Learning NOT to Multi-task

My name is Jeannine, and I am a multi-tasker.

I'm on Week 1 Day 2 of my 10 week "Making Healthier Choices" plan. Right now, I'm not eliminating all the "bad" stuff and forcing myself to do "good" stuff, I'm just making little changes.

So, today after a LONG day of teaching, I let myself stop and get pizza on the way home. "Wait a minute!" you say. "How is that a healthier choice?" Here is where the healthier part comes in. I tend to do other things while I eat. I can accomplish a lot while I'm eating a meal. To be honest, I can't remember the last time (before tonight) that I ate a meal without doing several other things. The big problem with that is that then I tend to overeat...a lot. My healthy choice today was to eat my pizza, but just eat my pizza. I couldn't do anything else.

It was hard. I mean really, really hard. I even had to take a break to read the mail. Yeah, I know that technically that means that I didn't eat the whole meal without doing anything else, but the important part is that I didn't eat while I was doing something else.

In our culture, multi-tasking is praised and seen as a skill to develop if you want to really go places in the world. In many ways, multi-tasking has allowed me to achieve things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. But...I think that there is something to be said for being completely focused on one thing, being fully present, and slowing down.

There is a time and place for multi-tasking, but I think I spend too much of my life there. I've found recently that I'm even starting to multi-task my Tai Chi. "Check your breath. Check your alignment. Keep your heel down. Feel that weight shift." Yes, I do need to tweak all those things, but I also need to sometimes just do the form. Move it, feel it, observe it, be present. Then surprisingly, several of those other issues that I was trying to fix all at the same time kind of fix themselves.

My dinner experiment was tough, but I think I'm going to keep doing it for at least one meal a day. Be present, enjoy the food, and stop when I've had enough.


-- Posted from my iPhone