Dr. Jennifer Groh

I mean, do you find...

I mean, diving into the phone thing, definitely going to try the chicken thing.

Yeah, maybe I'll make a video.

Yeah, yeah.

The idea is you're trying to literally— To physically make you focus on one thing.

Well, I think, too, it could be helpful to ponder why one's attention is being drawn to other things because I think that –

Like the most relaxed I can get these days is if I know someone else is monitoring the state of the world and will let me know if there's some major disaster.

But having that outsourced is super helpful because it satisfies the need to have a warning system going on at all times.

And it allows me to kind of, you know, then focus in on, you know, what's in front of me right at the moment.

I'll give you an example that's not really about attention, but it's about, like, what's the best way for me to achieve a state of relaxation?

So I went on a lovely rafting trip in Idaho this past summer.

I have a Zolio satellite communicator.

This is basically a thing that interacts with your phone and interacts with a satellite.

You can't make phone calls, but you can send and receive text messages.

And I brought that along because I felt that I would probably be more relaxed knowing that if something really bad happened, people could reach me than being completely out of touch.

So for me, that sort of middle space of like some contact, otherwise I'm going to be, you know, a heightened state of arousal when I come back out from the, you know, from the remote wilderness.

And then the reentry is so painful of that sort of onslaught of stress.

of things and um you know even emotional messages from people that if you read them in order you know and it's five or six days ago and you're like then you see follow-up messages and things got resolved without you usually

Fingers crossed.

Usually that's what happens.