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Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spike and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode, as we, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s, of our 20s, my 20s, all of our 20s.
This is maybe the most important episode i'm gonna make this whole year because, unlike some of my episodes, which you know might not apply to everyone, i think this one definitely does, in a way that is honestly a little bit scary to acknowledge.
We're talking about the loss of our attention spans and our attention just in general, possibly the most precious resource we have as humans.
Where is it disappearing to?
And how are we going to get it back?
I would say the majority of us feel that our attention spans are noticeably nothing like they used to be.
Not to speak for everyone obviously, but I don't know.
I can recall a time when I could read books For hours with ease, in a way that feels almost unfathomable today.
I could sit and focus on a singular task, like studying, and stay on that task for hours.
More than five minutes, that's for sure.
More than 45 minutes, more than an hour at times with like very relative ease.
Nowadays, it can feel like it feels like our brains are these tiny frogs jumping from lily pad to lily pad, unable to stay on one for longer than a few minutes, always needing rest.
Two or three or four activities going on at once to feel entertained and to feel satisfied.
I used to think it was because I just wasn't disciplined enough or I was lacking the structure of being in high school or university, but now I don't think so.
Something else has also almost fundamentally changed about our society that we need to look into.
Now this is not just anecdotal.
This isn't just me.
This isn't just you.
There's real data and research to back up this experience.
One of the best indicators of this is a long research project undertaken at the University of California.
It was started 20 years ago.
This research involved this woman, Professor Gloria Marks, and her team, following a group of people around for days at a time, carrying stopwatches to time how long people spent on tasks before switching, before doing something else.
When they started this research in 2004 this is the year they found the average attention span was around Two and a half minutes.
That was their baseline.
They did the study again eight years later in 2012.
They started using more precise computer logging techniques.
They found that the average attention span is sitting at a little bit more than around a minute, around 75 seconds.
The most recent data from Mark's team actually only came a few years ago and they found the average attention span has gone from two and a half minutes to 47 seconds.
In the past 20 years.
That is the rate at which we are increasingly finding ourselves distracted, switching from task to task.
Our attentional capacity has rapidly decreased.
So what we need to ask is basically what's going on.
What's going on culturally?
What's going on psychologically?
What's going on neurologically that has allowed this to happen?
And what are the actual practical things that we can do to fix it?
Because I don't know about you.
I'm kind of bored of the same basic.
Stop scrolling, go outside advice.
There has to be more to it.
So I went and found it and I'm going to give you guys the real, tangible scientific tips to regain confidence, your attention span, all in this one big, comprehensive episode.
Without further ado, let's get into it.
So let's start with this.
Why have our attention spans become so frayed and so difficult to control?
Firstly, we need to take a look at our brains, specifically the role of dopamine, to kind of understand what reprogramming has been at play.
So if you listened to our history and psychology of dopamine episode a couple of weeks ago, you'll know this well.
You'll know this very well.
But dopamine isn't the pleasure chemical.
Many of us think that it is.
It's the anticipation chemical.
When we look at neuroimaging studies that map the release and flow of dopamine and the activity of dopamine producing centers in the brain, what we find is that our dopamine levels rise as we anticipate a reward, anticipate a payout, I should say anticipate something happening.
They spike whilst we wait for that thing and whilst we wait to obtain it.
And they kind of decrease once we get it.
Dopamine is deeply tied to something psychologists call reward control. prediction.
Essentially, our brain is constantly scanning the environment, asking what's going to be interesting here.
What's going to be pleasurable?
What's going to be useful or emotionally stimulating?
And how can we move further towards those things?
How can I get closer to those things?
It is what drives that motivation and that movement by getting us excited for what comes next.
It's not just pleasure, it's anticipation.
Evolutionarily, you know, dopamine was incredibly powerful as many of us needed to migrate and in search of food and migrate in search of shelter.
We needed to be patient.
We needed to stick to hard things to get stuff done.
We needed to wait for the harvest, wait until danger had passed.
Whatever dopamine is.
What allowed us to do that, by imagining the pleasure, or microdosing us with the pleasure, of finally getting a meal, finally getting a safe place to lay down, finally getting whatever it was that we had to work for.
The problem is in this day and age, We don't really have to wait that long for anything anymore.
We don't have to wait for food.
We have Uber Eats.
We have grocery stores.
We have ready-made meals.
We don't have to take time or put in effort to entertain ourselves.
We don't have to wait that long for information.
You know, we can Google it.
We can use AI if you want to go that extra level.
We don't have to wait that long for social feedback or social information either.
Or the pleasure of being around people.
It's served up to us in this nice bite-sized device or dose on social media.
