Like a lot of people, I’ve started wondering just how much my phone, my email, and all of life’s other tech-based distractions are messing with my head.

As a health writer, it’s part of my job to read up on the latest research. And more and more, what I’ve been reading suggests a constant stream of new alerts and emails is a significant drag on my brain’s ability to stay on-task and get shit done. I started paying more attention to how (and when) my mind would wander. And the more I looked, the more I found evidence of just how disruptive my phone and email had become.

I’d be on deadline—knowing I had only an hour or two to wrap up a complicated assignment—when a quick glance at my email would reveal a new note from an editor or a question from a colleague that would snag my attention and drag it down some rabbit hole that—5 or 10 or 20 minutes later—I’d emerge from a little disoriented and with the recognition that I’d just wasted a bunch of time replying to an email that was neither important nor urgent.

The same thing would happen when a text came through on my phone. Whatever I was working on, no matter how pressing, tended to be shouldered aside for the few seconds or minutes it took me to read and reply to the message.

Even when I caught myself—when I set down my phone or shifted away from my email before replying—it took some time for me to re-locate my train of thought and get rolling again. In those cases—those times when I was disciplined and got right back to work—I assumed the time I’d lost glancing at my email was minimal. A few seconds, at most.

I realized how wrong I was after speaking with Calvin Newport, Ph.D., an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of the book .

The Problem With Quick-Hit Distractions

The problem, Newport told me, is that people incorrectly believe that if they only spend 30 seconds checking their email or texts, they’re only losing 30 seconds of work time. Not so. “When you shift your attention, those context switches have a high cognitive cost,” he said. How high? “Almost like taking a drug,” he replied.

This is a rough analogy. But it helps to think of all this sort of like playing an old video game—Super Marie Bros. or Street Fighter. In those games, if you get picked off by some thug or sliding turtle shell, you’re whisked back to the start of the stage or level. You can still finish the game. But the more often you’re killed, the more you have to go back and complete part of a stage or level again.

The same sort of “go back to start” penalty is happening to your attention every time you’re distracted by an email or text, Newport said. Especially when you’re dealing with something complex that requires a lot of focused consideration, even a brief peek at your email can disrupt your train of thought enough that it may take you 20 or 30 minutes to get back to where you were before the distraction. And if you’re checking your email every 2 minutes? You’re going to struggle to get complex work done at all.

Maybe the scariest part: Newport said there’s research showing the more you allow your brain to be distracted, the more susceptible it becomes to distraction. So if you’ve spent years reaching for your phone or checking your email every few minutes, you may struggle to stay focused and on-task even in their absence.

“The broader idea that I’ve been pushing a lot recently is that, in the workplace, we’ve self-imposed this cognitive handicap that comes from being constantly connected and answering messages,” Newport told me, referring to email and our compulsion to reply to every missive almost the second it hits our inboxes.

The Solution?

I asked Newport for remedies. “Cut out the quick checks,” he said. “Police your attention, and try to block time for work that’s free of distraction.”

He recommended restricting my email checks to one or two times a day, and to cordon off big chunks of time for distraction-free work. He says that, in his experience, people who do this roughly double their productivity.

Taking his advice, I came up with a plan that seemed to fit my work demands and schedule.

I know I work best in the morning, and that’s also the time I tend to receive few urgent emails from editors. So from 8:30 to 11:30 A.M., I resolved to close my email and silence my personal phone and all alerts. I’d check emails from 11:30 until noon or a little after, then go to lunch. Afterward, I’d again work without distraction until 4 P.M., leaving me an hour or two to answer emails at the end of the day (when my brain tends to be fried anyway).

It was an admirable plan, but one that, from the start, proved tricky.

One of the many early roadblocks I encountered: A big chunk of my job as a journalist involves emailing sources and setting up time for interviews. I tend to send these emails on the fly as I conduct research on an assignment. But obviously that demands a visit to my Gmail inbox.

It took some time, but I developed a workaround. At least in Gmail, there’s a way to compose new emails in their own tabs. So, at the start of the day, I’d open a dozen or so blank email tabs so that, if I needed to fire one out, I could do so without looking at my inbox.

How My Brain Changed

There were plenty of other procedural and workflow issues I had to resolve. But those proved to be the least of my problems. Even after I’d created a physical and digital workspace completely free of distraction, my brain—or, more accurately, my attention—seemed unwilling to stick with the new program.

It was frightening how often my head and hands itched to check email while I was trying to work.

During that first week, my eyes kept sliding to the top-left corner of my screen, which is where my inbox counter usually sits. I’d never realized it before. But now that I was paying attention, I realized I’d developed a habit of checking my email every time I wrote a paragraph, or finished reading the abstract of a new study. It was like a little reward my brain had learned to seek out every few seconds.

This sense of email-as-reward intensified when 11 A.M. rolled around, and I would open my inbox with a kind of crazed eagerness.

I could make some over-the-top comparisons here to strung-out addicts shooting up. But honestly, diving into that sweet pile of unread messages was an almost euphoric experience. (If you spend all day on email, try going an hour or two without it and you’ll see what I mean.)

How to Influence Your Boss:

That first week was a slog, and the second was nearly as tough. But by Week 3 of my new routine, I noticed a change. I was going a full 20 or 30 minutes without any “time to check email” thoughts, or a loss of focus on my work. By Week 4, my focus was even stronger. An hour might pass, and I’d stay completely immersed in a task.

The improvements in my productivity were noticeable. I tend to get an assignment or two done each day, depending on the length and complexity of the piece. Now I was wrapping up the same amount of work by the early afternoon. I was gaining at least an hour or two each day.

I also noticed the benefits bleeding into the other parts of my life. I felt less fried in the evenings at the gym, or while having dinner with my family. I also found myself reaching for my phone a lot less after the kids were in bed and my wife and I were watching TV.

I once took a course on mindfulness meditation, and I noticed a lot of parallels between that experience and this one. In both cases, I was working to free my mind from distraction. But while the benefits of meditation always felt abstract, the productivity gains I was experiencing were measurable and meaningful.

So now more than a month has passed. I still feel that deranged sense of euphoria every time I open my email inbox. But I feel less tempted to check it during my blocked work times.

Every day, it feels like my mind has a little less trouble staying focused and on-task, and I get a little more done. I have more time for exercise and playing with my kids. And, maybe more importantly, I feel like I have more control over my thoughts and attention.

“We’re all holding ourselves back,” Newport had said to me. “If we want our brain to be comfortable not getting a shiny new piece of stimuli every few minutes, we have to schedule time for deep work, and we have to make that time sacred.”

Based on my four-week experiment, I couldn’t agree with him more.

Markham Heid Markham Heid is an experienced health reporter and writer, has contributed to outlets like TIME, Men’s Health, and Everyday Health, and has received reporting awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C.

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