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Ugh, out 20s.
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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our
20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode, another topic, another deep dive.
As we of course break down the psychology of our 20s.
Okay, there has been a trend that I have been noticing recently, both within myself but
also those around me across social media, amongst my workmates, even from you guys, the
listeners that everybody is talking about.
And that is our collective declining ability to concentrate and our ability to focus.
So many of us in this day and age are struggling to stay on task, struggling to keep away from
our phones and kind of push back against like the siren call of TikTok and Instagram.
One professor has even stated that our levels of inattention have reached an epidemic rate.
That might sound a little bit extreme but I think that it is something that all of us
can relate to, I want you to seriously ask yourself this simple question of when was
the last time you were able to spend a complete hour on a single task without getting distracted.
For me, I think for most of us, we probably can't remember that time.
It's pretty safe to assume that there has been a gradual decrease in our attention spans
going on for some years.
A lot of us really started noticing it post COVID and post lockdown when a lot of us really
did get quite engrossed in short form content on TikTok when we lacked any structure to our
days, when we were allowed to kind of follow any impulse that we had because there was
nothing else to do.
That has seemingly bled into where we are now and the consequences of that time and I
think a whole number of factors is contributing to our inability to focus and concentrate
for a sustained period of time.
The area I think we notice it most is when it comes to those kind of activities that require
us to be concentrated for some time so I'm going to say more than an hour at least but
whether our little short term consequences if we don't stay focused.
So things like study or remote work where yes, there are things that you need to get done
but you're in charge of your own timeline and so you can get drawn into doom scrolling
into Wikipedia deep dives into TikTok.
Look up at the clock, realize that 30 minutes have gone by and you know having to kind of
try and start over again only to find yourself a few minutes later drawn back into some
other task or some other source of entertainment.
I think that is the area where a lot of us are noticing this occurring.
The other space is around daily planning and getting things done on a daily level, daily
tasks but also in conversations with others.
I don't know if this is just something I've noticed amongst my friends that we've spoken
about but our conversations are becoming a lot more quick and there is a lot more space
and a lot more kind of like jumping around rather than like a continued sustained focus
on one topic.
So I asked you guys how many of you had noticed a shift in your attention span in the last
two, five years.
88% of you had noticed at least some difference in an area of your life and 60% of you noticed
a huge difference within that.
That was from almost 8,000 responses.
So this is not like a small number, this isn't a small minority of the population and it
shows that this impact on our ability to focus and the impact that we're feeling on our attention
spans is significantly burdening those of us in our 20s and those of us in younger generations.
Think back to when we were in our early mid teens.
I remember that I could sit down and read a book for hours and the time would just fly
by.
I could focus on my homework for a solid chunk of time before I needed a break.
I could watch TV and not kind of need to be on my phone at the same time.
I could have conversations and not be thinking about you know my to do list and all the other
things that I needed to get done.
I think our attention spans are shrinking in very measurable and observable ways and it's
valuable that we talk about it.
So in today's episode, firstly we're going to understand why, why is this happening?
Do we only have our phones to blame or is it kind of a broader combination of burnout,
of over stimulation, of repetitive workloads, of trying to do everything at once and you
know big media and marketing companies really leveraging what they know about our attention
spans.
But also what is the impact, if you haven't already seen an impact for yourself, what
is some of the psychology saying about what this means for us long term?
And finally is there a solution?
I feel like that is quite a rhetorical question.
Of course there is.
I wouldn't be talking about this if I didn't have something that you could do about it.
So we're going to talk about it and I also wanted to hear from you guys.
You all wrote in some incredible responses about late stage ADHD diagnoses which are becoming
so much more common.
You spoke about screen times above nine or ten hours a day, deleting apps and then
re-downloading them later, misdeed lines.
Late night spent compensating for all the distractions.
There were so many valuable insights that came from you all, the listeners and I want
to share it all.
So without further ado, I'm going to stop rambling and let's discuss what it is about
our attention spans these days and why it seems harder than ever to stay focused.
Let's get into it.
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Our first time using something normally forms a lifelong impression even if psychology says
that impression is not always correct.
For example, you may try a new food for the first time, realize you don't like it and you're
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hair removal cream.
I think we can all remember that strong chemical smell of those old formulas.
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time I used hair removal creams was when I was probably 18.
There was nothing pleasant about that smell but now with scents like orange blossom and
Moroccan organ oil for the new shower creams and kirkar butter, oat milk, vanilla or
water lily and aloe vera for their body creams, they actually make me enjoy the experience.
So a story about this the other day I had three of my closest girlfriends and my boyfriend
over for dinner and we had this bottle we decided we wanted to try it out.
We wanted to get rid of some hair on our legs.
We all used the oat milk and vanilla body cream.
Literally at my dining table we applied it and we waited for three minutes.
They turned out so smooth even my boyfriend put some on his calf and let me tell you
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He can testify this stuff works and we also agreed these do formulas are a game changer
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Oh out 20s the drunk dialing the forgetting to wash our face at night and yes neglecting
out teeth don't do that last one you only get one set of teeth so you need to protect
them.
Pronamel intensive enamel repair penetrates deep into the enamel surface and locks
in vital minerals to repair acid weakened enamel.
Pronamel also makes a new mouthwash which helps to repair acid weakened enamel beyond brushing
alone.
Enamel is the number one dentist recommended brand for acid erosion so by pronounble repair
anywhere you buy your toothpaste or mouthwash visit pronamel.com today.
So let's quickly get up to speed on some of the basics of attention we tend to think
of attention as being only one thing the ability to focus on one specific task for a continuous
period of time without being distracted and it's something that's in our control.
But we're talking about when we talk about a controlled sustained period of focus is
actually only one form of attention called sustained attention we also have selective
attention where there are multiple stimuli and things going on in the environment and we
have to choose to focus on just one and you know tune in or filter out the other distractions
and then we have alternating attention this is also known as multitasking where we switch
back and forth between tasks that have different cognitive demands so this might sound efficient
right you're right in your essay whilst also listening to a lecture or your texting and
driving that's the classic one but study after study will tell you that when you're performing
two or more tasks at once especially ones that are cognitively demanding and splitting
up your focus this will actually lead to lower efficiency on both tasks it makes a
sloppier it increases our stress but also I think I can speak from experience it takes
so much more time than if you just done each thing you know one after the other and consecutively
so that is alternating attention and the final kind of attention we have is divided attention
and this is very similar to alternating it basically highlights our ability to react
to two or more different demands or things in our environment simultaneously so this kind
of attention dividing attention is just less cognitively demanding it basically is you
know your ability to watch TV whilst also eating normally the actions that were doing a
quiet procedural so of all these kinds of attention the area where a lot of us are suffering
is selective attention basically our environment has a lot of stuff going on and we have to
choose to only focus on one thing within that in order to get it done I think most people
without chronic attention issues or conditions or neurotypes like ADHD could likely focus
fairly well if they were given a task in a quiet empty room that is where sustained attention
really flourishes when we only have one thing to do one thing to focus on nothing else
but in a very modern world these conditions they are so rare our lives are filled to the
brim with opportunities for distraction or competing stimuli and so we need to be able
to filter all those other things out and prioritize what's in front of us that is becoming
a lot harder leading to a greater reliance on alternating attention switching back and
forth from our phone to our computer to our environment to somebody talking without
limited success some people who are a lot more qualified than me have sought some answers
and explanations to this problem of our diminishing selective and sustained attention so there
was a recent study in the UK done at King's College London and it found that about half
of us adults think that our attention spans are getting shorter and that number is actually
going to go up for people between the ages of 18 and 34 66% of us in that age bracket
which I'm assuming is probably you are noticing a change a shift and one that is noticeable
so there is like a common myth that has been swirling around that our attention spans
are now so poor that they rival that of a goldfish it might feel that way sometimes but
actually we're still very much winning that competition but only by a little bit and
we know this based on a longitudinal study that is actually still going on now so one
of the leading researchers in this space in the space of attention is Dr Gloria Mark and
she is a psychologist and a professor from the University of California Irvine. Now back
in the early 2000s whilst she was studying people's attention rhythms which we're
going to get back to a little bit later on she started to notice that the people she
was observing were really not doing too good at staying on track when it came to the tasks
that they were being asked to do so she switched focus she wanted to see how long most
of us or the people that she had sampled for her studies could stay on a task or a project
before moving along and whether that this was being impacted by new technologies so at the time
it wasn't it was kind of like phones but also computers it was really before like the social
media craze but because she started early she was able to track our attention spans through
these big societal shifts in our access to technology so she started back in 2004 that's almost