There's no longer a need for patience and patience. for sustained anticipation.
Where does that leave our dopamine systems that have adapted for a completely different scenario?
What this does for us psychologically is it begins to train the brain to expect constant novelty and rapid emotional, psychological and physical payoff.
The brain is highly adaptive.
It learns from repetition.
So when we repeatedly move towards quick rewards, our attentional system starts calibrating itself around speed, immediacy and stimulation, rather than patience and slowness.
When we're constantly anticipating and immediately getting anticipating and immediately receiving, our brains are naturally being flooded with more and more dopamine, because those hits are coming faster.
This reduces our brain sensitivity so that when we do have to do tasks that require fixed, sustained attention, the normal release of dopamine that is at an appropriate level that previously would have sustained you, just doesn't cut it anymore.
We are used to getting hit after hit after hit.
Tasks that unfold slowly.
Reading a difficult book, sitting down and actually planning and writing an essay, sitting with your thoughts studying, even watching a full movie without checking your phone, they begin to feel disproportionately effortful because they cannot compete with the pace of this modern day dopamine delivery system.
What we really have here is a dopamine sensitivity issue, not a dopamine level issue.
That's another common myth.
There's also another important concept here, which is called delay discounting.
This was first mentioned in a book by the economist Irving Fisher back in the I don't even know way back when.
It's since found a very important place in psychology, and it's the idea that humans naturally value immediate rewards more highly than delayed ones.
Basically, you'd probably rather I give you 30 now than the promise of maybe getting 50 in six months.
This obviously used to be important for survival.
Don't expend energy on a promise.
You know, take what you can now if you need to live.
A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, like all those kind of things.
But modern life has amplified this tendency enormously, to the point where it's no longer useful.
It's actually disruptive.
You know why spend two hours learning a skill when you can get a tiny hit of achievement instantly from clearing emails or buying something online or refreshing your messages or taking off a small, easy task?
Our brains start prioritizing rewards that are fast and frictionless over rewards that are meaningful and slow.
Here's something to note.
A 2012 study published in the journal Psychology and Neuroscience found that people who have High rates of delay discounting
Basically, people who are more willing to forego smaller immediate rewards and wait or work for something larger not only have stronger attentional control, which is basically what we're talking about today but are more likely to be successful.
Maybe wealthier may have and be in better health.
But this is becoming harder and harder because again, of the technological and physical environments that we find ourselves in.
In particular, we really just can't have this conversation without talking about social media.
And the fact that social media has literally been designed with knowledge of how our attentional systems work and therefore the ability to hijack it using anticipation reward cycles.
Not to sound too conspiratorial, but to generate ad revenue.
Social media companies need to make sure that we are scrolling for as long as possible.
Every element of the user interface.
Please make no mistake, every single social media platform you use.
The certain features are chosen because they work to attract and capture people's attention.
Things that you may not even be aware of are doing this.
For example, the infinite scroll, the fact that you never get to the bottom of whatever you're scrolling, the frictionless nature of scrolling.
Have you ever noticed with instagram tiktok, everything there is like there's literally no clicking or movement of the finger required.
The physical movement of watching is very smooth.
You just move your finger ever so slightly right in the middle of the screen, so there's very little reason for you to step away.
There's even the fact that the algorithm, your algorithm, is designed specifically for you.
That is all, those are all design features that were chosen to get you addicted.
There was a really great paper on this called digital slot machines, social media platforms as attentional scaffolds from 2024, where they also talk about how the recent push of really emotionally salient and, at times, emotionally triggering content also plays a role in pushing emotional reinforcement videos of people crying, celebrity drama content, that kind of stuff.
It pushes that emotional reinforcement and therefore lessens attentional control.
If we boil it down really to its baseline, you could say social media platforms may seem free to use, but they're not.
You are the product.
Your attention is the product.
And because of that, it is something that people want possession over.
In the words of Barbara Dumerix, I think her name is, she's a famous professor.
If you use social media, there is no way that you can have a normal brain today.
And yet we are being told to blame ourselves for our dwindling attention spans, as if it is a motivational or disciplinary issue, which is ironic because discipline is an individual issue.
But it appears, if we take this perspective, to be declining on a mass scale.
So there's obviously a bigger factor going on here.
This is not just a you question. problem.
This is not that every single person has lost discipline.
Something else is going on.
One more point on this, because I found this really interesting as well.
The very way not just social media has been designed, but the internet in general has been designed is also incredibly neurologically significant for our attention.
Professor Gloria Mark, she is the one who did that research originally.
She has been a key figure in research on attention and the impact of technology upon it for almost 20 years.
She is like the goat of this.
She argues that the very design of not just social media but the internet maps very well onto somatic memory theory.
