I had two books going this January, which I do sometimes. What wasn’t usual was A Little Life.

I’d finish a chapter and just sit there. Not ready for the next one yet.

I started bringing Jude up in conversations that had nothing to do with books. Was he actually beyond help. Could therapy have reached him. Was there a version where he got out okay. I wasn’t really discussing a novel anymore.I was trying to solve it. I was trying to save Jude.

I’d been talking about it so much with ChatGPT that it eventually said, why don’t you read The Body Keeps the Score alongside it. Not after. While I was still in it.

I didn’t think that would do much.

It did. And that’s how I got introduced into this concept of reading in pairs.

When Jude’s chapters got to be too heavy, I’d switch over and read about what trauma actually does to a person, physically, not just emotionally. Then go back. It wasn’t a break from the novel. More like the two books were talking about the same thing from different rooms, and I was just walking between them.

What reading in pairs actually means

Two books at once. One nonfiction, one novel, memoir, or poetry.

Think mind and heart. One explains something. The other makes you feel it. Neither one finishes the job alone.

Sometimes that means psychology, like it did for me. Other times it’s history or philosophy, whatever gives you the ground the story is actually standing on. A novel set during a war reads differently once you know what actually happened. A character’s whole worldview makes more sense once you’ve spent time with the philosophy they’d have grown up inside.

Why a schedule ruins it

I tried scheduling it once. Mondays for one, Tuesdays for the other. Lasted four days.

The second it becomes a system, it stops working. At least that’s been my experience every time I’ve tried to force it.

What worked instead:

• Read the novel while you have the room for it
• When it gets heavy, switch to the other book
• Come back when you’re ready, not when a calendar says so

How to pick your first pair

Start with a book that already has a grip on you. Then find nonfiction that touches the same nerve from a different angle. Psychology, history, whatever fits.

You don’t need to plan the connection out ahead of time, or you could, your choice really. A couple of my favorite pairings weren’t obviously about the same thing at all. It just showed up later, sideways, while I was already sitting inside both books.

I’ve kept doing this since. A while back I wanted to read some of Neruda’s poems, so I picked up his autobiography at the same time, mostly just to have some context for where each poem was coming from. And it worked, maybe even better than I expected. Knowing what was happening in Chile while he wrote, knowing who his friends were, how he thought, how deep he felt the world, who he loved and lost, all of it sank into the poems in a way that just reading them cold never would have given me.

Turns out knowing what he’d lived through changed almost every line for me.

Sobre perder el enfoque, construir convicción y encontrar mi camino de regreso a mí misma

En algún momento del año pasado, empecé a notar una brecha entre quien quería ser y lo que realmente estaba haciendo con mi tiempo.

Tenía metas. Certificaciones que quería obtener. Libros que seguía comprando y nunca abría. Una carrera que una vez había navegado con un tipo de hambre que ya no parecía encontrar. Me sentaba a estudiar o investigar algo que genuinamente me importaba y me encontraba en otro lugar completamente veinte minutos después, haciendo scroll sin dirección, sin intención, sin nada que mostrar por la hora que acababa de perder.

Eso no era propio de mí.

Pensaba en una versión de mí misma que reconocía mejor: la que podía pasar horas profundizando en un tema simplemente porque le interesaba, la que avanzaba rápido en su carrera precisamente porque amaba aprender, la que resolvía problemas con un tipo de enfoque particular que se sentía casi involuntario. Algo sobre esa versión se sentía inaccesible. No desaparecida, exactamente. Pero fracturada.

Las redes sociales no solo consumían mi tiempo. Estaban remodelando todo lo demás en silencio. Gastaba dinero en cosas que no necesitaba porque un influencer las hacía parecer necesarias. Formaba opiniones que en realidad no había pensado. Vivía más hacia afuera y menos hacia adentro. Y debajo de todo eso, la ansiedad que siempre había sido manejable estaba empeorando. Mi síndrome del impostor, con el que había pasado años aprendiendo a convivir, era más fuerte de lo que había sido en años. Ponía más metas, hacía más planes, intentaba con más fuerza organizarme, y nada de eso funcionaba, porque el problema no era la disciplina. El problema era que había cedido mi capacidad de concentrarme voluntariamente, y estaba empezando a sentir el costo total de ese intercambio.

Ya había intentado borrar las aplicaciones antes. Nunca duró. Y creo que ahora entiendo por qué dejarlo de golpe rara vez funciona. Trata el comportamiento sin tocar la creencia que hay debajo. Eliminas el hábito pero dejas el antojo intacto, y el antojo siempre gana eventualmente.

