There is a war on your attention. What to do about it
Despite my attempts to curb screen time through app limits, I often ignore them and blame myself for the time lost mindlessly “doomscrolling” — all for short-lived, feel-good dopamine hits of copious content I won’t recall. A movie or other long-form content feels like too heavy a lift.
But it’s not just me.
On my walk or train ride to work, I notice many other people looking down, staring at their phones. They are tuned into the digital world constantly competing for attention, vying to keep eyes glued to the screen.
The average focus time for individuals looking at a singular screen dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to an average of 47 seconds in 2021, according to Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.”
That drop in our capacity to pay attention could be a problem. Mark said in past research presented at the 2008 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, she found a strong correlation between higher stress and frequency of switching attention.
While a dwindling attention span is not due to a personal failing (despite individual variability) a majority of the time, experts say there are changes you can make to regain control over your mind.
Why attention span is dropping
The market has priced our attention by competing in an “attention economy” that’s influencing the internet, social networks and our lifestyles, according to D. Graham Burnett, the founder and director of a nonprofit dedicated to attention activism, the Institute for Sustained Attention, and cocreator of the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, New York, who calls this the “commodification of our attention.”
“Our attention is being monetized as never before,” said Burnett, who is also the HenryCharles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University in New Jersey. “We are living through a kind of gold rush, a gigantic technologically intensive and heavily capitalized program of financial exploitation of our most intimate and fundamental attentional capacities.”
Describing the process as human fracking, Burnett said this competition for our attention is toxic. The bombardment “destabilizes, pollutes and contaminates the actual structures of our beings and our relationships,” he said.
Tracing ‘likes’ across platforms
Similarly, Mark noted the growing sophistication of algorithms that trace individual behaviors and interests to curate feeds and ads that follow everyone across platforms.
“Tech companies and ad marketing companies use this information to construct profiles about us, and then they design algorithms that are targeted to capture our attention,” Mark said. This is the phenomenon of surveillance capitalism, as coined by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School in Boston: harvesting your data to track and predict your behavior.
“If I click on an ad for a pair of boots, then I go to Facebook, I see the boots,” she said. “And if I go to The New York Times, I see the boots and they follow me around.”
Even your favorite television shows have shortened in film length and clip length over the years, averaging a cut every four seconds, Mark said. “I’m not saying this causes short attention spans (but) it reinforces our already short attention spans when we’re watching a film,” she said.
Online videos also utilize jump cuts as part of their aesthetic in sustaining attention. They remove filler words and natural pauses, Mark said, noting that this abruptness leads to impatience in normal conversation between people.
Social media’s constraints on content length also propel the attention quandary. While users cycle through content at rapid speeds, they can develop expectations for fast content shifts, Mark said. The goal is to keep you scrolling because the longer you scroll, the more revenue these platforms make. And there is no financial incentive for platforms to alter this model.
It’s not a personal failing
Technology isn’t the only factor influencing attention span, according to Johann Hari, author of “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How To Think Deeply Again.”
The other 11 factors include office workflows, air pollution, classroom structures and diet. “The key solution is to protect yourself in the environment and for us collectively to change the environment,” Hari said.
Hari spent time in Silicon Valley interviewing experts who designed key aspects of the technological world we live in who he said had come to realize how they had contributed to the current collapse of attention. “I think what struck me most is how sick with guilt they feel about what they’ve done,” he said.
How to regain your power
Deleting all forms of media from your phone may not be necessary, but maintaining balance is crucial. “We are social creatures,” Mark said, which is why we respond to messages and turn to media to connect and communicate.
Here are Mark’s suggestions to reclaim control over technology.
Become conscious of your automatic behaviors. Note when you are picking up your device — develop “meta-awareness.” That’s recognizing what you are doing as it unfolds.
Develop a plan to take breaks. They can be scheduled at logical points in your day to avoid burnout and replenish yourself. Mark suggests meditating, taking a walk or reading something inspirational. Regular breaks are important, she said, to avoid “mental fatigue,” in which people are more susceptible to distraction and loss of control. She also advised engaging in the practice of forethought, which is imagining your future self and goals to keep on track with whatever you need to complete.
Know your chronotype. In her work, Mark has also found that people have personal rhythms of attention that wax and wane throughout the day. Monitoring these “peaks and valleys in attention” should be leveraged to effectively arrange your tasks for the day. Keep a diary or understand your chronotype (your rhythm for activity during the day) to find these key points of energy, she recommended.
“We have a tank of attentional resources (that) gets drained when we keep switching our attention,” Mark said. “And it gets drained if we force ourselves to focus overly long on something hard and effortful (without breaks).”
Protect your focus. Hari recommended protecting your focus by using a time-locking container to lock your phone away for periods of time. He uses it three hours a day to complete writing tasks and suggests working your way up to longer periods without your phone. Additionally, he suggested using an app that places time limits on social media or websites you find yourself addicted to using.
Technology solutions are coming
Hari advocates for these individual behavioral changes, but he said these actions alone will not solve the problem. The problem is bigger than all of us individually.
“The way I feel at the moment is like somebody is pouring itching powder over us all day,” Hari said. “And then they’re leaning forward and going ‘Hey, buddy, you should learn how to meditate, then you wouldn’t itch all the time.’
“But you need to stop pouring this damaging powder on me,” he said.
Now, some companies are trying to make money off the need to focus. Mark recently attended the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI ’24 conference — the flagship conference in the field of human-computer interaction featuring state-of-the-art technological designs — and was fascinated by the prototypes designed to conserve our attention by making it more difficult to use smartphones.
“There’s just a lot of techniques that are creating friction for using the phone, which I just find so ironic,” she said. “People now realize that we have to conserve our attention. Our attention is just getting sucked up by these devices. And so now there are innovations to make it harder to use (them).”
Some people are already altering the settings on their phones to grayscale to make it less visually appealing and addictive. Others are rotating their phone several times to access social media by unlocking the app-limiting usage. (But if you place restrictions on a majority of apps, you may need to lock up your phone for self-control.) And for increased privacy, to avoid data tracking, some are toggling off personalized ads on iPhones or opting to delete advertising ID on Android devices in settings.
It’s important to fight back, Hari said. Although companies are seeking control over your attention, you do have the power to develop healthier habits and live more present, fruitful lives, he noted. “We are the citizens of democracies. And we own our own minds. And together, we can take them back if we want to,” he said.
“Sustained attention is at the heart of all human achievement,” said Hari, noting that no athlete is bringing their phone to check in the middle of an Olympic event. “When you get your attention back, it really is a feeling of regaining your superpowers.”
The constant bombardment of digital content and the competition for our attention from various platforms can lead to increased stress and a strong correlation between higher stress levels and frequent attention switching, according to Dr. Gloria Mark's past research. To regain control over our mind and combat the issue, experts suggest incorporating regular breaks into our day, becoming conscious of our automatic behaviors, and protecting our focus by using time-locking containers or apps with usage limits.
