You’re not bad at focus. You’ve just been trained out of it.
The one “norm” has been draining your genius and killing your brain cells
There’s a hidden work pattern stealing more energy than you realize.
It creeps in quietly, and has become such a norm that you don’t even notice doing it anymore.
It shows up when you open a new tab mid-sentence. When you reply to DMs and emails while watching a webinar. When you check your phone while you’re in the middle of a conversation.
From the outside, it looks like you’re staying on top of things.
Inside?
There’s a quiet fraying. The small, continual erosion of your attention. It convinced you that the more you do, the more output you produce, the more progress you make.
But when you look closely, you are “getting things done,” but it doesn’t feel truly complete. You’re constantly moving, but not quite arriving. You wrap up your day wondering why you’re so drained.
It’s easy to blame your to do list, your lack of time, or the weight of responsibilities.
But here’s what it really costs: Your presence. Your ability to think clearly with depth. Your EQ. And here’s something unexpected, it’s killing your brain cells!
Not all at once—but slowly and subtly, until you don’t even realize how much you’ve drifted from what you’re truly capable of… each time you multitask.
It seems like we know it’s not the best for us. I shared a Note asking people to tell me what they thought about multitasking in less than 5 words, and there were some great answers:
…but how often are you still doing it?
It doesn't just split your attention. It splits your identity.
Every time you context switch from task to task, you fracture your internal rhythm.
You train yourself to operate in fragments, in tiny sprints.
You give partial energy to everything, and full energy to rarely anything.
And then you wonder why your creative work feels diluted. Why you reread the same sentence three times and still can’t absorb it. Why your ideas feel foggy, even though you’ve been “working” all day.
That is the deeper harm of multitasking.
When I started noticing how multitasking was draining me, I realized it wasn’t just my energy slipping away—it was my belief in my own capacity. Not just to do… but to creatively think, to focus, and to trust my own process.
I began to believe that “I work better under pressure”, so I created shorter timelines to force myself into get what I needed done. Then I start designing my work day and business around that urgency, instead of my genius.
I thought I could hack my way into being more effective, but what started as a coping mechanism became a way of operating. A survival pattern that quietly disconnected me from my best self. That is how multitasking became more than just a bad habit.
This 4 Day Work Week Experiment is my reclamation, a conscious unlearning, and exploration to undo that harm.
What multitasking actually teaches your nervous system
It’s easy to overlook because it feels familiar and normal. You think it’s not affecting you, only because you’ve been doing it for decades and your body has found a way to cope with it.
But underneath it all, multitasking tells your nervous system to stay alert and be on edge. It keeps you stuck in shallow engagement, never fully landing in one thing before leaping to the next.
And when you try to slow down? Try to take your time, go deeper, or focus for more than a few minutes?
You feel anxious. Your brain tries to distract you. The quiet you’ve been craving suddenly feels uncomfortable.
Why?
Because your brain has been trained to equate stillness with danger, with falling behind, and missing opportunities.
This is how multitasking becomes a negative feedback loop: You feel scattered, so you try to do more. But doing more makes you feel even more out of sync. Whenever you want to rest, your brain guilt trips you back into doing more. Rest no longer soothes you—it agitates you.
So you’re not here to just about learning another productivity strategy to get more done in less time.
You are here to relearn how to feel safe in your own focus again.
Yes, multitasking actually damages your brain
Let’s drop the “it’s just how I work” defense and get real about what multitasking is doing to your brain.
A mentor once told me about a Forbes article that said, “multitasking kills your brain cells.” That sounded extreme… until I looked deeper and learned that the damage isn’t theoretical.
That article stated that “A study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they'd expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child.”
Another study discovered that heavy multitaskers have reduced gray matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex—the part of your brain responsible for empathy, emotional regulation, attention, and decision making. The very skills you rely on to lead, relate, and create.
That’s what’s happening inside your head while you’re toggling between tabs!
But it’s not just your IQ that takes the hit. It’s also your EQ.
Multitasking lowers your emotional intelligence because it dulls your awareness. You stop noticing tone, body language, and the subtleties in people’s words. You miss what’s being said between the lines, and your ability to respond with clarity and care gets compromised.
You become less attuned. Less discerning. Less connected.
Not because you don’t care… but because you’re not fully there. You are present with your body but not with your full, undivided attention.
That disconnection continues to build in other areas of your life, too. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “how you do one thing is how you do everything”, right?
It shows up in missed cues, weakened rapport, and degrading ability to connect at a deeper level. (That also includes the relationship with yourself, too.)
So NO! Multitasking is far from being harmless. It affects how you think, how you learn, how you lead, and how you connect.
And for entrepreneurs who are the face of their business? That is everything.
When you trade attention for speed, you dilute your power.
It’s tempting to believe that doing more means you’re being more.
But when you dilute your focus, you dilute your depth. And when you dilute your depth, you disconnect from the very thing that makes your work matter.
Your clearest insights (the ones that land with your audience and actually shift something for them) don’t show up during a flurry of context switching. They arrive in the stillness, immersion in the space where your mind gets to complete a full thought without interruption.
That’s where your voice strengthens, where your genius gets sharper, and where your work resonates deeper.
You aren’t just be “productive”. You’re making a difference. This is why focusing on multipurposing has been such a impactful shift for me.
Because it doesn’t just change your work flow and Work Structure.
It changes your Work Identity. Because you’re no longer someone who “tries to do it all”. You become someone who sees clearly, chooses wisely, and honors what truly matters to you.
You’re not broken.
Your focus is scattered because you’ve been taught that more is better and that your worth is tied to your output.
But that way of working has a shelf life and dire long term consequences. It leaves you feeling perpetually behind, even when you're checking things off. It disconnects you from the parts of yourself that are wise, creative, and present.
You don’t need more hustle. You need more clarity. Not about what to do next, but about what deserves your full presence.
Your real power isn’t in what you can juggle. It’s in what you can hold—fully, deeply, and without distraction.
Choose that. Choose that each time you notice yourself multitasking or chasing distractions. Choose to stop, reclaim your focus, and save your brain cells, too.
P.S. If this post helped you rethink how multitasking shows up in your day, tap the ❤️. Share or restack this to help someone else unplug from the multitask trap.
✨ A special thanks to from The Doers Club and from the Vibe Coder for their awesome comments. Check out their Substacks, and maybe one might just earn a spot in your inbox.
"But underneath it all, multitasking tells your nervous system to stay alert and be on edge. It keeps you stuck in shallow engagement, never fully landing in one thing before leaping to the next."
All. The. Time. I feel called out but also glad to having been aware of this and slowly working towards improving. Great article Kat!