You know the feeling where there is an annoying noise in the background? Your mind readjusts to it’s new reality and accepts it as the new norm: Reality + “Beeeeeep”…
You’re still able to concentrate because the human brain is among the most remarkable devices to ever exist, but there is a thread running in the back of your mind, noticing the noise, processing it, and it’s taking up CPU and driving you crazy. It’s hard to even notice that it’s doing that, until the noise is gone and you relax in a sigh of relief.
When the noise comes back for the second time around, your mind loses faith in the idea that the environment is safe from noise, and readjusts again. As the noise keeps coming back again and again, it becomes a permanent resident in the mind’s model of the environment. Even when it disappears, you ask yourself, “Is it still there? When will it be back? Should I concentrate fully or expect the noise to come back?”. Apart from it being a nasty form of torture and taking up permanent CPU, it degrades the quality of your focus and your ability to consume informations and solve problems. You forget how it was before, and it seems like it was always like this.
Even when it’s not there for days, you still wait for it in anticipation, knowing it will come back to disturb you. Just like when it first introduced itself, when the noise disappears, it takes time for the mind to unlearn the trauma and gain trust in the environment as being safe from noise again. During that time, the mind had already allocated cognitive resources, using them to anticipate and expect something that will break the stream of focus. So, even when the disturbance is not physically present anymore, it’s there - like a ghosting effect.
This phenomena happens with other types of distractions. It could be a noisy roommate or neighbor, unimportant phone call, even that other task you keep thinking about and getting back to. We basically train our mind to acknowledge that our time working is worth as much as the time spent doing the interrupting activity. Because, after all, if what we were doing was really that important, couldn’t everything else wait? This thought corrupts our mindset and stops us from letting go of outside reality and entering a state of deep work.
I don’t have all the answers, but for me, the way to deal with this is: instead of dealing with, or, removing the distractions, I remove myself from the distractions. Like starting with a blank sheet of paper, a separate, clean physical and virtual environment helps me completely focus and immerse myself in the process of creation.