The idea that memory is organized in terms of making associations between concepts.
Our brains love this.
The internet, with its kind of node and link structure so, like you know, enter here, then it diverts you to somewhere else is conducive to destruction, because information is organized in terms of associations.
A Wikipedia page is the perfect example.
You read a topic, you see a link, you click on that link, you find another link.
Suddenly you've read like a million articles.
If you read an article online, you recommended three others that are similar.
If you get shown a certain video and you like it, suddenly four more, just like it will show up on your feed.
That is literally how memory works.
You know, you have a memory.
Suddenly you're thinking about something else and then you're thinking about something else.
It's all very deliberate.
Let's do a quick, rapid run through of some other factors that have disturbed our attention spans that don't have to do with social media.
There's just some things that we're also seeing decline.
People are getting less sleep.
I think as you get older, you care more about your eight hours, at least that's how I'm I've found I'm maturing.
But when you don't get enough sleep, you accumulate sleep debt.
Greater the sleep debt, greater your attentional and cognitive decline.
And people are sleeping a lot less, actually.
A study from 2017 showed how much like how significant not getting enough sleep is for our attention.
What they found was that they basically subjected these guys, these men, to sleep deprivation and then asked them to do a bunch of tasks.
Performance on all the tasks showed substantial deterioration when they were sleep deprived, but particularly tasks that have to do with attention and mental functioning.
It might sound extreme, like they've they did deprive them of sleep for a long time.
But even like another study from 2019 that had people sleep for just six hours a night for 10 consecutive days, also found a similar decrease inattention, as if you were not to sleep for 48 hours.
Sleep deprivation also intensifies and destabilizes our emotional responses in our amygdala.
That's what drives our response to stress.
So we feel more reactive.
We feel more anxious.
We feel more on edge.
Our attention also reduces because of that.
Like stress, lack of sleep, social media all reduce combining to put pressure on our attention, but also combining and included in that is like stress about the world, stress about your job, stress about friends.
It's also meaning that the appeal of social media and things like that and the appeal of fast.
I mean, is greater because it's so instantaneous.
We're so stressed by everything else in our lives.
We don't want to work to be entertained.
We don't want to work to find out information.
We don't want to work for anything.
And finally, we are experiencing greater levels of physical disruption and distraction than ever before.
More people are moving to cities.
More people are living in urban areas.
By 2050, the UN thinks 70 of the world's population is going to live in a city, developed or urban space.
What that means is more exposure to noise, light pollution distraction, other people, busy public transport, crowded spaces.
Do not overestimate what that does to you on a daily basis.
The sensory and social overload of that means we always need to be on alert.
If we don't feel on, our brain at least needs to be on, even if we want to clock out for a bit.
And we do have limits.
We do have limits.
And when we hit them, when our brain hits them, our minds and our attention suffers.
In 2011, scientists found that two regions in our brain involved in the regulation of emotion and anxiety and attention become overactive in city dwellers.
You don't always think it has an impact until you leave.
I just went to a cabin the other day this isolated cabin outside of London and within 24 hours it felt like someone had put a sedative in the air.
Like I played Scrabble for three hours straight.
I felt my attentional systems regenerate, being out of a city, being out of a high stress, high stimulation environment.
So that's basically what's contributing.
There's a couple other things.
I think those are the biggest ones.
We are going to take a short break here and when we return we're going to talk about the signs that you may need an attentional reset and seven science-backed ways to do it.
So stay with us.
So if you're still doubting whether your attention is really that affected by social media, by your environment, by your sleep, by whatever it is, here are five smaller signs that you can check yourself against really quickly to tell you do I have a problem or not?
Number one, do you frequently use more than one screen at a time?
So you're on your phone and you're watching TV.
You're on your laptop, maybe at the same time.
Number two, do you struggle with boredom and silence?
How often do you need to have music on in the background or a YouTube video playing?
How often do you feel like you need to watch something up until the moment that you put your head on the pillow, or you need to open social media first thing in the morning?
Number three do you pick up hobbies activities, projects regularly and abandon them just as fast when they require more effort and time than you think?
Number four After you finish a meal, how long do you sit at the table thinking, just enjoying yourself?
Or do you feel like you need to rush off?
Do you feel like you need to leave the restaurant as soon as you're done eating?
You need to go somewhere else.
You always need to be in transit to somewhere else, even if you're not busy.
Number five, what speed do you watch things on?
What speed do you listen to things on?
Do you watch everything at one and a half speed when you watch reels, when you listen to podcasts?
Do you watch videos or TikToks you see all the way through?
Or do you just keep scrolling and only wait for the?