Entonces recordé algo.

En la universidad, vi Food Inc. para un ensayo. No llegué a casa esa noche y anuncié que me volvería vegetariana. Pero algo había cambiado. Seguí leyendo, seguí aprendiendo más sobre el tema, y en un par de semanas había dejado de comer carne por completo, durante todo un año. No fue fuerza de voluntad. Fue conciencia. Una vez que entendí con suficiente claridad lo que estaba pasando, el comportamiento siguió casi solo. Había notado el patrón. Necesitaba usarlo de nuevo.

Así que empecé a investigar. No casualmente. Profundamente. Quería entender la dopamina, la fragmentación cognitiva, lo que la estimulación constante realmente le hace al cerebro con el tiempo, y lo que la investigación decía sobre la reversibilidad. Esa última pregunta era la que más me asustaba. Un día lo escribí en ChatGPT, casi con miedo a la respuesta: ¿Es esto reversible? Ese hilo se convirtió en algo a lo que regresaba casi a diario durante meses, haciendo nuevas preguntas, siguiendo nuevos hilos, construyendo una imagen de cómo había llegado aquí y lo que realmente se necesitaría para salir.

Mientras más entendía, más diferente empezaba a verse el comportamiento. No como un placer culposo que me costaba abandonar, sino como algo que genuinamente se interponía en el camino de quien quería llegar a ser.

También pensé cuidadosamente en la logística. Había aprendido el concepto de un plan de salida de Janis Santaella, psicóloga clínica y life coach a cuyas conferencias había asistido antes. La idea es que la mayoría de los cambios de vida significativos fallan no por falta de intención sino por la fricción no resuelta: los familiares que se preocuparían al dejar de verte en línea, los amigos que interpretarían tu ausencia como una declaración, la infraestructura social de ser una persona que existe en internet. Lo planeé todo. Me di un plazo: el 31 de diciembre. Empecé a publicar menos. Cuando la gente preguntaba por qué estaba menos activa, les decía la verdad sin la explicación completa: estaba perdiendo el interés. Para cuando llegó enero, ya llevaba meses desapegándome.

El 1 de enero, borré las aplicaciones. No las cuentas. Eso habría provocado más preguntas de las que tenía energía para responder. Solo las aplicaciones, en silencio, sin ceremonia.

La mayoría de las personas intenta forzar la disciplina primero. Yo construí la convicción primero.

Las primeras semanas fueron más difíciles de lo que esperaba, incluso con toda la preparación.

Tomaba el teléfono automáticamente, la memoria muscular buscando algo que ya no estaba. El silencio se sentía diferente, más intenso y más exigente. Mi cerebro seguía buscando estimulación, y la urgencia de esa búsqueda era real e incómoda. Ya había sentido ese tipo de urgencia antes. Años atrás, atravesando una ruptura amorosa, había estado en búsqueda de cosas que me ayudaran a superarla y encontré una técnica de mindfulness llamada surfing de impulsos, desarrollada por el psicólogo Alan Marlatt. La idea es simple: los antojos se comportan como olas. Suben, alcanzan su pico en intensidad, y luego, si no los alimentas, se disipan solos. No luchas contra el impulso. No te distraes de él. Simplemente lo esperas, permaneces presente con la incomodidad unos minutos, y lo dejas pasar. Me ayudó entonces. Sabía que podía ayudarme ahora.

Así que eso fue lo que hice. Cada vez que llegaba el impulso, me quedaba con él en lugar de alcanzar el teléfono. Y pasaba, cada vez. La ola llegaba y luego se iba, y cada vez que se iba era un poco más pequeña que la anterior.

Tardé casi seis semanas en empezar a sentirme yo misma de nuevo.

Mientras tanto, le di a mi atención un mejor lugar donde estar. Empecé a entrenar con un entrenador personal tres veces por semana: una hora, sin teléfono, sin audífonos, solo presencia sin interrupciones. Llevaba mi Kindle a todos lados y llenaba la mayor parte de mi tiempo libre con lectura. Volví a hacer Sudoku y me interesé por juegos como el ajedrez. Empecé el needlepoint. Y fui deliberada en no llenar el silencio con televisión tampoco, porque podía ver que mi cerebro simplemente encontraría su dopamina en otro lugar si lo dejaba.

Mirando hacia atrás, cada una de esas actividades tenía algo en común: me exigían permanecer presente.

