This constant interruption during multitasking may cause damage to the brain.
Usually, most companies look for people who are good at multitasking while hiring their staff, believing that they can improve their productivity. But it turns out to be the opposite, as per a new study.
The study revealed that juggling multiple tasks at once can actually cause stress, sadness and fear, which would eventually lead to a tense working environment. If you're an office worker, you may be required to handle different things at once, such as answering emails while writing reports and so on. But those constant interruptions can negatively affect your mental health, noted the study authors.
Such unpleasant emotions can have negative consequences for the entire office culture, said study senior author Ioannis Pavlidis, director of the Computational Physiology Laboratory at the University of Houston.
The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
The study found that individuals who were engaged in multitasking appeared significantly sadder than those who did not. The multitasking cohort also experienced feeling of fear.
According to Pavlidis, multitasking imposes an onerous mental load, which is associated with elevated stress and sadness. But he finds the simultaneous onset of fear intriguing and he believes it is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption.
The display of these negative emotions can persist throughout the workday for many people, the researchers emphasized. This can have significant consequences on company culture, they added.
"Emotional contagion can spread in a group or workplace through the influence of conscious or unconscious processes involving emotional states or physiological responses," the study noted.
People multitask not because they are good at it but because it makes them feel good, claimed a research team from the Ohio State University. This is the reason why multitasking is so popular, though unproductive.
For the study, the researchers had college students record all of their media use and other activities for 28 days. They found that multitasking gave the students an emotional boost, even when it hurts their cognitive functions, such as studying.
It is a myth that multitasking makes people more productive, said Zheng Wang, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, who led the study.
They are actually misperceiving the positive feelings they get from multitasking. They are not being more productive they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work Wang explained in the Journal of Communication.
Many studies have linked multitasking to poor work performance. It has been shown that multitasking reduces your productivity by 40%. For example, every time you switch tasks, you have to repeat a bit to continue again. This will take your time as well as disrupt your thought process.
When you multitask, you're asking your brain to split its attention, but it can't do that.
Your brain is not capable of focusing on multiple tasks at once. While multitasking, your brain jumps back and forth between the tasks, focusing briefly one at a time. This constant interruption may cause damage to the brain.
A study at the University of Sussex found that people who regularly multitask have lower brain density in the region of their brain responsible for empathy, cognitive control and emotional control.
Instead of multitasking, the researchers suggested working on one thing at a time, in a place where you can concentrate.
