Lessons from the Book 📚 Stolen Focus

Overview

Is it becoming increasingly harder to keep your attention focused on a single task? If so, you’re not alone. In Stolen Focus (2022), Johann Hari identifies twelve main factors that are contributing to our collective loss of concentration and shortening our attention span. Hari details how all these forces converged into a perfect storm that is stealing our focus. Our sleep declines, we experience mental and physical exhaustion, and we lose interest in slow-paced activities like reading, meditation, and free play as we become hooked on fast-paced social media sites. Surveillance capitalism thrives on keeping our attention captive, but Hari outlines steps we can take to fight back.

Attention Crisis

In the twenty-first century, people around the world are finding it harder and harder to concentrate on any one task because so many things constantly clamor for their attention. Tour a museum, and you will rarely find visitors actually looking at the pieces of art. Instead, they take selfies with the artworks and frantically post them online. Younger people especially find it hard to break away from the shackles of their phones. They stay on social media in fear of missing out, so much that they end up missing out on actually living. But it doesn’t stop with young people. At 40, Johann Hari has been struggling to concentrate on tasks and be present. Even Roy Baumeister, a 66-year-old researcher who has thoroughly studied the subject of willpower and published a book about it, admitted to Hari that his ability to focus was waning.

In the same way that the obesity epidemic is a product of our changing environment, so is the attention crisis. Obesity is inescapable for some people who have to eat inexpensive processed meals and work extremely hard in sedentary occupations because of today's food supply and difficulties in sustaining regular physical exercise. You shouldn't be too harsh on yourself since gaining weight and losing concentration are not usually personal failings. Instead, you should do your research to better understand the issue and how to overcome it.

Research has found twelve factors that impair the human capacity to focus. Several of those forces have increased significantly during the last few decades. On the bright side, the attention problem can be alleviated through a series of concrete steps that you can take on an individual level.

Speed and Switching

The first factor is the increase in speed in our lives, which results in constant switching and filtering of our focus. Individuals tend to focus less on a single piece of information when more data is being presented to them. Scientific studies have demonstrated that attention spans have been decreasing since the invention of the internet. We receive information faster than ever before. We are constantly bombarded with news, data, stimuli, messages, and notifications clamoring for our attention. As a result, our brains struggle to filter out the noise and keep switching attention between different tasks.

This continuous switching has three detrimental effects on the capacity to focus. The first is the switch cost effect. If you often glance at your messages while trying to work, you're wasting not just the minutes you spend reading them, but also the time required to refocus, which may be considerably longer. The second way switching hurts your focus is the screw-up effect. By nature, the human brain is prone to mistakes, and switching between activities increases the risk of making mistakes you wouldn’t otherwise make. Finally, you'll feel a creativity drain. You’re inclined to be substantially less imaginative. If you spend a great deal of your brain-processing power on switching and error-correcting, your brain has less opportunity to wander off to other areas and generate creative ideas.

Reaching Flow

The second factor is not being in a flow state. When you’re in flow, you’re immersed in a unique psychological state anchored in the present where your self-consciousness and your ego disappear. You become one with your task. Being in flow is practically impossible to achieve in today’s extremely fast-paced world, unless you try intently. Doing so requires three essential elements.

The first step is to establish a clearly defined objective. You must make a firm decision to achieve it and put your other goals on hold. Monotasking, or only doing a single task at a time, is the only way to go into a state of flow. Flow is shattered by distraction and multitasking, and no one can achieve it if they are attempting to perform more than one thing at once. You must use all your mental resources to accomplish a single goal in order to achieve flow.

Second, you must be engaged in activities that have personal significance for you. For the most part, humans developed to focus their attention on the things that are important to them. When you force yourself to work on something meaningless to you, your attention frequently drifts.

Third, doing a task that challenges your skills but does not go beyond them can be helpful. A goal that is too simple will not stimulate your flow, and a goal that is too hard will make you anxious and unfocused.

Sleep Well

The third factor is physical and mental exhaustion, primarily due to our messed-up sleep. It's well accepted in the scientific community that getting too little sleep decreases your ability to pay attention. Even a tiny level of sleep deprivation has detrimental consequences. An expert on sleep studies, Charles Czeisler, discovered that when you are tired, you enter a “local sleep” state in which your brain is partially awake and partially asleep. When we don't get enough sleep, our bodies react as though they’re in an emergency state. Both short-term and long-term focus are reduced.

