Classifying Your Mistakes: for the developing psych fan

Mistakes = Daily Fails
Today well be exploring a random 3

*attention: (psychological definition): the tendency of an organism to concentrate on specific features of their surrounding (2 types: focus and divided attention- pretty self explanatory)

Okay, lemme get this to you. What Im trying to do here is make the easy hard but simple at the same time. Don't worry, its not as paradoxical as it appears :P Im going to highlight the terms you have to remember. Lets start with the obvious: mistakes. We make mistakes every day, small ones and bigger ones and we always blame them on distraction. Now, of course: that is true. But im going to attempt to excavate this topic a little to give you a more profound understanding of your mistakes, why you make them and what you can do to stop those little mishaps. Please remember that even with this explanation, there is a much deeper study to this. This is more of a simplistic outline of the complicated meaning behind a simple event.

First: Mistakes are *attentional failures. At one point, there is an element of distraction involved which causes us to commit our mistakes!

Autopilot: During various activities, we use conscious attentional control, which fundamentally means we monitor our focus consciously. Now what happens quite frequently is that for menial, mundane activities, the body pilots itself into an automatic process because this method has been repeated frequently. Often, when our body goes in unconscious attentional control, the body functions without analysis, and may make eventual mistakes.
e.g. You may iron stacks of clothing everyday, so much so that it has because an activity during which you go into autopilot. Eventually you may iron over sleeves or folded collars and create false folds. This is because you aren't technically paying attention to the course of your actions as your muscles are in an automatic function 


Automatic Muscular Relaxation or Tightening: This can be a product of a sudden transfer of focus or loss of attention coming from another source of entertainment, sudden excitement, fear or anxiety). So examples of muscular relaxation can be when you are holding your pencil whilst working and then drop it and talk to someone and drop it again. Another example could be holding a mug of water and drifting away mentally and snapping back into consciousness as your cups shakes and your water is spilled everywhere. A common scenario involving the reflexive tightening of muscles can be your hands and toes when watching a thriller: every time a shocking or sudden scene appears, your hands and toes grip on to close material in a tenacious manner.
Relaxation = drifting/distraction
Tightening= shock/sudden movement/occurrences

Test Failures: test failures basically signify the inability to complete a sequence/order of activities because due to poor monitoring at a critical point in the series of actions. This means that focus is lacking at a significant point of your activity, causing it to fail: thus your mistake.