Do you struggle to pay attention to long stories from people or do you struggle to have sustained conversations, often finding yourself kind of zoning in wanting the person to move on, speed up, go on to the next thing.
Now, if you have ADHD, maybe you relate to these because you have ADHD.
And some of the things we mention as tips are might not help you in the same way, because your attention is being impacted by different neurological and biological reasons.
It's not just environmental.
We've done a full episode recently on the psychology of ADHD with an expert, Chris Wang, end of last year.
That goes into that a lot further, but i do still think some of these tips we're going to talk about are useful.
With that being said, i think if you have adhd it's a different can of fish.
Some of this advice isn't going to work for you.
I still think it's important to listen anyways, but if you don't have adhd, if you're just noticing kind of a normal fluctuation in your attention
I think to start, you are on this mission to win back your own attention and to be able to find that delayed gratification high.
Firstly, you've got to know what's motivating you to want this.
Without a clear vision for why you want to get your attention back, why you want to achieve this mental feat, it's going to be hard to follow through.
So, after you've finished listening to this podcast, I want you to grab a pen and a piece of paper and kind of write a master list, by hand if possible, that you keep somewhere important that details.
Why do I want to fix my attention span?
What is my motivation behind wanting to spend less time on social media, wanting to be more present?
Here's some inspiration for things that can be on that list.
Perhaps you want to spend more time actually noticing the world around you.
Maybe you want to make active decisions about how you spend your time, without feeling like that decision is always being hijacked or you're always being controlled by whatever gives you the quickest spike of dopamine.
Maybe there are lots of other fun things that you want to do with your life.
You claim not to have time, but you want to see if that's actually true.
Perhaps you want to get your attention span back, because you want to experience the high of consistency and slowly achieving things.
Maybe you want more alone time.
Maybe you want to be able to really focus on certain goals.
Maybe you want to get more things on your to-do list done.
Maybe you just realize like, I want to just be present with people.
When I'm with people, I want to be able to listen to their long, sometimes boring stories, because I love them.
I want to feel less anxious about what's going on elsewhere.
I want to be capable of doing difficult things because I think, for the first time in history Maybe, like life is easier than it's ever been.
And I don't want that to just constantly be my reality.
I think that is a great place to start.
Why do you want to achieve this goal?
There's so much research, including a recent study from The Dominican University of California, that shows writing down a goal, writing down your intentions, increases your chances of success by 42.
So that's the first thing.
Now for the more practical stuff, I also want you to start by knowing your attentional baseline.
This was a strategy put forth by Daniel Pink.
He's the author of the book Whole New Mind The Surprising Truth About Motivation The Power of Regret.
He speaks about how, when he noticed his attention span was getting worse, he decided essentially, if I want to improve.
I need to know what I'm starting with.
I need to know I need to have some kind of measurement that I can track my improvement from.
His way of measuring his attentional baseline was that he sat down with the book and he timed how long he could actually sit and read and concentrate on reading before he found like he had to get up.
Before he felt uncomfortable, before he felt like he just needed to get a glass of water, needed to skip forward a few pages.
He then started trying different exercises for attentional control and he would come back to this book and come back to this exercise again in a few months, a few years and just see if he was improving, see what was helping.
You need this.
You need a version of this.
Any researcher will tell you.
If you want to see if an intervention is working, such as an intervention to get your attention back, you've got to know what the situation was like to begin with to see if it's made a change.
So try it this week.
Sit down with a book or an article or any activity that requires sustained attention.
How long can you stay in that? space.
That is your baseline.
A couple months later, test it again.
Okay, these next points are the intervention that we're speaking about.
Number one, you don't have to stop using your phone.
You don't have to stop using screens right away.
But if you want to get your attention back, single screen always.
Here's the thing.
We like to believe that we are really good multitaskers.
And we're really not.
There was a University of Utah paper, now very famous one, actually by David Sobomatsu, I think his name was.
He found that only 2% of the population can actually multitask.
And that's being very generous.
Here's another surprising thing he found in that research.
The people who are most capable of multitasking that rare 2 are probably not the people you're going to find actually doing it.
Most of us should not be doing this.
Oftentimes, when we're doing work with a TV show on in the background, even listening to a podcast, even scrolling while watching a lecture, we're not actually multitasking in a way that's actually productive, we're sensation seeking.
That sensation seeking causes us to attention switch much quicker than usual, and that depletes our attentional capacity and exhausts us much faster.
One statistic even says that task or attentional shifting so going from your phone to the lecture, to the computer costs us as much as 40 of our daily productive time, without us realizing it.
Basically, when you switch, when you are or when you're trying to do multiple things at once and thinking you can pay attention to shopping for something on your phone whilst trying to put together a plan on your laptop for a class, whilst emailing, you think that you can do those all at once and you're not going to notice a difference.
