How to Improve Your Attention Span without, Er, What Were We Saying...
By Hannah Betts
‘What are you writing about today?’ enquires a neighbor. ‘Err, well…’ I stammer, despite it being only four minutes since I closed my laptop. ‘It’s a feature… Some sort of… Oh, yes, I’m doing an article on attention spans – how they’re collectively missing in action.’ The irony isn’t lost on either of us.
Lately, I often find myself wondering whether I have early onset dementia. The other evening, walking the dog, I bent down to pick up her deposit and thought: ‘I am so solidly on autopilot, that – without looking up – I genuinely have no idea where I am.’ It was that feeling you get when you wake up in a strange bed and can’t work out your location. Only I was five minutes from home on a Tuesday night.
In a previous life, I was a (very) junior academic, pre mobiles, pre constant email barrages. In those days, I could read, read epic poems, no less, the longest works in literature, then hold coherent conversations about them; teach them, even. I knew things, I could think.
Then the high-pressure multitasking of office life rendered my attention span nil – replaced by a white hum in which information resided tantalizingly just out of reach.
Since the pandemic began – and work-life seeps into all hours of all days – said attention span became even less than nil. I barely finish sentences, let alone books, constantly breaking off not having properly registered to what I was saying.
I find these blanks disturbing, penning notes before I see friends so that I don’t bore them with the great gaps in my so-called brain. ‘Goldfishing,’ my friend Mark calls it, in reference to said fish’s supposed three-second memory. I goldfish so much these days that I expect to sprout gills.
So is it game over for my brain? I ask Stefan van der Stigchel, professor of cognitive psychology and author of Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction.
‘We have access to more information than ever, while our brains can only attend to part of the information presented to us,’ he reassures me. ‘Attention is a limited resource. Because of this, there is a continuous competition for our attention, including social media trying to influence our decisions. Our brain can only attend to one thing at a time, and only attended information is deeply processed by the brain.’
I am not alone in my attention-deficit crisis. Professor Van der Stigchel’s books have been translated not only into English, but Russian, Korean and Chinese. And talking to friends, colleagues, and random strangers, everyone has anecdotes about their inability to concentrate.
A friend recently left her son in a shop, only this wasn’t ‘baby brain’ – he’s eight. ‘I’d gone back years,’ she sighs. ‘If you’d asked me, I’d have said I was 25 and childless.’
Jenn Tripp, 31, an operations manager from south London, also relates. She tells me: ‘I can’t remember the last time I watched a film without doing something else, mostly doom-scrolling on my phone.
At work, it’s a battle to engage my brain in anything, especially the more mundane tasks. Last week, a co-worker had to repeat a question three times because my brain just checked out five words in. I laugh with friends about it, but it’s frustrating to feel like you’re battling your own brain just to get anything done.’
Jenn blames social media. ‘We have become acclimatized to so much stimulation that, without it, our brains don’t know what to do,’ she says, and points to the rise of TikTok – an app with endless entertainment that only requires your attention for as little as 15 seconds, meaning we never have to focus.
‘Since TikTok increased the allowed video lengths, I find myself thinking: “Wow, this video has been going on forever. I can’t even finish it.” A three-minute video is now too long for my brain to engage with.’
The chaos of Covid has exacerbated this. Those of us working from home throughout lost all our time markers and had our lives upended.
‘Even when there were minimal distractions, I struggled to focus,’ admits Jenn. ‘Then with going back into work, the stresses of not knowing what was going to happen with Covid, being told to work from home again, the 24-hour news cycle and the internet, my brain feels completely overwhelmed.’
Professor van der Stigchel confirms her impression. ‘Multitasking is certainly a problem. The rise of social media is presenting us with ever more opportunities for it. If you believe you are able to do several things at once without difficulty, you are likely the victim of the illusion of multitasking.
‘What happens is that you switch so quickly between two tasks that it appears as if you are doing them simultaneously,’ he explains.
‘However, you can observe in the brain that the two halves charged with executing the tasks become alternatively – not simultaneously – active, meaning that the brain has to switch continuously between the two. Multitasking can therefore be more accurately described as switching between tasks as opposed to combining them. It is less productive, more prone to errors, and mentally exhausting.’
Neuroscientist Dr Amishi Jha, author of Peak Mind, believes that the pandemic has definitely exacerbated matters. ‘We are not losing our attention spans – our attention is working so perfectly that computer algorithms can predict our attentional tendencies.
This can feel as if we are in an attentional crisis, like our attention is not our own. Three main forms of kryptonite for attention are stress, threat and poor mood. The demands on us over the pandemic have been filled with stress, threat and poor mood. This leaves us in a cognitive fog, making errors, feeling emotionally reactive and socially disconnected.’
So, what’s to be done? Dr Jha has found that mindfulness training can gradually rebuild our ability to focus. Her book suggests 12 minute-a-day exercises ‘to lift the mental fog, declutter the mind, and strengthen focus so that you can experience more of your life’.
One of the exercises involves ‘mindfulness meditation’: allotting a period of time during which you focus on the breath and redirect your attention back to it when you notice your mind wandering off-track.
Training ourselves in this way doesn’t mean our minds won’t roam when we’re engaged in daily tasks. However, it does mean that we’ll notice when our attention has strayed, and be able to redirect it.
Jenn Tripp staged her own detox: ‘I went for a holiday with no TV, and set up parental controls that blocked all social media, internet and games. If I wanted to entertain my brain, I had to do one of the non-tech-related things I had planned. I hiked miles, read three books in three days, and relaxed by the fire at night. It was heavenly; I didn’t realize how much I needed it.’
Psychologist Dr Gemma Briggs of the Open University recommends extending this beyond a holiday. ‘The attention-loss notion keeps being revisited because people are constantly multitasking. A good corrective is setting boundaries: if you’re working on something, don’t check your phone or social media; don’t try to do multiple tasks at once; snooze social-media notifications; set your phone to “do not disturb”. The proliferation of information available to us now makes distraction more likely, but it’s a choice. Our brains haven’t evolved to reduce our ability to focus attention.’
Boundary building is also advocated by Professor van der Stigchel, not least with so many of us slogging away at home once again. He suggests ‘strategically altering’ your environment and mindset.
‘Do your best to make your workplace distinct, and close your office door,’ he says. ‘But, if you must set up at the kitchen table, dismantle your workplace and clear away your materials to signal the end of the working day.’
Ah, the end of the working day, I remember that. Professor van der Stigchel is right: for me, it’s not just my domestic space, but my mindset that needs addressing – I need boundaries, downtime, the odd Sunday off. I have never bought into the mindfulness movement.
As a depressive, my mind tends not to be a safe or happy place to be, and I spend too much time locked in it as it is. However, being present would be preferable to crouching in the dark, dog mess in hand, having no idea where I am, so perhaps I’ll explore meditation. If I can remember to. Watch this – currently entirely blank – space.
Four ways to improve your attention span
By Professor Stefan van der Stigchel, author of Concentration
1. Avoid multitasking. Impose boundaries at – and around – work. When you try to perform two tasks at once, your brain needs to switch between them, which creates mental fatigue.
2. Experiment with meditation and mindfulness. These practices help you focus on being fully present in any moment. Meditation is great concentration training, because it helps you learn how to deal with distractions.
3. Play background music. This creates a wall of sound around you, which makes you less prone to small distractions. Just don’t listen to anything attention-demanding.
4. Get enough sleep, eat sensibly and keep hydrated. Sounds obvious, but whatever is good for your body, is good for your brain – and your concentration. – Telegraph