Poco a poco, la capacidad de seguir un pensamiento durante horas empezó a volver a mí. De investigar algo que captara mi curiosidad sin perder el hilo a mitad del camino. De sentarme con una idea difícil hasta entenderla. Estas eran cosas que siempre había amado hacer, parte de cómo había construido mi carrera y parte de lo que me hacía buena en el trabajo que hago, y en algún momento del camino las había cambiado sin notar completamente el intercambio que estaba haciendo.

También empecé a ver algo que no esperaba: patrones en otras personas.

Una vez que sales de la corriente, puedes verla con más claridad. Empecé a notar cuánto de lo que la gente quiere, compra, dice y cree está moldeado por lo que ha visto repetidamente en una pantalla. Lo notaba y aún lo noto en conversaciones, en decisiones, en opiniones expresadas con confianza que se disolvían ante la primera pregunta. Y sentí que algo se agudizaba en mí: el deseo de recuperar mis propias preferencias. No las construidas a partir de la exposición y la repetición, sino las que vienen de algún lugar más profundo. De mi crianza, mis valores, mis experiencias reales.

Quería enviarle una foto a mi mamá, a mi abuela, al grupo familiar de WhatsApp, y hacerles saber que quería compartir un momento con ellos específicamente, no publicarlo para el mundo y recolectar reacciones de personas cuyas opiniones en realidad no me importan. Quería mis propios pensamientos de vuelta. Los moldeados por las cosas que he vivido, leído y comprendido, no los moldeados por personas que polarizan para llamar la atención antes de haber profundizado lo suficiente para tener una posición real.

Mi mamá dice que de niña no solía aburrirme. Era tranquila, dice, y podía entretenerme sola sin ningún problema. Recuerdo algo así en mí misma, creciendo con lo que solo puedo describir como un mundo interior muy grande. No antisocial, no alejada de la vida. Disfruto una buena comida y una conversación real y un día en la playa con las personas que amo. Pero lo que más amo es el lugar dentro de mi mente que he construido a lo largo de años de lectura, pensamiento y profundización. Los libros siempre entendieron ese lugar. Mi papá también, de la manera en que las personas que cargan mundos interiores grandes se reconocen entre sí sin tener que explicarlo. Mis lecturas alimentaron ese mundo interior, de una manera que nada en un feed de redes sociales jamás lo hizo.

Estaba negociando ese mundo, unos minutos a la vez, por contenido que no puedo recordar.

No estoy argumentando que todos deban hacer lo que yo hice. Mi camino requirió meses de preparación, un marco personal tomado prestado de alguien más sabio, y el momento adecuado. Pero sí creo que colectivamente estamos subestimando lo que estamos cediendo.

La atención no es un tema de bienestar. No es un truco de productividad. Es el sustrato de todo lo que es significativo: cada habilidad construida, cada problema resuelto, cada relación verdaderamente comprendida, cada idea desarrollada lo suficiente como para convertirse en algo real.

Y ahora mismo, la mayoría de nosotros la está cediendo gratis.

On losing focus, building conviction, and finding my way back to myself

At some point last year, I started noticing a gap between who I wanted to be and what I was actually doing with my time.

I had goals. Certifications I wanted to earn. Books I kept buying and never opening. A career I had once navigated with a kind of hunger I couldn’t seem to find anymore. I would sit down to study or research something I genuinely cared about and find myself somewhere else entirely twenty minutes later, scrolling without direction, without intention, without anything to show for the hour I had just lost.

That wasn’t like me.

I thought back to a version of myself I recognized better: the one who would spend hours going deep on a topic just because it interested her, who moved fast in her career precisely because she loved learning things, who solved problems with a particular kind of focus that felt almost involuntary. Something about that version felt inaccessible. Not gone, exactly. But fractured.

Social media wasn’t just taking my time. It was quietly reshaping everything else too. I was spending money on things I didn’t need because an influencer made them seem necessary. I was forming opinions I hadn’t actually thought through. I was living more on the outside and less on the inside. And underneath all of it, the anxiety that had always been manageable was getting worse. My impostor syndrome, which I had spent years learning to work with, was louder than it had been in years. I was setting more goals, making more plans, trying harder to get organized, and none of it was working, because the problem wasn’t discipline. The problem was that I had given away my ability to focus willingly, and I was starting to feel the full cost of that exchange.

I had tried deleting the apps before. It never lasted. And I think I understand now why cold turkey rarely works. It treats the behavior without touching the belief underneath it. You remove the habit but leave the craving intact, and the craving always wins eventually.

