Stolen Focus
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Our focus has been deteriorating for centuries, and has been super-charged by social media and technology.
The solution is deeper than individual action. Our attention crisis is systematic.
Our attention and focus is fundamental to a good life, well-functioning democracy and solving difficult problems.
🎨 Impressions
Johann is one of my favourite authors, his books challenge your thinking on ideas that you didn’t realise needed challenging. This was no exception. Johann takes you on a wonderful journey across the world, with his own personal experiences with technology and focus, to interviews with the most renowned scientists and experts in the space.
How I Discovered It
This was top on my ‘to read’ list given Lost Connections and Chasing The Scream had such an impact on me.
Who Should Read It?
We can all understand and see our focus drift. This book allows you to explore some of the reasoning behind that and how we shouldn’t feel so frustrated and at fault. There are powerful external forces driving the attention crisis.
📒 Summary + Notes
The Problem
If we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is an endemic in the Western world. This is not because we have suddenly become more greedy and self-indulgent. Obesity is not a medical epidemic, it’s a social epidemic. The way we live changed dramatically - our food supply changed and we built cities that it’s hard to walk and bike around - and those changes in our environment led to changes in our body. Something similar may be happening to the changes in our attention and focus.
If you want to do what matters in any domain, any context in life, you have to be able to give attention to the right things. We need to deal with our attention problems before we can try achieve other sustained goals.
Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
Studies have found that topics are discussed for a shorter time period - in 2013 the average was 17.5 hours. By 2016 it had dropped to 11.9 hours.
Things are faster to reach peak popularity, and then faster to drop again.
The more you flood the system with information, the more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
In general, we want to choose the easy option. But what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a bit difficult. Our phones are with us all the time are the easy thing to do, not the important.
When a person focuses on slow activities, like yoga, a broad range of scientific studies have shown that they improve your ability to pay attention significantly. Because you have to shrink the world to fit your cognitive bandwidth. If you go too fast, overload your abilities, they degrade. Slowness nurtures attention, speed shatters it.
Switch cost effect - your brain has to reconfigure and remember what you were doing before. This takes time.
You start making more errors as you have to backtrack to figure out where your brain left off. Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial.
Creativity drain. your mind given free undistracted time will automatically think back to everything it’s absorbed and start to draw links between them in new ways. New ideas are born this way. Because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories and if you are spending energy on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.
136 students sat a test in a study, the ones who received intermittent texts, instead of having their phone off, performed 20% worse.
Your prefrontal cortex, is like a bouncer, who’s job is to filter out most of the stimuli hitting you at any given moment. Now there is lots of noise from open-plan offices, sleeping in crowded cities and tapping away in coffee shops. The ‘bouncer’ can’t filter like he used to, he’s overwhelmed.
The Crippling of Flow States
Flow can only come when you are mono-tasking - where you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing. Flow requires all your brain power. You also have to be doing something that is meaningful to you. And thirdly, doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, not beyond them.
Flow states are very fragile and easily disrupted.
Gaining focus is not a case of removing all your distractions, that will create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and replace them with sources of flow.
We have a choice between two profound choices - fragmentation or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes us bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks is. Flow expands us.
The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion
Only 15% of us wake up from sleep feeling refreshed.
We are so accustomed to being sleep deprived, everyone around us are exhausted, and we try medicate (with coffee and other stimulants). It’s become normal.
When we’re in a hurry, we’re all impulsive and easily irritated. You’re much less clear than you could be. When we sleep better, a lot of problems get less. It repairs a lot of damage.
We live in an apparent paradox - many of the things we need to do our so obvious: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But we are moving in the opposite direction: towards more sleep, more switching, less sleep.
The Collapse of Sustained Reading
In 2017, the average American spent 17 minutes a day reading, and 5.4 hours on their phone.
The medium is the message. The message we absorb from social media i.e Twitter is saying that: we shouldn’t focus on one thing for long, the world should understand the world in simple 280 character statements, the world should be interpreted quickly and confidently, what matters most is whether people immediately applaud a statement. Facebook/IG says your life exists to be displayed by other people, you should aim every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life, and that friends regularly look and engage with these.
We internalise the texture of the voices we are exposed to. When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inner lives of people over long periods of time, that sinks into your consciousness. You become more perceptive, open and empathic. If you expose yourself for hours a day to disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury from social media, your thoughts will start to be shapes like that. Your internal voices become cruder, louder, less able to hear gentle thoughts. Take care of what technologies you use, because your consciousness will come to be shaped by them
The Disruption of Mind Wondering
At some point you need to stand back. If we’re just frantically running around focusing on the external world exclusively, we miss the opportunity to let the brain digest what’s been going on.
In our current culture, most of the time we’re not focusing or mind wondering either. We’re constantly skimming in an unsatisfying whir.
Without mind wondering we find it harder to make sense of the world. We become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.
However, when we are jammed up with stressful thoughts, people mind wondering rank themselves as less happy because of this. In situations of low stress and safety, mind wondering will be a gift. In high stress, dangerous situations, mind wondering will be torment.
The Rise of Technology
There are control rooms with a hundred people hunched over a desk with little dials - a control room that will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This is real.
Success is measured by one thing, engagement.
Tony Fadell who co-invented the iPhone said ‘I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring into the world?’ He worried that he helped create ‘a nuclear bomb’ that can ‘blow up peoples brains and reprogram them’
These sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hungry for hearts and likes. Once you have been conditioned to need those reinforcements, it’s hard to be with reality in the physical world, because it doesn’t offer as frequent and immediate rewards as our phones.
