High on Health: Are We Losing Our Ability to Concentrate?

Imagine trying to read a chapter of a book the way people did 30 years ago. Before you finish the first page, your phone buzzes with a text, an email arrives, or a news alert pops up, and you remember to check the weather. By the time you return to the book, you’ve forgotten what you just read. Are we actually losing the ability to concentrate, or are we simply living in a world that constantly steals our attention?

Are we Losing Our Ability to Concentrate?

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.  We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation, breathwork, and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email, texting, and social media, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary resource. ~ The Attention Project

Do humans have goldfish attention spans? Not necessarily. According to research, how we concentrate and the length of our ability has changed, and much of that is due to social media and tech usage. The problem isn’t attention, however. It’s all the interruptions, according to researchers. People can still watch a three-hour movie, read a novel they enjoy, or spend hours on other hobbies.

But, as psychologist Gloria Mark at the University of California explained in an interview with the American Psychological Association, people now spend only about 47 seconds on a computer screen before switching to something else. Twenty years ago, that average was over two minutes long. Our digital environment encourages constant switching, which can increase stress and mental fatigue. The issue, according to Mark’s research, is that phones and apps constantly interrupt attention before our brains can fully engage in a task.

A PubMed Central study showed that shifting attention between tasks requires the brain to refocus each time. Imagine writing an email when your phone dings with an important – or just interesting – notification, causing you to pause and look at it. While you’re looking at that, you get a phone call or text message, and the vicious cycle continues. Each time you stop to address something else, your brain has to put on the brakes, flip the turn signal, and reroute to the next task.

This, the PubMed study documented, is why people often walk into a room and immediately forget why they did so. It’s not always a sign of age; rather, it’s because their attention has already been redirected several times. Unfortunately, this can lead to making more mistakes, slower work, greater stress, and higher mental fatigue.

Mark also pointed out that as people frequently switch tasks, their stress levels and heart rates rise. It’s almost a vicious cycle as notifications lead to task switching, which leads to stress and distraction, which leads to more task switching. While people may think they’re being productive, she said, the opposite is often true.

Linda Stone, a retired consultant, coined a few relevant phrases used today, such as email apnea and screen apnea. In 1998, she came up with the phrase “continuous partial attention” (CPA), which she says is different from multitasking:

“When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient.  Each activity has the same priority  – we eat lunch AND file papers.   We stir the soup AND talk on the phone.  With simple multi-tasking, one or more activities is somewhat automatic or routine, like eating lunch or stirring soup.  That activity is then paired with another activity that is automatic, or with an activity that requires cognition, like writing an email or talking on the phone.    At the core of simple multi-tasking is a desire to be more productive.  We multi-task to CREATE more opportunity for ourselves –time to DO more and time to RELAX more.”

CPA is different in that the desire is not to concentrate on tasks that need to be completed, but rather because we don’t want to miss anything going on around us.

Kids Have It, Too

Difficulty trying to concentrate on tasks is showing up more often now in children, too. A recent Washington Post report described teachers who increasingly use “brain breaks,” movement, games, and short lessons because students often lose focus much faster than they did several years ago. Educators attribute the change in part to increased exposure to phones and short-form digital content, such as YouTube shorts. Teachers are also trying to make lessons more interactive because today’s students are accustomed to frequent stimulation from digital media.

A study published in Pediatrics Open Science looked at which types of screens affected children the most. Researchers followed 8,324 children over four years, starting when they were around nine to ten years old. The report explained that social media had the highest impact on the ability of kids to concentrate, which researchers believe it constantly competes for a child’s attention through notifications, messages, and an endless stream of new content. During the study, participants’ social media use went from about 30 minutes a day at age nine to approximately two and a half hours per day by age 13, and this is despite many platforms officially requiring users to be at least 13 years old.

The ability to concentrate has always been one of our greatest strengths. It allows us to learn, solve problems, build relationships, and develop new ideas. Yet today, we’re surrounded by endless voices competing for a few seconds of our attention. Perhaps the greatest challenge isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to concentrate, but that we’ve become accustomed to near-constant distractions.