tech topic #4: Attention and Focus

Digital media can be a source of education or ignorance, connection or isolation, growth or depletion. We want to continue the conversation about technology use between students, parents, and teachers and examine if the ways we use technology forge character, foster wisdom, and facilitate lifelong learning. 

SLOCA is only a small part of your student’s life; what happens at home makes an even bigger difference. This blog series, TECH TOPICS, is intended to present you with information we feel can be incredibly impactful, raise awareness, and prevent complacency. Not only that, we hope these posts can provide ideas for positive ways to use technology: we are tech-mindful, not anti-tech. We encourage you to look at the research, consider your own values, and develop an intentional framework for technology use as a family. And lean on our community for support, ideas, and help!

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From the moment you open your eyes in the morning, that little phone of yours is immediately vying for your attention. Alerts, emails,texts—many of us give in to our phones before we focus on our family, getting ready for the day, or just taking a moment to think about how we’re feeling. What is this kind of attention-stealing doing to us…and to our kids?

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt lists “attention fragmentation” as one of the four foundational harms (harms that are considered deep obstacles to human development) created by the new phone-based childhood. Of the harms we’ve discussed in this series thus far, this one is perhaps the most obviously evident in day-to-day life.

Attention: the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps call out.

Ask yourself, “How long am I able to sit and do one single task without being distracted or feeling anxious to move on to something else?” According to one study referenced in The Anxious Generation, the average number of notifications on a young person’s phone amounts to 192 alerts per day. The average teen gets about 11 notifications every waking hour, amounting to one every 5 minutes. If we look at heavy users, such as older teen girls, that increases to one interruption every minute!

The distraction doesn’t take much explaining: Buy this! Listen to this new song! Have you heard what happened in the news? Watch the latest funny cat montage! The siren call of our devices is having a constant effect on our productivity. Ironically, feelings of anxiety also creep in as we start to feel we’re not getting enough done.. We feel we are not being efficient if we’re spending too much time on one thing. What are we sacrificing for this “efficiency” and constant distraction? And how is this fragmentation affecting our kids’ development?

A recent article in The Atlantic, Get Phone Out of Schools Now, describes how adults (over age 25) have a fully mature frontal cortex to help resist the temptation to go off task. Now imagine a phone in a child’s pocket, buzzing every few minutes. There is no mature frontal cortex to help them stay on task. In addition to the immediate consequences of this lack of attention (in school, at work, in relationships), an adolescent’s continuous access to a smartphone may also interfere with their maturing ability to focus long-term.

“The rise of digital media and media multitasking has led to concerns whether these forms of media use deteriorate adolescents’ attention. The main assumption is that if adolescents get used to using media wherever they are and whenever they want, they might have difficulties sustaining their attention, for example, when doing their homework or when attending school.”

—Nesi, Telzer & Prinstein, Handbook of Adolescent Digital Media Use and Mental Health

When we have a task that takes a large amount of focus (learning or creating), we are consistently pulled away from it by digital distractions. To think deeply, without distraction, is essential to fully formulate ideas. As we attempt to multitask between what we need to accomplish and a buzzing, ringing, glowing device, we exhaust our brains and are not able to reach our full thought potential. Would we have Einstein’s theory of relativity if he had a smartphone? Would we have such a profound and beautiful Declaration of Independence if its authors were constantly drawn away to TikTok videos? It’s worth pondering! Nicholas Carr illustrates this perfectly in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

We are living in our short-term brains. When you can’t pay attention to anything, you aren’t truly absorbing anything. A life worth living requires deep, substantive elements. Without deep roots, we are easily swayed. This leads to increased anxiety and ultimately to a whole host of serious issues.

“When everyone traded in their flip phones for smartphones, they paid less attention to their teachers, less attention to their friends, and far more attention to TikTok, Instagram, and pornography. And are we surprised that they’re lonely and uneducated? Countries spend tens of billions of dollars on education, and then we just throw it all away by letting kids stay on phones all day long.”

—Jonathan Haidt, interview with The Hub

What to do?

Many of the recommendations here are, thankfully, very similar to the ones made to help ease the other harms we’ve discussed. 

• Read through some of the resources below. This post is just skimming the surface; to be well-informed will empower you to make great decisions for yourself and your family!
• Help your kids pursue high-quality leisure activities off screens. Getting outside, reading books, and getting together face-to-face with friends. This applies to our kids and ourselves!
• Prioritize sleep. Less sleep results in a shorter attention span. 
• For kids and teens, discourage entertainment media during homework. For adults, consider leaving your phone in another room for times of focus—that could be for work, reading a book, or just spending time with a loved one. This is personal to your needs and level of impulse control; some people can effectively work for much longer without a needed break. Figure out what works best for you and try to make it a habit. 

“…the best thing children can do is to do an activity off-screen. And I think they would learn to focus, whether it’s playing outside, reading books is an excellent way to get children to focus…If you need eight hours of sleep a night—and I need eight hours of sleep a night—but if you’re only getting six hours a night, that difference is called a sleep debt. And if you’re consistently getting six hours of sleep a night, you’re accumulating sleep debt. And we know that the greater the sleep debt, the shorter the attention spans. And what do people do when they have a lot of sleep debt? We found that they tend to do more lightweight activities like social media. They just don’t have the resources to be able to focus and do hard work, so they do what’s easy based on the amount of resources that they have available.”

—Gloria Mark, PhD, American Psychological Association Podcast

Discussion

• Where would your life most benefit from removing your digital distractions? How much focused time would be most beneficial to you? 
• Do you feel anxious when you’re not multitasking? 
• What goals would you like to set for yourself in regard to creating a life that is less prone to attention fragmentation? What is one step you can take to put this into practice?

Recommended Resources

Anxious Generation

Speaking of Psychology: Why Our Attention Spans are Shrinking – Gloria Mark, PhD, American Psychological Association Podcast

Get Phones Out of Schools Now – The Atlantic

Handbook of Digitial Media Use and Mental Health – Cambridge Press

The Hub – Jonathan Haidt Interivew

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains – Nicholas Carr