Human life was built around the cycle of the sun until the invention of the light bulb. Humans are now capable of controlling light, and this is influencing their internal rhythms. To change that, before going to bed, you should restrict how much light you are exposed to. You must also change your exposure to your screens, and not allow them into your bedroom, at least a few hours before you sleep.

The Decline of Reading

The fourth factor is the deterioration of our reading. According to the American Time Use Survey, the number of Americans who read a book for enjoyment has decreased by 40 percent since 2004. Moreover, since 1978, the market for books has fallen by 40 percent.

Reading books teaches us to read in a specific manner and a linear pattern, concentrating on one thing for a continuous duration. However, using a screen teaches us to read in a different manner. Manically, we hop from one item to the next and quickly scan the data in front of us to get what we need. Unfortunately, screen reading for long periods affects our paper reading skills. Skimming and scanning habits are transferred to paper, becoming the default. As a result, reading takes on a new meaning; it ceases being a delightful engagement in an alternate universe and becomes akin to running through a crowded shop to collect whatever you need and leave. Books become less enticing when our screen reading habits are transferred onto paper.

Let Your Mind Wander

The fifth factor is that we don’t, or can’t, let our minds wander anymore. We are always frantically running around, focusing on the external world and busying ourselves with tasks, distractions, and entertainment. We never give our minds the breathing space necessary for mind-wandering. And even though mind-wandering might sound like the definition of being distracted, it’s actually an important process.

During a state of mind-wandering, three things happen. First, you begin to rationalize the world around you. You'll be more effective at setting and achieving personal objectives, coming up with new ideas, and making long-term choices if you allow your mind to roam. Allow your thoughts to wander and slowly make sense of your existence, and you'll be able to perform better.

Second, letting your mind wander allows it to create new links among ideas and thoughts, which can often solve problems. Third, your mind will go into “mental time-travel” while wandering. It goes over your past and attempts to predict your future. Liberated from the constraints of thinking only about what is immediately in front of you, your mind will begin to consider what could come next—and will help prepare you for it.

Surveillance Capitalism

The sixth factor is the rise of surveillance capitalism, which is technology that tracks your every move and uses it against you. Every time you use Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or Google to send a message or change your status, your words are scanned, categorized, and saved. A profile of you is being built for the purpose of selling it to marketers. As an example, if you send an email mentioning that you need to buy diapers, Gmail will know that you are a new parent and target you with ads for baby supplies.

Surveillance capitalism is the economic model for digital corporations, and they are continually refining it to get a deeper understanding of us and our behaviors. Because of their business strategy, they create applications and websites that are intended to increase distraction. They need you to spend the majority of your time on their websites in order to make revenue from the ads they display to you.

Surveillance capitalism is damaging our attention in six main ways. First, our brains are now trained to want regular rewards from websites and applications. We crave the attention and approval of others through likes and comments. If you've been hooked into this system, you'll find yourself reaching for your phone more frequently than you would otherwise. Breaking away from your job and relationships in order to get retweets will become a habit.

Second, these platforms encourage you to switch activities more often than you would otherwise, and jump between apps and sites. According to research, this is just as detrimental to your ability to think clearly as being intoxicated.

Third, these services get to know exactly what you like to do and how you want to spend your time. In order to keep you scrolling, the sites continue feeding you content that will keep you engaged, based on your previous browsing habits. Traditional media such as the printed page or television could never target you like this. Fourth, in order to keep you interested, these sites want to make you furious. For years, researchers have conducted trials to demonstrate how anger impairs your capacity to pay attention. Fifth, these sites make you feel like you're surrounded by other people's rage. When you visit, you get the impression that you are in a hostile environment, which makes you more vigilant. Slower activities, such as reading a novel or engaging with your children, become less and less accessible when your focus moves more toward looking out for threats. Sixth, these sites have managed to set the world ablaze, and we must pay attention right now. Fake news spreads more quickly than truth on social media, making us all more susceptible to inaccurate information, and society as a whole suffers as a result.

Rejecting Cruel Optimism

The seventh factor is cruel optimism, which is when you give people a simple and individualistic answer to a complex issue, such as surveillance capitalism, in misleadingly optimistic rhetoric. A known example of this is making people believe they can greatly limit the pollution of the ocean by refraining from using plastic straws, when in reality the harm from plastic straws is virtually negligible compared to the huge amount of pollution generated by big factories. Another example is the promotion of web browsers that claim to protect your privacy and not share your information, but in reality this doesn’t do anything to solve the general problem of surveillance capitalism.

