How We All Lost Our Focus—And How to Get It Back
It happened because I wasn’t paying attention. Or rather, I was paying attention to too many things, which is the equivalent of heeding nothing at all: the baby on the counter; my seven-year-old “washing” dirty dishes at the kitchen sink; the oven, which was slow to heat; the narrowing after-dinner homework window for my fifth grader’s history project; the Slack notification that flashed above the recipe I was reading on my phone; and which institution was NPR reporting that Trump had just dismantled? Shouldn’t I drop everything and tune into that? These were, ostensibly, my nonworking hours, but I was white-knuckling through them: Those collard greens that had been languishing in the fridge, they were going to get chopped and cooked tonight. Or maybe not, because a moment later, I was holding a dish towel tight to my hand after my knife slipped. I’d sliced the tip of my finger right off.
An emergency has a way of cutting out the noise, but to a lesser extent we are all teetering on this edge, the mind pulled in so many directions it can feel as though control has vanished from our grasp. And the research tells us we are heading one way: progressively, irrefutably, whittling away how long we can focus. In 2003, before smartphones were really on the scene, the average time a person spent on any one computer-related task before switching screens was two and a half minutes. Between 2016 and 2020, that interval fell to 47 seconds. How low can it go? Five seconds? One? What even is a task in the era of the scroll, that smooth and aimless motion? Art follows culture, or vice versa: The average shot in a movie in 1930 was 12 seconds; by 2010, it was less than four.
As an editor and writer I like to think I’m a focused person, professionally trained to pay close attention. And yet, I feel the pull of my phone when I’m sitting down with a novel, when I’m on a walk in the woods, when I’m trying to fly a kite with my kids. The other day, in an Uber, I watched, horrified, as the driver flicked through TikTok at a stoplight, but then, behind the wheel later that afternoon, I found myself checking my own emails in the sliver of time before the light turned from red to green.
This isn’t just a problem because of the potential for accidents—though mistakes can be consequential even if you’re not wielding a kitchen knife or driving a car. Doctors, pilots—they’re just as distracted as the rest of us. Studies have shown that multitasking physicians make more errors when writing prescriptions, as do pilots when they’re interrupted. There is also what researchers call “switch cost”: the fact that we’re less efficient at any task when we alternate between them. And then there’s the fact that the constant toggle doesn’t feel very good. To take just one physiological marker: Our blood pressure rises when we’re pulled in multiple directions.
There’s a philosophical way to think about this, elegantly outlined in The Sirens’ Call, a book from MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes published earlier this year: “The defining experience of the attention age is a…feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will,” Hayes writes. Basically, we are what we notice, and as we notice less—or are coerced or cajoled into noticing less by what amounts to a thousand marketing pings—we are fundamentally reduced. As William James put it in 1890: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”
Utter chaos—that resonates as a headline floating above my domestic tableau. And it’s worse for those who shoulder the bulk of household work, who are disproportionately subject to “the psychic equivalent of smartphone notifications,” says Allison Daminger, author of the forthcoming book What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. She means those mental pings—We’re low on milk. Isn’t summer camp sign-up coming soon? Has our car registration expired?—one can’t switch off.
But hope is not lost! For if we live in an era in which attention is fractured and commodified, we also live in an era in which people are beginning to bristle against unwelcome impositions. And as Hayes puts it: “It’s one of the axioms of American capitalism that where there is consumer demand, there will soon be businesses to serve it.”
Spas like the renowned Lanserhof in Tegernsee, Germany, now offer “brain health” programs that function not only “in the context of disease prevention,” says Lanserhof’s Stefan Lorenzl, a neurologist and palliative care physician, “but also in helping individuals achieve better resilience and attention in everyday life.” At the SHA wellness clinics in Mexico and Spain, cognitive and emotional health programs are in part geared toward helping guests manage daily distractions. Kamalaya Koh Samui, the Thai wellness retreat, recently opened a “cognitive house” that offers everything from a high-tech electroencephalogram (or EEG) to sound therapy designed to encourage restful sleep. I pay a visit to the Aman spa in New York City, where a treatment utilizes marma-point therapy (an Ayurvedic technique similar to acupressure). A skilled therapist named Lauren explains that the treatment is as much about energy work as traditional massage, an approach that manifests in a surprising choreography of touch: light strokes around the base of the big toe, a pointed pressure along the inseam of my bicep, hot stones in the cradle of the belly. “You have a lot of warmth emanating from the top of your head,” Lauren says, “a lot of positive energy.” I left feeling good, the deep groove between my brows a bit less brutal.