Your brain still needs to catch up.
One screen at a time, even better if you schedule your switches.
So basically, you know that you have to do 40 minutes of deep work on your laptop and then you'll get 10 minutes just of pure phone time, maybe even 15.
You know, you have to sit at your laptop for those designated 40 minutes.
Even if you're not getting anything done, you're still strengthening your attentional band.
Then you get the reward.
You still get time for these things, but they're segmented.
I think after a short period of procrastination, you'll definitely be surprised by how quickly you are able to get into a deep flow state, knowing that your time is reserved just for this one activity or this one screen.
And getting into a state of deep flow is going to become...
I think increasingly valuable in this attention economy.
There's this guy, his name's Cal Newport.
He's the author of Deep Work.
And he wrote about this recently that he basically said as like AI takes over, as social media becomes more prominent, the people who are going to rise to the top, the people who are going to be successful, are those who could sit down and can still sit down and commit to a task that requires sustained attention.
You can have a master's degree, you can have a bachelor's degree, you can have heaps of experience.
Whatever skill you have Excel Google, I don't know what skills people put on their resumes these days, but like whatever skill, it is the one people are going to want the most is the person who can sit down and just focus and just work.
That is what you are building by not always splitting your attention between multiple tasks and multiple screens.
Other ways, I think, to form a healthier relationship with your phone.
Don't just put up social media blocks or timers, because they're not going to work and it's going to feel like you're doing something when you're not.
They're so easy to skip.
Instead, treat your phone like a landline.
When you get home, immediately plug it in and it stays in that one location at all times.
You can use it for whatever you want.
You can use it as much as you like.
You can scroll for as many hours as you desire.
You have to be where the phone is.
It helps if that location is obviously not next to your bed or next to your couch, but somewhere a little bit inconvenient where you need to stand, for example maybe in your kitchen.
But it helps you have a better relationship with being able to turn away from it.
You can also turn your phone screen to grayscale.
Only use social media on your laptop.
Delete your most stimulating apps.
Over the weekend.
There's so many creative ways that don't require complete abstinence, but they create I don't know, can I say intuitive usage.
Almost like intuitive eating?
That's the way I see it.
It's intuitive usage.
Second piece of advice every single day, if you want to get your attention span back, give yourself an attention broadening exercise where you just focus on one thing for 30 minutes.
This doesn't have to be screen free, but it does have to be scrolling or task switching free.
Deep concentration on one thing is a great, great way to train your brain to pay attention and rebuild the ability for your attention to sit within itself for longer.
Some examples.
You can commit to reading an in-depth op-ed for half an hour.
That was my task today.
I just read a New York Times article about um who gets custody over IVF embryos.
That's what I did.
I just sat there for 30 minutes and I read every word, start to end, even when I wanted to skip certain bits or jump ahead like I had to read it word.
I know that sounds like a brag that I read an article.
I don't know.
I don't mean it to be.
It was actually kind of hard, but that's what I've been getting myself to do.
The sense of satisfaction afterwards as well.
I just told you guys about it.
Obviously, I feel good that I did it and I feel good every day that I do it.
Other examples for your daily 30-minute sustained attention practice cook a meal without listening to a podcast at the same time, or music or anything um, do a crossword.
Or do sudoku for 30 minutes just you and the sudoku book, without picking up your phone, without again listening to things.
Walk to the shops without having your airpods.
In 30 minutes, 30 minute walk, just you and nature.
Sit and just listen to a podcast and take notes without doing anything else.
The singularity is important.
Adam Brown.
He is the co-director of the Center for Attention, Learning and Memory at New York University.
He says that gently nudging ourselves in the direction of long-term focus on things works as a form of mental muscle memory.
This is your attention gym you're going to every day.
The same way.
You do 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour of exercise a couple of times a week or probably every day, like you're doing this for your brain.
You are building cognitive endurance, which is your ability to sustain mental activity over a continuous stretch of time.
There was a study published just last year, actually in an economics journal no less, and it randomly assigned 1600 school children to 20 minute increments of sustained attentional focus a day.
Some of them got it, some of them didn't.
The children who participated in this exercise once a day saw that cognitive endurance and performance increase by 22, compared to those who didn't do that.
I'm basically asking you to do this experiment on yourself 20 to 30 minutes a day, the same way you exercise shower, eat.
Have your attentional exercises as well.
I'll also slip in this other tip in here as well, because I think it kind of relates to the strategy somewhat.
But if you want an easy boost to attention, stop walking or running with your headphones in.
See how long you can endure silence.
I know this.
