Scattered: Five Ways to Find Your Way Back

Have you ever felt scattered: your attention in one place, your feelings in another, your motivation somewhere out of reach? I came home from leading a retreat at Esalen feeling just like the grass I saw scattering its seeds across the hillside on the drive up. In this episode, I share five ways to find your way back when you feel scattered, from expanding your space to connecting the dots, and why the goal isn’t to get rid of the scatter, but to be with it in a different way.

Listen and Learn:

• How expanding your space, including a little time in nature, can loosen a scattered mind

• A simple orienting question, “What are you loving about yourself right now?”, that gathers your attention

• Why switching between tasks leaves an attention residue, and what two weeks without mobile internet changed for people in one study

• How incubating (a walk, a night’s sleep) is different from procrastinating

• A paper-folding practice for connecting the dots from scattered to oriented

Listen to the full episode, and the next time you feel scattered, try the paper-folding practice: draw what scattered looks like on one side, what oriented looks like on the other, and let yourself connect the dots.

Related Resources:

• Research articles from this talk:

  • Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being (Castelo et al., 2025)

  • Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014)

  • Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks (Leroy, 2009)

  • Attention restoration theory (Kaplan & Kaplan)

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About Dr. Diana Hill:

Dr. Diana Hill, PhD is a clinical psychologist, executive consultant, and international trainer who helps leaders and teams navigate complexity without precedent. Her Wise Effort Method addresses a problem most high performers recognize immediately: the drive that got them here is now working against them. A leading voice in the evolution of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, she co-leads ACT BootCamp with ACT founder Dr. Steven Hayes, trains the trainers, and serves as an instructor for the University of California's Climate Resilience Initiative. She has led executive retreats and intensives for leadership teams including Deckers Brands, Lightfully Behavioral Health, and YPO. Diana is the author of Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most and three other books, hosts the Wise Effort podcast, and has been featured on NPR, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. With over 20 years of yoga and meditation practice, she teaches from embodied experience rather than theory alone — her sessions are experiential and transformational. 

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