘on’, highly active, loving the social life, proud of your workaholic-ism, sleep deprived, sugar and coffee reliant, but it seriously plays havoc with your ability to control your moods, your memory, the ability to focus and everything you need to play at 100% in your role and can actually turn the tables on you.

If you find yourself wanting instant gratification (i.e. lacking patience and cutting to the chase), or you tend to be more go, go, go and hyperactive (i.e. can’t sit in silence for too long and feel you need to rush someone along to fit your timeframe), or maybe you are impulsive and let your emotions override your logic and reasoning (i.e. you don’t ask the right questions or can’t be present to a conversation), then you may find yourself victim to this addictive, distraction filled lifestyle.

Chances are you may have higher than normal levels of dopamine and may need to take steps to calm down your lifestyle, learn to go a little slower and take time out. We can’t blame technology per se, nor can we say we are addicted to technology, because our phones, our I-pads, our video games, our emails etc are simply tools and they have a place in our world.

But these are no different to any other resource or tool we have access to, except for their ubiquity.

We need to take our power back.
We need to improve our relationship between us and technology.
We need to tackle our self awareness.
We need to stop being in denial.
We need to take control of where our attention leads us.

Here are some ideas:

I now have sales teams who place their mobile phones in a box before entering a meeting (Thanks Simon Sinek) so that attention is focussed where it needs to be.
We now turn off all electronic devices before we go to sleep so that the brain can calm down in order to sleep deeply because that’s where and when all the reparation work for our brain and body occurs, in order for us to play at 100%.
Taking time out during the day to simply ‘breathe, be and block time’ will go a long way to help you stay in the moment and complete your self agreed task before taking that impatient dopamine based break that is champing at the bit to interrupt and distract you.

Now, to collect my mail.

Our addiction to distraction shows up everywhere sales gets done – the notification that pulls a rep out of a discovery call, the inbox that gets checked mid-negotiation. Naming it as an addiction to distraction, rather than just ‘busyness’, is what makes it possible to actually manage.

Winning Back Attention from Our Addiction to Distraction

None of the ideas above are complicated, and that’s the point – our addiction to distraction isn’t solved by one big dramatic change, it’s solved by a handful of small, repeated boundaries that protect your attention on purpose.

Every strategy above is really the same move applied to a different moment: interrupt our addiction to distraction before it interrupts you. That’s the whole game.

I’m not immune to this either – the mail box story at the top of this article is my own addiction to distraction playing out in real time, and I noticed it precisely because I’d started paying attention to my own patterns instead of just reacting to them.

That noticing is really where the work starts. You can’t manage our addiction to distraction, or your own version of it, until you can catch it happening in the moment rather than an hour later when you’ve already lost the thread of what you were doing.

Sales leaders often ask me how to build this awareness into a team, not just an individual habit. Start with the meeting itself: name our addiction to distraction out loud, put the phones in the box before anyone sits down, and treat the next 30 minutes as protected time rather than negotiable time.

It sounds almost too simple to matter, but our addiction to distraction thrives on ambiguity – on nobody quite agreeing whether checking a phone mid-meeting is fine or not. Make the rule explicit, and the addiction loses most of its power in that room.

Give it a try this week: one meeting, phones in the box, and see how much of our addiction to distraction was actually just habit rather than necessity.

The mail box is still there, by the way. It waited. It always does – which is usually the clearest proof that our addiction to distraction was never really about urgency at all.

What surprised me most, writing this piece, is how much our addiction to distraction has become invisible infrastructure – we’ve built entire workdays around interruption and call it multitasking, when really it’s just our addiction to distraction wearing a productivity costume.

Strip that costume off and the truth is simpler: deep, focused attention is rare now, which makes it valuable now. Anyone who can consistently push past our addiction to distraction and stay with one task, one conversation, one person, has a genuine edge over everyone still checking their mail box.

So here’s the practical takeaway: our addiction to distraction is manageable the moment you stop treating it as a personal failing and start treating it as a system problem – environment, habits, and clear rules beat willpower every single time.

If our addiction to distraction is costing your sales team focus, follow-through and results, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations tackle exactly this – helping people take their attention, and their performance, back.

I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.

If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.

BOOK A NO-OBLIGATION 20-MINUTE CALL

And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.