It feels like listening to music as we move through the world isn't harming us at all.
It's not really doing anything.
It seems harmless, right?
But there's actually a growing body of research suggesting that constantly pairing movement with audio stimulation so music, podcast videos, voice notes may increase what psychologists call cognitive load, meaning the total amount of mental effort your brain is using at one time.
Even if it is harmless, your brain is still processing language, predicting sound patterns, filtering information and dividing your attentional resources between your environment and the audio stream.
One relevant concept here is something called attentional residue, which was coined by Dr Sophie Leroy in a 2009 study she did on once again on multitasking.
And this is the idea that when part of our attention is allocated to one stream of information, some of it will always stick there, even as we try to focus elsewhere.
So if you're walking or studying or working whilst listening to a podcast, listening to music, trying to do anything, if you have this in the background, mentally your brain is always partially occupied by it.
No matter how much you've listened to that song, even if there's no words, your brain never fully enters a state of open awareness or even of rest, just like when you have two screens.
This is obviously kind of a bummer, because music also is shown to reduce stress, also shown to increase, like life satisfaction and the emotional salience of memories and moments, and it's just joyful like the.
You don't need a scientific reason to justify that music is beautiful.
But again, I'm not saying, you know, from now on it's silence for you and you only.
Like music is not something you can enjoy until you fix that like pesky attention span of yours.
I'm just saying be more aware of what taxes your attention span in the background that you may imagine is harmless but is actually just normalized.
Okay, we're going to take our final break for this episode before we finish off.
Good job if you have made it this far without taking any other breaks, without skipping forward.
Your attention span is doing well today.
Stay with us.
We're going to return for those final tips and some finishing thoughts.
If it wasn't clear already, I'm going to say it.
Analog is back in a huge way.
When I say analog, what I mean is any activity that is by hand, requires a little bit of friction or concentration and mainly requires your human input.
We've kind of subtly spoken about this all day, but when we do analog things...
Parts of the activity are not offloaded to a machine or technology.
It's writing letters by hand.
It's reading a physical book.
It's baking from scratch.
It's listening to vinyl records.
All of those are analog activities.
A big one though, that you should be doing more of, if you want to repair your attention span, is playing card games.
I know strange, but the evidence for the impact of card games on your cognitive ability is not spoken about enough, and that's exactly why I wanted to include it.
My favorite study on this was done by two University of Edinburgh researchers in 2019, who examined the relationship and association between playing card games or any analog game for that matter so chess checkers and changes in cognitive function from 11 to 70.
Now, this was a longitudinal study and the participants were all born in Scotland in the 1930s and essentially assessed across their lifespan.
For
Hey, are you playing card games?
How's your memory going?
How's your attention going?
And then they also controlled for factors like education, social class activity, even early intelligence.
And they showed that those of them who were engaging in card games, especially with friends, but even alone, had greater cognitive speed and greater attention.
The same can be said for activities and hobbies that require a lot of hand-eye coordination or motor skills, like pottery woodworking, rock climbing, dancing and, once more, sustained attention.
There is cross-brain stimulation.
Your brain is required as well to stick to the task for it to be good.
That is expanding your cognitive endurance.
If we think back to how our dopamine systems are being frayed and depleted by our current environment, analogue activities provide a much needed antidote because they are essentially doing the opposite.
They require sustained problem solving and attention.
You don't get an immediate convenience reward from doing hard things.
Your brain has to wait.
Your brain has to be patient.
And the payout feels more significant, showing your brain neurologically psychologically, to do that again.
And it feels better.
You've worked on it for longer.
The reward spurs more of that behavior.
Taking from this as well.
It's not just analog activities, but having analog afternoons, analog days, analog weekends, where you challenge yourself to do things without technology or digital input, may prove to be an unconventional approach to retraining our attention spans, but once more, a highly effective one, the kind of guerrilla approach you might need right now.
There's also just something so intimate about doing things in a way that isn't necessarily convenient anymore, but feels really special and feels really sacred.
You know, like your friend who films the birthday party on her camcorder.
That is more special than a movie shot on an iPhone.
Your friend who hand paints you a portrait rather than buying a gift off Amazon.
That's better than the Amazon gift.
You know, that portrait's better than an AI trend.
Taking two hours to really perfect a chocolate cake, rather than uber-eating a chocolate bar to your house.
These things all feel more special.
Something I've learned from doing this podcast is that so many modern psychological problems are really just solved by ancient primal solutions.
Not all of them, but some of them. the people of the past didn't do everything right.
And advances in technology are like incredible.
I'm not scoffing at them.
I'm not saying I'm not trying to push like a trad wife ideology, but just think about what environment your brain was made for.
