How to reclaim your brain and get your concentration back.
Can’t finish a sentence? Join the club. From embracing boredom to practising ‘deep work’, Phoebe Luckhurst gets her concentration back
Sitting at my desk, two thirds of the way through an article I’m writing, my phone buzzes. My hand stretches out to pick it up before I realise what I’m doing and retract it, guiltily. As my brain whirs trying to recall what I’d been thinking before I was interrupted, two colleagues next to me start talking about the new Trainspotting film. I’m about to join in when I catch myself again. Turning back to my screen
I sigh and put my hands up to the side of my head to block out all view of them.
I am not normally given to such antisocial behaviour — but this method is recommended by experts. Specifically Sam Horn, communications coach and the author of ConZentrate, who advocates creating physical ‘blinkers’ to distraction and to whom I have turned in order to try to regain my concentration. Do I look ridiculous? Maybe — but desperate times call for desperate measures.
For if 2017 is anything, it’s the year I’m getting my concentration back. As a teenager I spent uninterrupted hours reading. Now I can barely last 15 minutes without checking my phone. I regularly struggle to recall the opening of an article by its close, scrolling back up to check on details such as names or locations. I open new browser tabs mid-way through tasks, then forget what I was doing before I opened them. And I am an inveterate ‘double-screener’: sitting in front of the television, I swipe through Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Certainly, I might have got stupider, or at 26, (very) prematurely senile. But my sad decline probably sounds familiar to you: poor concentration is the modern condition. According to research by Microsoft, the average attention span was just eight seconds — one second shorter than a goldfish’s. In the report, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, issued a disquieting prediction: that the ‘true scarce commodity’ of the future will be ‘human attention’.
Technology is heavily implicated. A 2014 education study found that the more time students spent online, the less they were able to concentrate in class and, accordingly, the shorter their attention spans. The same year, advertising agency OMD reported that the average person shifts their attention between their smartphone, tablet and laptop 21 times an hour. Social media in particular is designed to be distracting; dependency is encoded in their algorithms. ‘Once people come in, then the network effect kicks in and there’s an overload of content,’ former Instagram engineer Greg Hochmuth explained to The New York Times in late 2015. ‘People click around. There’s always another hashtag to click on.’
This isn’t just affecting our concentration — it’s changing our brains. Research by London-based psychologist Glenn Wilson found that those workers who are distracted by phone calls and emails see a 10 per cent drop in their IQs. And a 2015 study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab identified that 91 per cent of people questioned considered the internet to be an ‘online extension’ of the brain. The process treats facts as superficial, disposable, temporary — and scientists believe it prevents the proper ‘encoding’ of memories.
Personally, I’m just sick of feeling intellectually soft-boiled. I want to remember what I did before I outsourced my brain to Google. How can I learn to re-engage? (read full)