Then I remembered something.

In college, I watched Food Inc. for an essay. I didn’t go home that night and announce I was becoming a vegetarian. But something had shifted. I kept reading, kept learning more about the topic, and within a couple of weeks I had stopped eating meat entirely, for a whole year. It wasn’t willpower. It was awareness. Once I understood clearly enough what was happening, the behavior followed almost on its own. I had noticed the pattern. I needed to use it again.

So I started researching. Not casually. Deeply. I wanted to understand dopamine, cognitive fragmentation, what constant stimulation actually does to the brain over time, and what the research said about reversibility. That last question was the one that scared me most. One day I typed it into ChatGPT, half afraid of the answer: Is this reversible? That thread became something I returned to almost daily for months, asking new questions, following new threads, building a picture of how I had gotten here and what it would actually take to get out.

The more I understood, the more the behavior started to look different to me. Not like a guilty pleasure I was struggling to give up, but like something that was genuinely getting in the way of who I wanted to become.

I also thought carefully about the logistics. I had learned the concept of an exit plan from Janis Santaella, a clinical psychologist and life coach whose conferences I had attended before. The idea is that most significant life changes fail not because of weak intention but because of unaddressed friction: the family members who would worry when they stopped seeing you online, the friends who would read your absence as a statement, the social infrastructure of being a person who exists on the internet. I planned for all of it. I gave myself a timeline: December 31st. I started posting less. When people asked why I was less active, I told them the truth without the full explanation: I was losing interest. By the time January came, I had already been detaching for months.

On January 1st, I deleted the apps. Not the accounts. That would have provoked more questions than I had energy to answer. Just the apps, quietly, without ceremony.

Most people try to force discipline first. I built conviction first.

The first few weeks were harder than I expected, even with all the preparation.

I would reach for my phone automatically, muscle memory searching for something that was no longer there. Silence felt different, louder and more demanding. My brain kept looking for stimulation, and the urgency of that search was real and uncomfortable. I had felt that kind of urgency before. A few years earlier, going through a heartbreak, I had gone searching for something to help me get through it and found a mindfulness technique called urge surfing, developed by psychologist Alan Marlatt. The idea is simple: cravings behave like waves. They rise, peak in intensity, and then, if you don’t feed them, they subside on their own. You don’t fight the urge. You don’t distract yourself from it. You just wait it out, stay present with the discomfort for a few minutes, and let it pass. It helped then. I knew it could help now.

So that is what I did. Every time the pull came, I sat with it instead of reaching for the phone. And it did pass, every time. The wave would come and then it would go, and each time it went it was slightly smaller than the last.

It took almost six weeks before I started feeling like myself again.

In the meantime, I gave my attention somewhere better to be. I started training with a personal trainer three times a week: one hour, no phone, no headphones, just uninterrupted presence. I carried my Kindle everywhere and filled most of my free time with reading. I started doing Sudoku and playing chess again. I picked up needlepoint. I was deliberate about not filling the silence with television either, because I could see that my brain would simply find its dopamine somewhere else if I let it.

Looking back, every one of those activities had something in common: they required me to stay focused.

Gradually, it started coming back. The ability to follow a thought for hours. To research something that caught my curiosity without losing the thread halfway through. To sit with a difficult idea until I understood it. These were things I had always loved doing, part of how I had built my career and part of what made me good at the work I do, and somewhere along the way I had traded them away without fully noticing the exchange I was making.

I also started seeing something I hadn’t expected: patterns in other people.

Once you step outside the current, you can see it more clearly. I started noticing how much of what people want, buy, say, and believe is shaped by what they have seen repeatedly on a screen. I noticed it in conversations, in choices, in opinions stated with confidence that dissolved under the first question. And I felt something sharpen in me: a desire to have my own preferences back. Not the ones built from exposure and repetition, but the ones that come from somewhere deeper. From my upbringing, my values, my actual experiences.

I wanted to send a photo to my mother, my grandmother, my family group chat, and let them know I wanted to share a moment with them specifically, not post it for the world and collect reactions from people whose opinions don’t actually matter to me. I wanted my own thoughts back. The ones shaped by the things I have lived and read and understood, not the ones shaped by people polarizing for attention before they have gone deep enough to have a real position.