It wasn't the one that you are in now.
Our brains are an ancient machine that adapted for thousands of years to go slow and to have to put in effort to get output to chase long-term gratification.
They were literally trained on slow, sustained dopamine.
That has changed incredibly rapidly.
Artificially turning that state back on for yourself by going analog at times when the world around you doesn't require you to, is really helpful and really does change how you focus, change how you feel change yeah, once again, your attention span.
Okay, tip number four or five, I don't know which one we're up to.
Let's say five separate your environments so that you can cue your brain to know when it's time to pay attention and when it's time to switch off.
One of the reasons our attention spans yours mine, everybody's feels so fragmented is is because our brains no longer associate specific spaces with specific mental states.
During the pandemic especially, our bedrooms became offices, our couches became classrooms, our phones were the cinema.
Everything was, everything was everything.
Like it was, you know, your space, there was no clear delineation.
And what this has stopped is what psychologists call context dependent memory and behavior, where our brain learns to associate certain environments, like your home or your bedroom, with certain habits and emotions, and other places, like your workplace or your desk, with other habits and emotional states, like alertness.
So if you do everything everywhere, your brain never receives a clear signal about what specific mode it's meant to be in.
This is why people who work from home often report feeling like they are never fully off, myself included, And it's why they also have a more strained attentional system.
There is no psychological boundary separating their states of being and the requirements that those different states have.
And without recovery, our focus deteriorates even more.
Attention really actually requires contrast.
Your brain needs spaces that say here we can concentrate, and other spaces that say here we can rest, here we can have fun, here we can be entertained.
Otherwise, you kind of exist in the middle where you can't really do either.
Like you can't do one or the other.
You do the secret third option, which is like both at the same time.
So separate your spaces bed for sleeping only, couch for phone only, office for work only, library for study only.
Spaces have to have specific functions if you want to improve your attention span.
What actually makes a good focus environment?
Let's talk about that for a second.
There's been a lot of research on this.
An environment that's good for attention is firstly one that is low in visual clutter.
So studies consistently show that clutter competes for our attention, because every object in our visual field is processed by the brain to some extent.
So, even if you think you're ignoring the piles of clothes or random tabs or notifications, your brain is still allocating tiny bits of energy towards filtering them in or out, or putting them on your to-do list.
So having an environment where you pay attention and you focus on Making sure that's one that is clear of clutter is super important.
This is something, this woman called Dr. Emily Balchicist.
She's a social psychologist at NYU.
She talked about in a recent Big Think article.
As much as attention is controlled cognitively and mentally, it's also controlled visually.
You have to think of your eyes as like flashlights.
So whatever it's pointed at, it attends to.
When you have multiple things in your environment, on your desk, on your wall, the flashlight is jumping between them.
When you have just one thing.
So your laptop, your textbook, your computer, your notes, your flashlight finds it easier to settle on that singular object.
This is actually called your visual focus muscle by the way.
And the more you can reduce the spotlight's diameter, the less preoccupied you are, which is better.
So that's the first thing an environment often needs.
Secondly, physical cues for concentration.
This sounds simple, but Having objects that only appear during focused work can become powerful mental triggers.
Maybe it's a particular lamp.
You switch on your noise cancelling headphones that you only use when you're working, a specific playlist candle, a certain chair, even a particular drink.
For me, you guys know it's always a Diet Coke.
That is my get stuff done cue, because it is the only caffeine I really have ever.
And these things the diet coke, the playlist, the headphones become what psychologists call conditioned stimuli, basically signals that prime the brain for certain states.
Athletes do this all the time before a competition, so do famous musicians.
Lots of people do.
It's part of the ritual of work.
And finally, an environment that helps you pay attention and focus is one that has natural elements.
So exposure to natural light greenery, outdoor views, all have been shown to all have been repeatedly linked, I should say, to improved attention restoration and reduced mental fatigue.
Attention restoration theory in particular is suggests that nature gives our directed attentional systems a chance to recover because natural environments engage the brain softly rather than harshly.
Even a plant on your desk or working near a window can help.
And now for my final tip.
My final tip for getting your attention span back is to not overestimate the power of actually taking breaks.
I think when we are on this quest to rebuild our attentional capacity, specifically the attentional capacity we once had, there's a real all or nothing thinking that can take over.
Especially when it's something we care about, we're really worried about.
You know, it's only natural to notice something's changed, like our attention, and to be fearful of what that means long-term and to try very drastically to force yourself into a state of focused, disciplined effort.
You're not doing yourself any favors by demanding hours and hours of sustained attention for yourself, thinking that that's helping, especially when it comes from a place of self-punishment or fear.
In fact, psychology tells us that this approach often backfires.
