Who stole my focus?
November 27, 2024
Who stole my focus?
Looking for answers, I recently read “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again”. Author Johann Hari basically tells me to blame the tech companies for hijacking my attention.
They’re the bad guys, he argues. Their business models are intentionally designed to capture my eyeballs. Worse, they are driven by nefarious reasons: distracting me into spending my money in one way or another.
Moreover, in Hari’s opinion, I shouldn’t take my inability to focus as a personal failure. It someone else’s fault.
There was a time when I would have agreed with him. As recently as a few months ago, before embracing digital minimalism, I was ranting to anyone who would listen that Big Tech was screwing around with all of us. That they were deliberately making our phones more addictive, and gaming their algorithms to keep us wanting more.
But if I’m being really honest, I have to disagree with the author.
It’s too easy to blame someone else, like Trump for instance, and the breaking batshit crazy news cycle he’s unleashed on us, again. While the tech companies haven’t exactly been saints, it’s not entirely their fault. I’m also complicit in creating my distracted life.
The truth is, lately I just can’t seem to stop myself from looking at my screens. Again. And I have to own up to my inability to stop reading the news.
It hasn’t helped that I’ve been suffering from a bit of cabina fever. In November, Costa Rica declared a state of emergency country-wide. Historically high amounts of torrential rainfall simply did not let up. Driving hasn’t been easy. With so much water, derrumbes or landslides, have been happening everywhere, as roads just collapsed from the weight of it. Plans have been consistently canceled and there’s only so much reading I can do. Or baking, for that matter, with my granddaughter.
I’m bored, therefore I scroll.
It’s easy to blame someone else for that. But no one is forcing me to click on a news site when I know full well it’s going to upset me. It’s my own damn fault I don’t have the strength to just throw my phone on the ground and stomp on it. When I lie awake in the middle of the night worrying about the state of the world, that’s on me. True, bad habits and addictions are not always easy to break, but I believe I can and must try harder.
Luckily, I’m a pragmatic women and constantly on the lookout for solutions. A helpful article popped up at just the right moment recently in the Globe and Mail. It could have been written just for me. I even sent a thank you email to the journalist who wrote it. (The link to the article follows this post.)
Writing about—what else?—our distracted life, journalist Zosia Bielski interviewed several researchers on the subject of focus and attention. The opinions of one in particular, Gloria Mark, grabbed me. As she had also written a book, I immediately downloaded it.
“Attention Span: A Ground-breaking way to find Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” (with a testimonial I noticed, from my digital minimalism guru Cal Newport, right on the cover) now has me totally re-thinking my ideas about focus and the distractions which steal it.
An American psychologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, Mark believes that sometimes, distractions can actually be a good thing, cognitively speaking. They are all part of the natural rhythm of our various states of attention.
She identifies four of those key states beginning with flow, an intensely focused state that can make someone lose track of time. (I wrote about finding a flow of my own earlier on this blog). But it’s only one member of the quartet.
There’s also rote, a state where you can be highly engaged in something but not really challenged, like playing a game of solitaire. Or bored, when you’re neither engaged nor challenged, the polar opposite of a flow state. Finally, there is the frustrated state, where you can be highly challenged and not engaged at all, like trying to write a blog post when the words won’t come.
She believes and her research confirms that there is a natural rhythm to these states of attention. And she tells us that all humans cycle through them in the course of the day. That rhythm, she writes, is essentially, the new flow. “We can feel the rising and lowering gauge of our inner cognitive resources,” she writes.
“Paying attention to it can let us know when to recharge so that we’re not trying for nonstop focus and getting overspent. Our resonance with rhythm can help us restore our psychological balance.”
Of course she wrote a lot more in her book, but any time I hear the word balance, well, I pay attention. That’s probably why I found reading Mark’s book so much more useful than Hari’s “Stolen Focus.”
I’m always desperately seeking equanimity or balance in my mind and life. That explains why I’m game to follow her sage advice: to know my own cognitive rhythms and adjust my life accordingly.
For me, that means writing in the morning when I’m focused; reading in the afternoons or playing with my grandchildren; and in the evenings, watching something on my tablet. Lately The Nordic Murders on PBS have me hooked.
Who stole my focus? I did.
Now, armed with a greater understanding of my various states of attention, it’s entirely up to me to find my way back to a sustainable way to make sure I don’t lose it again. Wish me luck.
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Links to check out: