Paying attention to giving people your full attention.
We've all experienced that moment when someone glances at their phone mid-conversation and you suddenly feel invisible. Kiwis check our devices around 50 times an hour, and it's costing us more than we think. Psychiatrist and writer Dr. Samaiya Mushtaq says attention is a form of care, and when we lose it, we lose empathy too. She writes for Modern Love in the New York Times and on her Substack, The Middle Path. In a new essay she explores how distraction lets us dodge discomfort and why real connection starts with giving people your full attention. The title of the essay is How Much Control Do We Have Over What We Pay Attention To? Dr Mushtaq spoke to Jesse.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

RNZ News
19 minutes ago
- RNZ News
Former Black Fern Cheryl Waaka on facing cancer
sport health 30 minutes ago This week a group of healthworkers - including specialists, nurses and paramedics signed an open letter to MPs asking them to waive private healthcare during their time in office. It's an idea, that Mihingarangi Forbes put to former Black Fern Cheryl Waaka - who helped bring home two world cups. At just 55, Cheryl is facing a stage four bowel cancer diagnosis. She's too young to have been screened, and the drug she needs is not funded - she's got to find thirty thousand dollars by August.

RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
Not so awful offal
Hannah Miller Childs, funder of The Lady Butcher Photo: Davina Zimmer One of Hannah Miller Childs' go-to bar snacks is chicken hearts. "A bit of mustard, you can eat it with a toothpick," she says. You could also chop it up, add it into mince and make it a full nutritious meal. Adding offal to mince in government school lunches last week hit the headlines because parents hadn't been warned it was coming. But what's the big deal? Offal is back on the menu not just at school, but in high-end restaurants and one specific pub just off Auckland's Dominion Road. Originally from America, Miller Childs moved to New Zealand a little over a decade ago to pursue a career in butchery. She founded a boutique business, the Lady Butcher, specialising in traditionally crafted, locally sourced meats. She follows the nose to tail philosophy, which as the name suggests, means using the entire animal from nose to tail, including all the crunchy, wobbly, icky bits widely known here as offal. "Stomach, heart, liver... bones can be part of that as well, usually the head in its entirety is referred to as offal, although in more recent years cheeks have become popular so now what we'll do is we'll take the cheeks off, and the rest of the head would become offal," Miller Childs says. While some may remember growing up eating parts like kidney or liver, offal hasn't necessarily been a popular protein choice. Miller Childs thinks offal is having a comeback and is in full support of it. "There's a reason why in nature, when a lion takes down a gazelle, they eat the guts first. That's where the nutrition is," she says. There are different kind of offal, red and green. The former refers to organs like the heart, liver and kidneys and the latter encapsulates things like the intestines, stomach and bladder. Miller Childs says red offal is especially good for you. "Heart particularly, really high in protein, but also vitamins... a lot of women don't get enough iron, eat some heart, and a small amount goes a long way," she says. It's also significantly cheaper than the standard slab of steak or chicken breast. So while you might not want to commit to a whole ox heart, swapping out your chicken breast or steak with something like chicken hearts could significantly cut down your grocery bill. "You're looking at ... a couple bucks, whereas for the same weight-wise for a steak you'd be paying upwards of $20," Miller Childs says. But Miller Childs acknowledges there's an ick factor to eating offal, in part because we've become disconnected from where our food comes from. "The thing with offal is, it looks like what it is, a heart looks like a heart ... so there's that confrontational aspect," she says. Miller Childs thinks as a society we've removed ourselves from that confrontation but says actually knowing what you're eating and where it's coming from is incredibly important. "While I'm pro eating offal, I do want to know what's in my food and I think that we should all have a healthy interest in that," she says. Consuming offal doesn't just mean eating it yourself, it could also mean feeding it to your pets. The main thing is avoiding as much waste as possible. "This animal took years to raise, someone spent their life doing that ... there's a lot that's gone into it and it's very easy, in today's life, to just go, 'buy a packet of mince and off you go', without thinking about it. "If it doesn't get eaten, or if you can't be bothered with taking leftovers for lunch it ends up in the bin and it's a waste of that whole process." Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here . You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter .


Otago Daily Times
4 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
AI-powered app targeting cognitive health of older adults
Adults frequently tell their children to stop spending so much time on their mobile devices, for fear it will rot their brains. Ironically, Dunedin-based app company Elli Cares is helping to develop a world-first, AI-powered mobile phone app that will assist older adults in monitoring and strengthening their cognitive health. Elli Cares originally supported seniors living with dementia, by creating a mobile app that gave them gentle reminders when it was time to take medications, go to appointments, carry out tasks such as refilling medications scripts, and informing family members if their loved one missed a reminder or left a safe zone. It aimed to empower them to live independently, confidently and with greater control over their health and wellbeing. The New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) recently awarded a $4million Catalyst: Strategic research grant, alongside additional co-funding from Singapore's National Research Foundation, to develop a new app which can monitor and strengthen the cognitive health of all seniors — not just those with dementia. Elli Cares founder Angela Edwards said the company would work with Dementia New Zealand, and researchers from the University of Otago, Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Auckland, alongside the Singapore-based National Neuroscience Institute, the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing, and Lions Befrienders. The new app would use speech and game-based tasks to assess memory, decision-making and verbal fluency. It would also use adaptive AI algorithms that tailored activities to each user's performance, analyse their performance, and alert families and clinicians with summaries if changes to their performance were detected. Ms Edwards said studies had shown the brain was a muscle that needed to be used, and if it was not used, "it wastes away". She said playing games like Candy Crush, Wordle, Sudoku, and even "rapid-fire shooting games',' on mobile phones were good for cognitive health. "We can actually identify a number of different types of games that can help different parts of your brain. "We want to find recall games that can help with memory; rapid fire games that can help with response times; and language-based games that can help with vocabulary and communication." The new app marks a shift from passive diagnosis, to proactive cognitive resilience. The project will include a pioneering integrated ethics programme, led by University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine bioethics lecturer Dr Tania Moerenhout, to ensure the users' values, autonomy and privacy were prioritised from the earliest design stages. Dr Moerenhout said older adults may prioritise autonomy and meaningful living, while families would focus on safety. "AI tools must reflect those nuances. "Embedding ethics across the design process is key to building trust and ensuring the technology truly supports the lives people want to lead." Ms Edwards said the new app would be embedded into the Elli Cares app, because it was already being used in more than 40 countries, making it quicker and easier to deploy and expand the new app. She was thrilled the next-generation tool would bring world-class AI researchdirectly into the lives of all older adults and their families.