If we had a GPS and it worked fine the first time, but then took you a few streets from where you wanted to be, all because advertisers of the GPS paid for this to happen, you wouldn’t keep using it. But this is social media, there is a destination we want to get to and most of the time it takes us off track.
The Rise of Cruel Optimism
This is where you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression or addiction - and you offer people upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic because you are telling people it can be solved and soon but the solution is so limited and so blind to deeper causes that for most people, it will fail.
The alternative isn’t pessimism, it’s authentic optimism. Where you honestly acknowledge the barriers that stand in the way of your goal and establish a plan to work together with other people to dismantle those barriers, step by step.
A Deeper Solution
If all the social media sites were subscription based, and no longer relied of advertising revenue. It would be working for you, and would have to figure out for the first time what makes you happy. if you want to be socially connected, instead of isolated in front of your screen, it would have to figure out how to make that possible.
One push notification a day - getting one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all.
Questions could be prompted such as ‘what changes do you want to make in your life?’ matching you with interesting strangers, friends, family.
At the moment social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. But it could be designed to understand your intentions and better help you achieve them.
Surge of Stress and Increase in Vigilance
A YouGov poll that identified people who felt their attention was getting worse, and why it was happening and given 10 options to choose from. The number one reason was not their phones, it was stress, chosen by 48%. Number two was a change in life circumstances, like having a baby/getting older, also 48%. Number three was disturbed sleep. Phones were fourth at 37%.
To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off parts of your mind that are scanning the horizons for bears or lions or their modern equivalents. When you’re in a dangerous environment, selective attention is a dumb strategy - instead you need to spread vigilance around your environment, looking for cues of danger.
Through Universal Basic Income studies, once a person received a basic income, their ability to focus improved significantly. If you have to worry about your financial situation, it takes a lot of capacity of your brain. If you don’t have to worry, it improves your capacity to think about other things.
4 Day Work-Week and A Right To Disconnect
From introducing a 4 day work week at a company in Australia, they found that social media usage at work fell by 35%, team engagement, and stimulation at work was up by 30 and 40%, stress levels were down 15%. The academics studying the experiment showed that they were achieving more in four days than they had in five. the changes have now been permanent.
Many of us build identities around working to the point of exhaustion. We call this success. In a culture built on ever-increasing speeds, slowing down is hard. And most of us feel guilty for doing it.
Covid demonstrated that businesses can change their working practices radically, in a short period of time, and continue to function well. The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable - until it changes, and then we realise it didn’t have to be like that in the first place.
Everyone should have the right to disconnect, in 2016, it became French law that workers agree the hours they can be contacted, and all other hours are out of bounds.
There’s no point of giving people self-help lectures about the benefits of unplugging unless you give them a legal right to do it. In fact, lecturing people who aren’t allowed to unwind by their bosses about the benefits of unwinding becomes a kind of maddening taunt.
Poor Duets and Rising Pollution
Achieving sustained attention is a physical process that requires your body to be able to do certain things. So if you disrupt your body by depriving it of the nutrients it needed, by pumping it full of pollutants - your ability to pay attention will be disrupted.
Most of us eat in a way that deprives us of the nutrients we need for our brains to develop and function fully. The brain gets built from foods.
Our current diets aren’t just lacking what we need - they also actively contain chemicals that seem to act on our brains like drugs.
Furthermore, with pollution, your brain did not evolve to absorb these chemicals through the respiratory system and it doesn’t know how to handle them. it leads to damage to nerve cells to the neurons. Depending on the dose and your genetic susceptibility, it can lead to your brain cells getting damaged.
ADHD and How we Respond
The Confinement of Children
When adults notice that children and teens seem to be struggling to focus and pay attention, we often say it with a weary and exasperated superiority. The implication is look at this degraded younger generation. Aren’t we better than them? Why can’t they be like us? But, children have needs and it’s our job, as adults, to create an environment that meets those needs. We don’t then play freely, we imprison them in our homes, with little to do except interact via screens and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, and contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that they are struggling to learn attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.
Attention Rebellion
4 layers of attention:
Spotlight - focusing on immediate actions like ‘i’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.’ It involves narrowing your focus
Starlight - focus you can apply to longer-term goals. Like, you want to write a book, or set up a business. If you become distracted from your starlight, you lose sight of your longer-term goals. You forget where you are heading.
Daylight - this is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out.
Stadium lights - our ability to see each other, to hear each other and to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals.
If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked, who switches tasks every three minutes, who are tracked and monitored by social media sites designed to figure out your weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll, who are so stressed we become hyper-vigilent, who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash, who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day - then yes we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems.
Imagine you brought a plant and you wanted to help it grow. What would you do? You would make sure certain things were present: sunlight, water and soil with the right nutrients. And protect it from things that could damage: plant it away from trampling feet, from pests and disease. Your ability to develop deep focus is like a plant. To grow and flourish to its full potential, your focus needs certain things to be present: play for children, flow states for adults, to read books, to discover meaningful activities that you want to focus on, to have space to let your mind wonder so you can make sense of your life, to exercise, to sleep properly, to eat nutritious food that makes it possible for you to develop a healthy brain, and to have a sense of safety.
3 big movements:
Ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus
Introduce a four day work week because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention
Rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely
Economic growth is at the centre of our society. Growth can only happen in one of two ways. One, by finding new markets or inventing something new. Two, persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, sleep less, you have found yourself a source of economic growth.
This inevitably speeds up life. If the economy has to grow each year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more in the same amount of time. We are living in an economic machine that requires great speeds to keep going - and this inevitably degrades our attention over time.
Our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. We should want to live in a world where we can clearly see our own goals, our own thoughts, our own dreams.
