Why you can’t pay attention
Parent Post
The current diet deprives
The current diet deprives us of key nutrients that are necessary for our brains to fully develop and grow.
A Dutch study assigned children to a diet where they had to cut out most of the synthetic, processed foods we normally eat. 70 percent of them experienced an increase in attention, and the average improvement was 50 percent.
If you are interrupted,
If you are interrupted, it takes you an average of 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before you were disturbed.
So if your screen time shows that you spend three hours a day on your phone, you are losing much more. Yet we are surrounded by apps like Facebook that are designed to interrupt you and get you to pick up your device and start scrolling.
Imagine that, you are
Imagine that, you are attacked by a bear, and you survive.
In the weeks that follow, your attention will shift from focusing on the things in front of you to scanning for dangers all around you.
Now imagine that, just as you start to feel safe, you are attacked by a bear again. You will then flip into a state called “hypervigilance,” where you are constantly scanning for risks, and find it impossible to focus on reading.
Our current diet contains
Our current diet contains dyes and chemicals that act on our brains like drugs, amping us up.
A study took two groups of kids. One was given a plain drink, and the other was given a cocktail of dyes and other chemicals that are found in the candies kids eat every day. The kids given the cocktail were significantly more likely to become wild.
There are several factors
There are several factors that can degrade our attention and many of them have been rising dramatically in the past few years.
Interestingly, tech is playing a significant role, but it isn’t the biggest of the causes. To get our brains back we need to first understand these causes, and then deal with them.
We can only get
We can only get out of this crisis if we respond at two different levels.
The first is as isolated individuals, by making changes in our own lives and our children’s lives, to protect ourselves from the forces invading our attention.
Get K-Safe, a small plastic safe that will lock away your smartphone for however long you tell it to. Imprison my phone and get hours of undisturbed time every day.
Your brain can only
Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind at once. Yet the average young person now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.
They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness.
But what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, that comes with a cost.
The COVID crisis has
The COVID crisis has flipped many of us into a state called “hypervigilance,” which is ruining our focus.
At the start of the COVID crisis, many of us thought that with more free time, we would read more. Lots of people cracked open their neglected books and novels—yet, we struggled to focus more than ever. Here is why.
Individual changes will help,
Individual changes will help, but they will only get us so far.
Meditation does have value, but we need to band together and collectively take on the forces pouring this powder on us, and stop them.
As long as social media companies profit from interrupting and distracting us, they will find ever-more sophisticated techniques to do it. We need to force them to adopt a different business model.
Your attention didn’t collapse—it
Your attention didn’t collapse—it was stolen.
We are now living in a serious crisis of attention—one that is analogous to the obesity crisis, or the climate crisis.
The average college student now spends just 65 seconds on each task. The average office worker spends just three minutes. Even the average Fortune 500 CEO only gets 28 minutes of uninterrupted focus a day.
Any stressful situation will
Any stressful situation will trigger greater vigilance.
This is why stress so often causes a huge increase in attention problems.
Narrow your focus in a safe environment to learn things and flourish and develop. But if you are in a dangerous environment, selective attention [where you focus on just one thing] is a really dumb strategy.
Deep focus is something you can only really do when you have achieved safety. So nobody should blame themselves for struggling to focus during a pandemic.
The way we eat
The way we eat in the Western world is severely damaging our attention and focus.
The unprecedented shift towards eating mostly processed foods has seriously affected our ability to focus, in three ways.
It causes huge energy spikes, and then energy crashes—which leave us with brain fog. White bread or Frosties for breakfast releases glucose really fast, giving you a rush of energy. But then your blood sugar crashes, and you slump at your desk, feeling drained and unable to think clearly.