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Have you ever felt like your focus is being hacked, invaded and stolen right in front of your eyes?
Let’s face it, I’ll be the first to admit, our attention spans are slipping through our fingers, and we’re often left wondering, “Where did all that time go?” Take a moment to consider how many times you pick up your phone in a day. Some think 100, maybe 150, pushing 200. Well hold on, because the average person picks up their phone a staggering 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.
I have spent my fair share of hours mindlessly doom-scrolling through the never-ending abyss of social media. There have been many days planned immaculately full of good intentions, only to be sabotaged by a screen. It’s a cycle that feels as inevitable as it is frustrating.
A recent best-selling book, ‘Stolen Focus’ by Johann Hari explores how we are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live.
However, he takes a different approach to addressing our attention crisis.
He says this isn’t happening because, all of a sudden, we became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse overnight; it was stolen. But by whom is the question?
Our world is being flooded with information. The more information there is, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it. It’s like we’re drinking from a fire-hose – there’s too much coming at us. And we are inevitably soaked in information.
In 2016, the British writer Robert Colville says we are living through ‘The Great Acceleration.’ It’s not simply our technology that’s getting faster – it’s almost everything. We talk faster, we travel faster, and even our Instagram Reels are getting faster! The original BlackBerry advertising slogan was, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing faster.”
Prof. Earl Miller, an award-winning neuroscientist at MIT, believes that we have all fallen for an enormous delusion. He explains that “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts.”
The myth we have invented. The myth we have fallen for. Is the myth of being able to multitask. Workers now spend 40% of their time wrongly believing they are ‘multitasking.’
Miller goes on to explain the ‘switch cost effect.’ When you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t just losing the little burst of time you spend looking at the text, but you are losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards.
You don’t have to look far to see the effects of this. You see people nowadays sit in libraries with their phones, laptops, ipads, books and headphones – wondering why they can’t focus on a single thing. A recent study on college students found that they only focus on any one task for 65 seconds.
In my own experience, uninterrupted time is becoming increasingly rarer. We have to deal with conflicting priorities, people chatting in Link and, on top of all that, music blasting from the gym. A study found that most people working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.
In our culture we have created a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction.
Adam Gazzaley, a professor at the University of California says that our brains are not only overloaded with switching but also with filtering.
He explains that you should think of your brain as like a nightclub where, standing at the front of that club, there’s a bouncer. The bouncer’s job is to filter out most of the stimuli that are hitting you at any given moment – that obnoxiously loud drunk person, the person slurring their words, and of course your mate who’s probably lying in a bush – so that you can think coherently about one thing at a time.
The bouncer is essential: this ability to filter out irrelevant information is crucial if you are going to be able to attend to your goals.
But today, Gazzaley believes, the bouncer is besieged in an unprecedented way. He’s exhausted.
And so, a lot more is fighting its way past him, so the nightclub becomes full of rowdy people disrupting the normal activity. ‘We could ignore them and pretend we’re capable of everything we would wish – or we can acknowledge them and live our lives in a better way.’
A lack of focus, an abundance of message pings and a compulsion to check emails might not be the biggest crisis we face, but it underpins our ability to deal with any others.
The answer, according to Prof. Miller, is that we need to try and focus on one thing at a time. Our desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing our ability to focus is like a desire to eat at McDonalds’s every day and still stay trim – an impossible dream.
Hari says that “Attention is the building block of absolutely everything you want to do.” Without it our dreams, goals, and even our relationships risk falling apart.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, know that you are not alone – and it’s not your fault. But we can’t afford to ignore this crisis – if we continue with this fragmented focus, where will it lead us? Maybe it’s time to take back control, one moment at a time, and regain our precious superpower of focus.
After all, in a world that is continually speeding up, choosing where to place our attention might just be the most radical act we have left.
