In the first part of this series, we looked at Dr Nicholas Kardaras’ book, Glow Kids, where he outlines the evidence piling up about the effect of unrestrained use of technology especially where children are concerned.
In this episode, we’re looking at it from a slightly different angle: paying attention & focus. Based on the heavily researched book Stolen Focus (Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again) by Johann Hari.
How often would you guess an average college student can pay attention to anything? Students, on average, switch tasks every 65 seconds. The median amount of time they focused on anything was 19 seconds.
Adults are not much better: we can make it a whopping 3 minutes before switching tasks.
If you’re focusing on something & get interrupted, it will take you an average of 23 minutes to get back to the same state of focus. Workers in the US mostly NEVER get an uninterrupted hour. If you’re a parent who stays home to raise your kids, this is probably true for you, too. And if you’re a parent trying to work from home, Jesus take the wheel!
I feel this! We are in our early 50’s and I can’t tell you how many of my friends I’ve had versions of the same conversation with: man, I can’t remember anything anymore! I used to sit and read a book for hours, but now I’m doing good to make it through a whole chapter. I feel so scattered and undisciplined.
Dr. Joel Nigg (one of leading experts in children’s attention problems) says our culture may be attentionally pathogenic, an environment where sustained and deep focus is extremely difficult and you have to swim upstream to get it. He says it’s through no fault of our own—that there never seems to be enough stillness for us to stop & think.
Information & Speed
From combing thru years of data from Twitter, Google, and even trending book topics from as far back as the 1880’s, scientists in Denmark have shown that over the years, topics have tended to reach popularity faster and drop off faster. So we can’t say it’s JUST technology that’s done this. It’s RATE OF INFORMATION in general. (Reporting on the great Chicago fire vs. daily news cycles about events in the Ukraine.)
Original Blackberry slogan was “anything worth doing is worth doing faster.” (a big fat lie when you think about it. Is fast food better? Fast sex? Fast conversations?) Speed of information feels good/modern/in-the-loop, but we sacrifice DEPTH/reflection. We choose an EASY thing instead of an IMPORTANT thing. (news from social media instead of in-depth book on history, eg). **By the way, this is what we humans tend to do in almost EVERY AREA of life…from our relationships to achieving our goals.
Multi-Tasking Myth
The term “MULTI-TASKING” was coined in the 1960s when the early computers were invented. It was what MACHINES did to process. Our HUMAN BRAINS can only produce one or two thoughts in our conscious mind at once. That’s not changing.
We THINK we’re doing several things at once, but we’re actually JUGGLING, SWITCHING. Moms probably have this figured out better than anyone on the planet!
Hewlett Packard did a study of its workers and found that when they received emails & phone calls, their IQ actually dropped 10 points (that’s twice the amount you’d get if you smoked pot). Switching tasks (1) makes you slower (2) error prone (3) less creative and (4) diminishes your memory of what you did.
Flow States—when you’re so involved in something that you lose track of time. It’s a monotask. It’s meaningful. It’s at the edge of your ability but not beyond it. It’s a real and deep form of attention. The more flow you experience, the better you feel. (playing piano, rock climbing, painting/writing, swimming)… These states are fragile & easily disrupted. In the 80’s he discovered that staring at a screen is one of the activities that provides the lowest amount of flow.
What do we typically do at the end of a hard day? Veg. Seek relief from all that noise/distraction by resting in front of the TV or scrolling. We need to replace that habit with a positive goal you’re striving for. The powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.
I’m So Tired
We learned in our podcast on Sleep that 40% of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived (less than 7 hrs/night). Over the past century, the average child has lost about an hour and a half/night.
Sleep deprivation effects are especially terrible in children. Adults get drowsy, kids get hyperactive and lose ability to pay attention. Your body treats lack of sleep as an emergency—it raises your BP, makes you crave sugar, cuts off memory making….just to be ready for the “emergency,” which in reality is just that you stayed up too late on amazon or binging some series.
Interesting: we’re dreaming less. Dreaming helps us adapt emotionally to things that happen when we’re awake. Most of us, when we’re awake, are hurried, irritable, stressed. What does it mean to be a society & culture so frantic that we don’t have time to dream?
Part of this is our unnatural relationship to light… blue light, rhythms of the day… no screens 2 hrs before bed; no artificial light in bedrooms
Sustained Reading
The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever. 57% never read a book in a single year. One of the simplest & most common forms of FLOW that people experience is reading a book—remember it helps us feel better & focus better if we get that flow.
When we read a book, it’s linear…we focus on one thing for a sustained period. When we read screens, we skip & jump, scan & skim. If you’ve not read a book in a while & try to, you’ll find yourself skimming, or fighting the urge to jump ahead, having to go back & reread.
I’ve seen articles from more than one college professor lately that talks about students’ inability to read, digest, and think about information. They tend to grab the “loudest nuggets” and regurgitate them. [Can we pause for a moment & think about what that means for our culture? Our politics? The way we filter and categorize information?]
At HARVARD, one professor said he struggled to get his students to read even quite short books & increasingly offered them podcasts and YouTube clips they could watch instead.
What does the MEDIUM where we get our info tell us about the world?
Twitter: the world should be understood in short, simple statements, interpreted confidently & quickly.
Facebook: you life is to be displayed, here is what friendship means
Instagram: What matters is how you look on the outside & whether people like that.
BOOK: life is complex. Slow down & think deeply about it. It’s worth thinking about how others live/think. (increases empathy)
Who’s the Puppeteer?
Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer who appeared on Netflix’s Social Dilemma, was fascinated by magicians as a kid. Magic is all about limits of attention. We think we control our attention & that if someone messes with it, we’ll know & can spot it and resist it. Magicians have long used this false feeling we have to amaze & astound us. They don’t have to know our strengths—they just have to know our weaknesses.
If you watch Social Dilemma—which you should—the testimonies of the creators of Twitter, Instagram, and all the rest all say that those platforms are “the magicians,” making us think we have control when in fact we are puppets turned whichever way they want using their proven manipulation methods (to make money).
It’s not that they’re listening & then target ads. It’s that their model of you is so accurate it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.
Every day, the combined total of 200,000 human lifetimes (every moment from birth to death) is now spent scrolling thru a screen.
This is a systemic attention problem that requires systemic solutions….
Stress
Dr. Nadine Harris (surgeon gnrl of CA)…. Looks at “hypervigilance” in kids. ACEs.
Children who experienced 4 or more ACEs were 32 TIMES more likely to have been diagnosed with attention/behavior problems (they’re always looking for “the bear” instead of being able to focus in school). ACEs TRIPLE the development of ADHD symptoms. To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. Selective attention in a dangerous environment is dumb—you need to constantly scan for danger. Child’s body is making too many stress hormones & decreasing ability to focus.
Ritalin does not treat sexual assault. Or financial crisis. Or Serious illness in the family. Or divorce.
Food
Dutch study (2009) took 27 kids id’d with focus trouble. 15 of them had eliminationist diet (no preservatives, additives, dyes). The other 12 ate usual fare. More than 70% on the diet improved their attention by an avg of 50%!
When you eat what we evolved to eat, your brain functions better. Across the world, if you look at the places where people are more physically/mentally fit than Americans are, with lower levels of dementia & ADHD, they’re ALL eating whole foods. Foods that our grandparents would have recognized as food.
Our culture is very individualistic, where we’re pushed to see our problems as individual failings. You can’t focus? You’re overweight? Poor? The message is: that’s your fault. You should have found a way to lift yourself up and out of that situation. (systemic food, pollution, tech issues)
ADHD
Hard to talk about focus without digging a little more into ADHD—which is the Ace of all attention issues.
Between 2003-2011, ADHD in the US increased by 43% (55% in girls). It has now reached the point that 13% of adolescents in the US are said to have ADHD. In some parts of the South, 30% of boys are now said to have ADHD by the time they turn 18. The majority are given stimulants for it.
They’re not making it up or faking it. If your child is struggling to focus, it’s not your fault. Most experts believe for some children there can be a biological component.
Dr. Sami Timimi (leading child psychologist in Britain): says ADHD is not a diagnosis. It’s a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together. That’s all. All you’re saying, when a child has been diagnosed, is that they’re struggling to focus. It doesn’t tell you much about the why question. (p. 224)
Crucial factor was the amount of stress/chaos in the home environment…. We just said how many of us (as adults) experience stress, sleep deprivation, feel harried and unfocused ourselves. Of course this has an effect on the general environment at home and in the world at large.
Big issue—esp when you realize the pharmaceuticals are a proxy for meth (dextroamphetamine)…given to meth addicts to help them in their addiction. (p 228)..in a study done at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. It’s the same drug prescribed over 1M times/yr in the US for kids with ADHD.
–example of vet giving Ritalin to the crazy beagle or naxalone to the cribbing horse….it takes the edge off for animals who have “biological frustrations”… horse unable to graze, polar bear unable to roam….
Play & Outdoors
Today’s moms get the message that “you’re a bad mom if you take your eyes off your kids.” We need to get back to unsupervised play, exploring, being outdoors, taking some risk.
Today, in the US 73% of elementary schools have ANY form of recess. 10% of children spend any time playing outdoors on a regular basis (2003 data).
Take a look at Finland: often judged by international league tables to have the most successful schools in the world. There, kids don’t go to school at all until 7. Before then, they just play. From 7-16, they have school from 9-2, have almost no homework and take almost no tests. By law, Finnish teachers must give students 15 min of free play for every 45 min of instruction. Only 0.1% of their kids is diagnosed with ADHD. It’s consistently rated as the “happiest” country.
Losing our Light
James Williams (former Google strategist) puts it this way. (p. 266)
Our attention has 3 different forms:
- Spotlight: your focus on immediate actions, like I want to find my glasses. I want to finish reading this chapter. It’s narrowed focus. If you’re distracted, you’re prevented from finishing these near term actions.
- Starlight: applies to longer term goals—projects over time. You want to write a book. You want to start a business. You want to be a good parent. When you feel lost, you look up to the stars & remember your direction. If you’re distracted, you forget where you’re headed.
- Daylight: makes it possible for you to know what your long terms goals are in the first place. How do you KNOW you want to write a book? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? If you can’t reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these out. If you lose your daylight, you cant figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, or where you wanted to go.
Losing your daylight is the deepest form of distraction. You become obsessed with petty goals or depending on simple signals from the outside world like retweets. You’re lost in distraction. You can only find your daylight & starlight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering and deep thought.
Williams believes our attention crisis is depriving us of all 3 forms of focus. We are losing our light. (What a sinister metaphor this is!!!)
What can we do?
Read this book: Stolen Focus. Read Glow Kids. Identify ways you’re distracted and how that makes you feel. Check out Cal Newport’s book Deep Work.
What deliberate and intentional actions can you take to set limits on yourself & your family? Be accountable to someone else. Turn off your notifications! All of them. Set screen limits for social media. See if you can batch emails–set them all the send at 5 am every day.
Read another book. Exercise that reflective and deep thinking muscle.
For kids: limit screens (or do not allow screens) before age 10. Give them books & lots of free outdoor time.
Sleep!