Reclaiming Our Minds in The Age of Distraction

How Society’s Obsession with Speed Undermines Our Ability to Focus — and What We Can Do About It

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“Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again” by Johann Hari explores the systemic issues leading to widespread attention deficits in modern society. Through extensive research and illustrative personal anecdotes, Hari identified a number of the key causes for our lack of focus and distraction filled world.

Importantly Hari makes the case that our distraction and subsequent inability to focus are not individual problem but the result of larger societal and systemic forces including, but not limited to, technology. Although some of the proposed societal changes may seem at odds with capitalist values, they can echo the consumer protections and other reforms established by entities like the FDA; such societal actions indeed balance incentivizing and regulating behaviors to align with both public welfare and economic principles.

The below summary and set of quotes from the book are organized in a few areas:

• Overview of the Attention Crisis
• Systemic Issues Leading to a Society That Can’t Focus
• Suggestions for Societal Improvements
• Personal Suggestions for Improving Focus

Attention Crisis

• Information Overload: The sheer volume of information available today drowns out our ability to concentrate. “The more information you pump in the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it”
• Task Switching: We live in a world with fragmented attention span. This example measuring students switching frequency was emblematic: “On average a student would switch tasks once every sixty-five seconds”
• Sacrifice of Depth: Keeping up with new information and our low attention span have led to a lack of depth. “What we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection”

Systemic Issues

• Economic and Technological Pressures: “This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day”, indicating the larger societal and economic forces at play, beyond individual control.
• Design of Digital Environments: “These sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards… push you to switch tasks more frequently”, discussing how social media platforms exploit our attention.
• Cultural Shifts: “The increase in speed switching and filtering” as a cause of our dwindling attention spans, pointing out how cultural and technological evolution promotes rapid task-switching over sustained focus.

Societal Suggestions for Reclaiming Focus

• Re-evaluating Economic Growth: Questioning the relentless pursuit of economic growth and suggesting a shift towards valuing time, relationships, and well-being over constant productivity. Interesting related read here and here.
• Legislative and Economic Changes: Ban surveillance capitalism — where companies like Facebook and Google vie for our attention to sell ads. The author recognizes the inherent potential of social media and the internet for good, suggesting the immense benefits if these tech giants prioritized aligning with our objectives (such as encouraging deep work and physical connections) over merely capturing our attention, making customer satisfaction, rather than customer attention, their guiding principle.
• Restructuring Education and Play: Emphasizing the importance of unstructured play for children’s development and focus, suggesting schools and parents allow more freedom and playtime.

Personal Suggestions for Improving Focus

The final section is the important set of learnings about what we can do personally and how we can work to strength our focus and mitigate our distractions:

• Practicing Slow Activities: Engaging in yoga, tai chi, or meditation improves focus by training attention.
• Pre-Commitment Strategies: “Pre-commitment is when you realize that if you want to change your behavior, you have to take steps now”, like using a kSafe to lock away distractions or digital tools like Freedom to block internet access.
• Scheduled Disconnection: Taking extended breaks from social media, “six months of the year totally off it”, to reduce the constant pull of digital notifications and social rewards.
• Importance of Mind Wandering: “…go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections.”
• Importance of Sleep: Where your brain can restore and recover, and ensure that your brain is not fatigued and you have the strength to resist the temptation to get distracted. Good blog on sleep.
• Importance of Exercise: a broad body of evidence showing that when people run around — or engage in any form of exercise — their ability to pay attention improves.
• Importance of Reading — “Reading books trains us to read in a particular way — in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens…trains us to read in a different way — in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another. We’re more likely to scan and skim when we read on screens…we run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need.”