It's like somebody who wants to get fit and runs a marathon suddenly overnight, thinking that's helping with their muscle retention.
It's not.
We need to build confidence up to it over time so that we can test our cognitive limits and then rest them and recover from that fatigue.
When we force concentration beyond our cognitive limits, our brain's, They don't become stronger, they just become fatigued and it can create learnt negative associations between our workspace for example, the work we feel we need to do and exhaustion boredom frustration, meaning that we're not going to do it.
There's also something called vigilance decrement.
It's a phenomenon where our ability to sustain attention naturally declines over time, when we are continuously focused on one task for longer than necessary or than we want to be.
This is why productivity researchers and neuroscientists alike really want people to take breaks.
They are incredible for restoring your executive function, especially when a break involves movement nature silence, anything that allows your brain to momentarily disengage.
And they're incredible for directing your attention, because we know it's always so much easier to come back to a task when we're not dreading it and when it feels novel.
But if you sit down and are like, all right, let's go.
We have to focus for 10 hours.
Otherwise, I have a problem.
All you're going to do is mean that the next time you have to concentrate or pay attention at all, you're going to feel the impending doom or the impending fear that like, maybe I'm in for another 10 hour feat.
I can't do this.
I can't do this in the middle lane.
I can either not pay attention, not be focused, or be focused so much that I'm just as I'm just mentally and physically drained.
And importantly, breaks are not laziness.
They are part of this training that we're talking about.
If you're trying to go from consuming 15 second videos all day to suddenly reading for four uninterrupted hours, Your brain is going to rebel right.
Instead, rebuild your attention span progressively.
20 focused minutes matters.
30 matters.
An hour matters.
The goal is not perfection.
It's consistency.
Five minutes matter.
You're trying to teach your brain that focus and attention is rewarding, is enjoyable, is safe.
So big episode.
To summarize, your loss of attention or control is not you, it is the digital and physical environment you've been forced into.
You are definitely not the only one experiencing that decline, but it is something that you can reverse due to the beauty and, I guess, the gift of of neuroplasticity.
So if you want to rebuild your attention span, number one, get clear on what is motivating you to change and the benefits of this change.
Two, set a baseline to measure your progress against.
Three, you don't have to stop using your phone, but stop using multiple screens, specifically at once.
Four, create friction so that using your phone or social media isn't as easy.
Five give yourself a daily attention.
Broadening exercise 30 minutes every day, where you just focus on doing one thing at once.
Six, stop listening to music or always having background noise on when you complete simple tasks.
Just give your brain some silence to replenish itself, especially when you're doing things that require attention.
Seven, return to analog activities, particularly those that require friction and concentration.
They are going to save your attention more than anything else.
Eight.
Design your environment to be more conducive to your attentional goals.
Limited clutter, one thing at a time.
Nature in your environment.
Those are the three things.
I don't know what number we're up to, but take breaks and measure back against your baseline as you progress.
The thing is, you absolutely have the power to do this.
Like you absolutely do.
And if you're thinking about it, you also should absolutely do it now.
I fully believe, as I've said in this episode, as AI becomes more dominant as well and makes things even easier and easier to And more convenient, the people who are going to continue to thrive and be successful are those who still know the power of effort and can execute effort through sustained attention and focus.
What's more, I think there's just genuine human beauty in doing things the hard way, even if they're not perfect, even if they're not the best, even if it requires more from you cognitively and mentally.
There's beauty in that.
So I hope this episode gets you closer back to that state of being that you can remember being in as a kid or as a teenager.
I think a lot of us are really realizing the cost of the online life and the overstimulated life on our brain.
So you're not the only one.
I think these tips will hopefully get you to the start line, past the start line, hopefully get you rebuilding your attentional muscle, because it is possible.
If you can think of anything else that's helped you and you want to share it with the audience and you're listening on Spotify.
You can leave a comment below.
I would honestly love to hear from you.
I feel like this is a massive talking point at the moment.
Any delusional tips or things or strategies that have worked for you, feel free to share them below.
Some other reminders.
You can also watch this episode on Netflix if you want to see what the studio looks like.
If you want a more I don't know personal way of enjoying the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram.
You can read our sub stack, where we send a version of the podcast in written form to you once a week.
And you know what, if you made it this far and you didn't speed up the episode and you didn't get bored halfway through maybe you did, I don't know, maybe it was just a boring episode but if you paid attention all the way to the end of this episode, congratulations.
You did two of your sustained attention exercises for the day.
You are incredible.
Wishing you all very good luck on your attentional capacity journeys.
It's a weird sentence, but until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself.
We will talk very, very soon.
This is an I heart podcast guaranteed human.
