The Zeigarnik Effect A REALLY Cool Psychological Principle
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 21st, 2023
I’m gonna drop some serious knowledge on you about this cool psychological principle called the Zygarnic Effect.
So here’s the deal: the Zygarnic Effect kicks in when you get interrupted in the middle of a task and can’t finish it.
It creates an open cognitive loop in your brain that’s like having a gazillion tabs open on your computer browser.
It sucks up your mental bandwidth, making it hard to remember stuff, retain information, and focus on what you need to do. Sound familiar?
But here’s the kicker: we can totally use this to our advantage with a little thing called intention.
Most of us fall victim to it when we get interrupted by our boss, phone, or email and end up scrolling through social media instead of going back to what we were doing. It’s like a vicious cycle, man.
But I’ve got a trick for you….when I started writing sci-fi and fantasy novels, I used this strategy where I’d stop writing in the middle of a sentence, just like Hemingway did.
It’s crazy, I know, but it works like magic. Your brain can’t let go of that sentence and keeps circling back to it, churning out ideas and solutions.
And when you come back to it the next day…you’ve got momentum and ideas flowing like crazy.
If you want to be a productivity ninja and crush your to-do list, you need to harness the power of the Zygarnic Effect.
Use intention to your advantage, close those cognitive loops, and watch your brainpower soar.
Trust me, you’ll thank me later.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Your mind becomes quiet. Life becomes quiet, and you find a lot more peace, you find a lot more focus in the tasks that you’re doing because you’re not trying to juggle 20 different things in the back of your mind while also trying to stay present in the thing that you’re doing.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk about one of the coolest psychological principles that we can start using in our lives to improve all sorts of things. Like our memory, our ability to retain information. We can use it to overcome procrastination, to get into the flow state more quickly. Like, this is a really powerful psychological principle called the Zygarnic Effect, which is a really weird, funky word, but effectively, here’s how it works. Designed like Garnick effect occurs when you’re interrupted in the middle of a task. So you’re not able to complete that task. And as a result, what happens is your brain creates an open cognitive loop, which you might have heard me talk about before.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:43]:
Now. The problem with open cognitive loops is that they consume energy running in the back of your mind. It’s like having tabs open on your computer browser. When you’re not on that tab, it’s still consuming bits of the computer’s overall bandwidth, right? And as you start to stack up these tabs, these mental sucks, then your overall cognitive load starts to become bogged down and you start to struggle with things like memory, with retention, with procrastination, all these things, right? Now the open cognitive loop is important in the sense that your brain does it like the Zygarnic Effect. It occurs because your brain recognizes that you don’t want to forget the thing that you are working on. And also your brain, your subconscious mind is working in the background to create solutions or resolutions to what you are doing. So we can leverage this with intent. And that’s the really important thing here to recognize is that most of us, we fall prey to the Zygarnic effect, which is somebody comes into the office, they interrupt us in the middle of a task or the phone.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:49]:
Goes off, we get a notification. We, for whatever reason, interrupt ourselves and decide that we’re just going to open up our email, go to social media, just for a second, just to check in, just to see what’s out there, right? And the next thing you know, because we’re in the middle of this task, your brain is still revolving around it, but you’re no longer working on it. And again, if you stack up these mental tabs, we’ll call them, then eventually it’s going to bog down your system, right? And more importantly, you’re really just not making progress any longer on that thing that you were working on. Like you might be subconsciously ideating on it, but if you didn’t leave that task with intention to come back to it at a different time, then the Zygarnic Effect is going to be running amok with you. And so that’s where we often find ourselves in relation to this really cool psychological principle. However, we can turn the tables. We can use this phenomenon with intention. And it’s actually something that I did when I started writing science fiction and fantasy novels.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:54]:
So writing books is very, very hard because every day you have to sit down and stare at the blank page and start generating ideas out of nowhere. And that can be very, very difficult. A lot of writers will tell you that the hardest part or the scariest part is staring at a blank page. And I took a note, I think it was out of Hemingway’s book, out of his writing protocol, where he would talk about how he would just stop writing in the middle of a sentence. Like his daily writing session, he would show up every day at the same time and he would do his writing, but he would always make sure that he ends in the middle of a sentence. Not at the end of a paragraph, not at the end of a chapter, but in the middle of a sentence. And I always thought that was weird, but then when I started implementing it, it became very obvious very quickly why he would do this. And it’s because when you stop in the middle of a sentence, your brain cannot let it go.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:51]:
