Finding Focus in the Franticness of Daily Life

Feeling frantic and unfocused has become a more and more common experience in my daily life. It crept up slowly, I didn’t have a cellphone until college, and the insidious ease and noisiness of apps connected to everything everywhere is relatively recent.

But I notice it, as do friends and colleagues. The constant interruptions, the inability to do focused and deep work, the dissatisfaction when you are paying attention to only what is in front of you, the constant sense that you are missing something.

For me, it shows up most deeply as “what is it that I am forgetting to worry about”, which honestly, feels loopy in its logic. This is the dark side of the “not knowing what you don’t know”. It isn’t a great mental narrative and it feeds itself. So I am going to try out something new and perhaps you will join me. For the rest of the month, I’ll share how I am looking at the Frantic Feeling that seems to be in the driver’s seat often, what feeds, how do I untangle it, what could help in going from Frantic to frantic. I hope you find something useful here and I would love to hear from your experiences as well.