Why do we struggle to do one thing at a time any more?

Somewhere along the way, doing just one thing at a time started to feel strange and multitasking became the new norm.

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The coffee isn’t getting cold because there wasn’t time to drink it, but because something on a screen pulled your attention away before you had the chance to enjoy a lovely, warm brew.

Sound familiar? For most of us, it’s not an occasional thing, it’s a daily occurrence.

Somewhere along the way, doing just one thing at a time started to feel strange and multitasking became the new norm. If you think about it: we eat while scrolling, watch television while half-reading our phones, we take a walk and listen to a podcast. It is a normal occurrence to find ourselves reaching for something to fill the quiet, peaceful moments.

The new normal of a divided mind

Multitasking used to be considered a skill and something to be proud of. The ability to handle multiple things at once felt productive, efficient, modern. However, we are slowly beginning to understand the cost of it. Productivity has been slowly dipping, because although multiple tasks are on the go, none of them are getting our full attention.

Realistically, our attention and focus aren’t really evenly split into two streams, it’s just rapidly flickering between the two tasks and every time your attention switches between the tasks there is a moment of reorientation. Over the course of a day, those moments accumulate. By evening, many people describe feeling exhausted without being able to say exactly why. The body hasn’t worked that hard, but the mind has been in motion almost constantly.

There’s something unsettling about how normalised this mindset has become. Checking emails during a lunch break is supposed to be time to switch off and reenergise before the afternoon or half-listening in a conversation because a notification blinking in the corner of your eye results in feeling a low-level restlessness during moments that used to feel restful.

The discomfort of stillness

This mindset is often hard to shift from because the pull towards mental stimulation isn’t always loud or obvious, it is often a subtle pulse that builds up over time paired with the familiarity of checking emails quickly over lunch. Since this habit has become so normal, there is often a mild unease when there’s nothing to look at, or listen to, and many people find this uncomfortable. It is as though the nervous system has become accustomed to constant input, and the absence can trigger an internal alarm.

This matters, because genuine rest tends to require a certain quality of stillness. When that space is constantly filled, the nervous system doesn’t get the signal that it’s safe to release and relax. Over time, this feeling builds up and becomes a constant low-level hum of mild anxiety, a sense of always feeling slightly behind or having difficulty concentrating. Reaching the end of a day and not quite being able to recall how it passed.

Coming back to where you are

There’s no dramatic solution to any of this, no single habit that undoes the habits of modern life. But there is something genuinely valuable in the simple act of noticing and occasionally choosing to be where you are. That might mean enjoying your morning coffee from the coffee machine and letting the warmth of it register. Putting the phone face-down, just for those few minutes, and being in the small ritual of it. It sounds remarkably simple but for many people, doing even that fully without reaching for something else has become almost foreign.

It might mean noticing the quality of light during a walk, rather than filling the time with audio and letting your eyes rest on something in the distance. Giving your senses something real to engage with, rather than something constructed. These aren’t techniques, they’re more like small invitations - moments where you slip back into your own experience, rather than hovering somewhere above it.

Mindfulness is returning to the breath, to the body, to the texture of right now. Not with the aim of achieving anything, but because presence is its own kind of nourishment. The coffee will still get cold sometimes. The phone will still blink. But there’s something quietly meaningful in occasionally noticing that and choosing, just for a moment, to stay.