My mother says I was never bored, even as a child. I was quiet, she says, and I could entertain myself without any help. I remember something like that in myself, growing into an adult with what I can only describe as a very large inner world. Not antisocial, not removed from life. I enjoy a good meal and a real conversation and a day at the beach with the people I love. But what I love most is the place inside my mind that I have built over years of reading and thinking and going deep. The books always understood that place. So did my father, in the way that people who carry large inner worlds recognize each other without having to explain. My reading fed that inner world. They were companions for it in a way that nothing on a social media feed ever was.

I was trading that world away, a few minutes at a time, for content I cannot remember.

I am not making an argument that everyone should do what I did. My path required months of preparation, a personal framework borrowed from someone wiser, and the right timing. But I do think we are collectively underestimating what we are giving away.

Attention is not a wellness topic. It is not a productivity hack. It is the substrate of everything meaningful: every skill built, every problem solved, every relationship truly understood, every idea developed far enough to become something real.

And right now, most of us are giving it away for free.

I am not trying to become a developer. I want to be clear about that upfront.

What I want is to stop being dependent on one. I work in Salesforce every day, I am on the path to an Architect certification, and I have enough coding background in other languages to know that when I have a problem, code is often the fastest solution. What I did not have was Apex. And every time I needed something built, I had to wait, explain, request, and follow up.

That’s what I wanted to fix.

I tried Trailhead. I tried documentation. I tried following along with tutorials. The problem was not the content, it was the format. I have a coding brain. I learn by doing, by breaking things, by figuring out why something did not work. Passive walkthroughs were not going to get me writing Apex fast, and I did not have time to start from scratch like someone who has never coded before.

I needed something that would get me hands-on immediately without skipping the fundamentals that actually matter in production. So I built it.

What the Research Actually Says

Researchers in educational psychology have known for decades that passive learning doesn’t stick. Studies from the National Training Laboratories show we retain about 5% of what we hear in a lecture and 10% of what we read, but up to 75% of what we learn by doing. Most coding tutorials are lectures with a keyboard.

The other piece is feedback. Cognitive scientist John Hattie’s research identified immediate, specific feedback as one of the highest-impact factors in learning, ranking above class size, teaching style, and prior knowledge. Tutorials give you none. The code works or it doesn’t, and you’re on your own to figure out why.

That space between doing something wrong and understanding why is where most people quietly give up. It’s where I kept ending up.

So I Built Something

I built an interactive Apex learning tool using Claude, the AI developed by Anthropic, and the experience changed how I think about what learning tools should do.

Each lesson has four parts. Theory with visual diagrams, because some concepts click in ten seconds when you can see them laid out. A coding exercise where you write real Apex in a built-in editor and see output right away. AI feedback from Claude that reads your specific code, understands what you were trying to do, and explains the gap in plain English. And real org practice, step-by-step exercises you run in an actual Salesforce Developer Org.

A 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that one-on-one tutoring produces learning gains two standard deviations above the average classroom outcome. We’ve known for years that personalized tutoring works. We just couldn’t make it available to everyone. This is what changes when AI is used well.

What’s Inside

The tool covers 16 lessons across three tracks.

Foundations: where to code in Salesforce with real setup instructions and links, variables and data types, control flow, and collections.

Intermediate: governor limits in practice, classes and methods, exception handling, and SOQL with DML including injection prevention.

Advanced: security with sharing rules and field-level security, triggers, test classes, async Apex, REST callouts, LWC and Apex integration, and deployment with the Salesforce CLI and Git.

Every lesson links to the official Trailhead modules that go deeper, so you always know what’s next.

The Thing That Surprised Me

While building this, Claude kept catching things I hadn’t planned for. Code written in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Logical errors that a pattern check would miss because it wasn’t checking patterns, it was reading intent.

The psychologist Lev Vygotsky described the Zone of Proximal Development as the space between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with the right guidance. That guidance, at the right moment, is what turns confusion into understanding. Most tools leave you alone in that space.

Putting AI there isn’t just a feature. It’s a fundamentally different relationship between a learner and a tool.

Who This Is For

This was built for the Salesforce admin who knows the platform deeply but freezes when someone asks them to write code. For the person who has watched the same tutorial three times and still doesn’t trust themselves to open a blank file.

The difference isn’t the content. It’s that you won’t just watch this time. You’ll write. And something will write back.

👉 Try the Apex Interactive Learning Tool here

For real org practice, sign up for a free Developer Org at developer.salesforce.com/signup. Free, and it never expires.

To learn more about Claude: anthropic.com

If this resonates, share it with the admin in your life who’s been thinking about making the move into development. They’ll thank you for it.