I also stop by Lift, a minimalist, brick-walled flotation-therapy spot in Brooklyn, where an extremely zen attendant shows me to a giant egg-like pod containing 1,000 pounds of Epsom salts dissolved in 250 gallons of body-temp water in which I will be semi-submerged for an hour. “What happens if I…don’t like it?” I tentatively ask. “You’re required to stay,” he deadpans, then sensing my alarm, quickly switches tack: “Nothing is mandatory!” He tells me, though, that he rarely has people emerge before their allotted time is up. First time for anything, I think to myself as I step into the saline waters. And then something happens: As I’m bobbing gently side to side, my mind clicks into a slower gear, the thoughts coming and going without their usual urgency; the minutes melt away, and when the automated message informs me that my session has finished, I am genuinely surprised. I emerge with the sensation that I’ve just done a satisfying round of yoga despite the fact I’ve barely moved.
CLEAR VIEW
If we live in a time in which attention is fractured and commodified, we also live in a time in which people are beginning to bristle against unwelcome impositions.
You can, of course, seek solace in simpler ways. There are any number of distraction-disabling apps that can help you block whatever you deem to be most detrimental: Sidekick, Stay Focused, the aptly and poetically named Freedom. One such app-slash-device launched recently and quickly gaining traction is Brick, which offers a physical object you must tap your phone into and out of in order to access the apps you’ve marked as time sucks—a degree of friction that a friend attests has prevented her from losing hours to Instagram when trying to get to sleep at night and motivates her in the morning to get out of bed.
In fact, when you start to, er, pay attention, it can feel like there’s a remedy for not just your deskbound hours or the 2 a.m. doomscroll, but the morning coffee, the commute, and the afternoon slump. Supplements and elixirs hold out the promise of a crisper mind—a more “natural” Adderall or, in the case of And Repeat’s daily focus supplement, one that is more aesthetically packaged (“Display-worthy and effective” is the tagline). As I’m researching all this, an email arrives inviting me to cover a “weeklong nervous system reset” in Kyoto this fall hosted by Japanese wellness brand Apothékary, which, not incidentally, sells a tart and earthy tincture that purports to “enhance cognitive function and support brain longevity.” Wander through the aisles of any boutique supermarket and you’ll find no shortage of adaptogenic mushroom powders and B vitamin supplements claiming to perform a variation on the theme.
But as my collection of herbal remedies grows and my browser tabs for mindfulness retreats multiply, a different concept increasingly appeals: The idea that “empty space” is essential. The importance of rest is backed up by neuroscience, which has for decades tracked declining performance when people work on something for too long. It also relates to more poetic ideals like the Japanese concept of ma, loosely translated as a pause that allows for clarity or growth, and that can manifest in physical movements (a moment of stillness after bowing in greeting, for example) or simply more considered speech.
As the subway hurtles me home from an eye doctor appointment one afternoon, amid a train carriage full of people staring glassily at their screens, I experience a kind of unintentional ma myself. My eyes dilated by ophthalmologist drops, I cannot focus on my phone or, frankly, anything; my headphones left at home, I’m forced to stare into the foggy middle distance for the entirety of my 45-minute commute. Once the annoyance wears off and I resign myself to the spell of emptiness, I feel a sense of unaccustomed calm.
When I call Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of the 2023 book Attention Span, she reminds me that one doesn’t need to turn the pursuit of calm into its own commodity. Given the magnitude of the problem—the distress it seems to be causing on a societal level—the solution she advocates is pointedly simple: Go for a walk; take breaks; accept that you’re a morning person or an evening person, and orient your day around those hours. “You just can’t keep running on empty. You need to set aside time,” Mark says. “And setting aside time does not mean spending an hour doing your email.”
“Attention is goal-directed,” she adds. “We need to pay attention to what our goals are.” And those goals can be emotional: How do we want to feel at the end of the day (relaxed, fulfilled, at peace)? And how do we get there? Mark tells me about a study she conducted among Microsoft employees in which she had them state their emotional goals alongside task-related goals, an act of affirmation that kept them buoyed more than if they hadn’t made their aims explicit.
But how to bring about a goal that is a bit more specific than “less chaos” in my own life? Mark points me toward the online platform called Coursera, where an array of mindfulness classes from institutions like Yale is offered free of charge. I’m not one for online courses—too many distractions just a click away!—but I start to consider where I already have empty space in my life and where I might make room for more. There are my regular visits to the Quaker meeting house attached to my children’s school, where a lengthy moment of sometimes uncomfortable but ultimately welcome silence ends each meeting. Swimming is my favorite form of exercise, perhaps because I can do nothing but count laps while I am in the pool. I think back to periods when I have been in truly remote geographic locations: first comes frustration, then the hunt for a signal like a water diviner trying to find a spring, and then gradual relief at being truly out of range.
And then there are the times that I’m doing something with my hands that doesn’t involve a cursor or my texting thumbs, playing a song on my cello, for example, an instrument I learned as a kid, and neglected for decades, but have recently begun to fool around with again. For weeks, writing this piece, my wounded finger was immobilized in an awkward splint, but it is just about healed now. I think it’s time to pick the instrument back up.