It is just ideating constantly. It’s perceiveberating on that sentence, it wants to close the cognitive loop, it wants to reach resolution. And until you come back to the table the next day, it is going to just continue circling on it. Which is good as a writer, because if you intend to come back the next day writing, you want your brain to continue working. And then when you sit down to start writing, you have all these ideas for how to finish it. And now you’re excited to dive into to complete that sentence. Even if it’s not a scene, let’s say, that your brain is fixated on for the whole day leading up to the writing. It is still easier to sit down and start writing when all you have to do is complete the sentence that you are in.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:33]:
Because you just read for context, like oh, Joey was saying, what was he saying? Finish out what he was saying. And then next thing you know you have momentum. And that’s really the most important thing to have when it comes to writing, or really with most cognitively demanding tasks, is traction, it’s forward momentum. And so ending in the middle of a sentence is a really powerful way to do that. And we can utilize this not just in writing, but in all tasks if we can find a cutting off point, not an intuitive one, right? Like our minds love the idea of completing things, getting to the end of a paragraph, getting to the end of a chapter. But the problem with that then is when you get to the end of the chapter the next day, you have to start from scratch. You have to get all the momentum going again. You have to create a new scene, new characters, get them moving forward.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:17]:
Whereas when you leave off right before the end of a chapter. It’s very easy just to complete that chapter and then keep that momentum forward. And I know I’m using this in the context of writing, but again, it truly does work in all contexts. Now, let’s circle back for a second because I wanted to talk about how we could use the Zygarnic effect to superpower the creative process, right? However, most of us, again, we fall prey to the Zygonic effect. It happens because we got distracted, because things imposed themselves on our world, and we allowed them to let us get pulled from the thing that we’re working on into whatever the new distraction is. And so because we all struggle with this, here’s a solution that I found very, very impactful, which is creating a second brain. Because all of those cognitive loops, all those open cognitive loops in a lot of instances are not beneficial, they’re not helpful. You don’t need to be perceiveberating on 90% of the things that are cycling through your mind, but your mind is perseverating because, one, it doesn’t want to forget what’s in there.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:20]:
It thinks that it’s important, right? And to some degree, maybe it is like, oh, you need to go to the grocery store and you need to get the carrots, or you need to make a doctor’s appointment. Those things are important to a degree, but they’re not things that you need to be perseverating on. Your brain doesn’t need to be using up cognitive bandwidth just for the sake of not forgetting the thing. And so this is where creating a second brain or having a place that we can take the ideas out of our mind and document them, whether that’s in a journal, whether that’s in Asana, whether that’s in notion or some other kind of to do list tracker software that can help you get these ideas into a place where you’re confident you’re not going to lose them. An interesting thing happens when your mind is no longer holding on to all these loose ends, thinking like, oh, if I lose this one, I’m going to forget about it entirely. Your brain, once it has the security of knowing, okay, the grocery list is on the to lou list. The doctors think all my to do’s are there. I don’t need to hold bandwidth.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:18]:
Your mind becomes quiet. Life becomes quiet, and you find a lot more peace, you find a lot more focus in the tasks that you’re doing because you’re not trying to juggle 20 different things in the back of your mind while also trying to stay present in the thing that you’re doing. And so I find a second brain tactic as a very, very powerful strategy. If you want to learn more about that. I go into the ins and outs of my particular second brain, which I use a combination of Asana, Notion, and then my remarkable notebook, or just sometimes it’s a regular pen and paper notebook. If you want to learn more about that? I unpack it all in the Hyperfocus Masterclass, which you can learn about by going to beyond theapex.com hyperfocus. And that’s pretty much all my systems for productivity and getting out of my own way. So hopefully you find that valuable.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:09]:
But that’s the Zygarnic effect. It’s a really cool principle that most of us, if we’re not aware of it, it is not helping us. But if we can understand the principles behind it, we can structure our day, our systems in a way that leverage it for maximum utility. And I think when you do that, you start to find that the creative process, which for most of us is very hard, very difficult to get into the flow, it just requires so much momentum and inertia. If we can use this Zygarnic effect, then it makes the whole process infinitely. Not infinitely, but vastly easier. Infinitely. That’s an insane multiple.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:50]:
So we’re not going to talk in that kind of hyperbole, but hopefully you got some value out of this. Guys, appreciate you being here, as always. Looking forward to seeing you back here tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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