Cruel optimism assumes we can't alter the systems wreaking havoc on our concentration, so we must instead focus on improving our isolated selves. But why do we have to accept this as the norm? Isn't it absurd that we allow ourselves to be surrounded by things that are meant to addict and enrage us? We must be honest and recognize that most of us will not be able to get out of this pit by using just individual remedies. The powers that are hijacking our attention must be confronted and pushed to change.

We seem to be in the middle of a race between intrusive technology's increasing power and a collective movement demanding technology that serves us, not the other way around. Humane technology advocates argue that only government regulation can alter the social media business model. Putting an end to surveillance capitalism may seem impossible, but the feminist movement has shown us that even apparently intransigent forces can be overthrown. After all, though Big Tech today has immense power, it arguably does not compare to the collective power of men in 1962, yet it was still possible to challenge that power then, and therefore it is possible to challenge surveillance capitalists today.

A Need for Vigilance

The eighth factor is the sudden increase in stress and how it’s triggering us to become more vigilant. You must feel secure in order to pay attention normally. Rather than actively checking the horizon for threat, you should be able to turn off those portions of your brain and focus on a single, safe issue.

Yet when you find yourself in an unsafe environment, you'll need to keep an eye out for signs of danger all around you. With stress coming at us from every direction, we stop being able to focus on the safe things that don’t constitute immediate danger.

Bad Diets, Worse Pollution

The ninth and tenth factors go hand in hand, and they are deteriorating diets and escalating pollution. In the last two generations, a major shift has occurred in one of the most fundamental aspects of being a human: what we consume. Our present diet causes us to lose concentration since it creates energy surges and collapses. Our children's concentration will improve if we stop giving them a diet that is heavy in sugar and processed carbohydrates. Our diets also impair our concentration by depriving us of the minerals and vitamins we need to operate effectively.

Most of the pollution we encounter comes in the form of particles in the air we breathe, and these particles are having an effect on our brains. For youngsters, whose brains are still forming, these findings are particularly troubling. Despite the well-documented dangers of exposure to lead, which have been recognized since at least ancient Rome, it was added to gasoline in large quantities in the early twentieth century. As a consequence, between 1927 and 1987, about 68 million American children were exposed to hazardous amounts of lead via the use of leaded gasoline. Lead exposure substantially impairs your capacity to concentrate and pay attention, according to research. You are 2.5 times more likely to have ADHD if you were exposed to lead in the air as a youngster.

The rise of ADHD is actually the eleventh factor. ADHD diagnoses in the United States increased by 43 percent between 2003 and 2011. Currently, 13 percent of teenagers in the United States have been diagnosed with ADHD. The problem will keep getting worse, because it amplifies itself. Small children need an adult to comfort them and help them relax when they become upset or angry. When children are well cared for, they eventually develop the ability to calm themselves. Stressed parents, however, find it difficult to calm their children since they can't calm themselves down. Their children do not develop the skills for calming and centering themselves. Consequently, when faced with adversity, their children are more prone to get angry or upset, which may have a negative impact on their ability to concentrate.

Kids Who Don’t Play

The twelfth and final factor is the decline of free play in childhood. Free play teaches youngsters how to engage with others, socialize, and feel joy and pleasure. They also learn how to deal with exclusion and create new games. However, there have been significant changes in childhood during the last thirty years. By 2003, barely 10 percent of youngsters in the United States spent time playing freely outside on a regular basis.

Childhood is now mostly spent behind closed doors, and when kids do get to play, it is either monitored by adults or takes place via screens. Unbridled experimentation and play have all but disappeared. How can your attention improve if it is continually regulated by others? How do you learn what piques your interest? How can you discover your inner motivations, which are so vital in honing your attention?

Reclaiming Our Attention

We will continue to be a society plagued by attention deficit if we are chronically sleep deprived and overworked, switch tasks every few minutes, are monitored and surveilled on social media, and have diets that cause our energy levels to spike and crash. However, there is another option. We must unite and fight back against the powers that are setting fire to our attention.

Taking back our attention may look something like this. The first step is to outlaw surveillance capitalism. Second, add a third day of rest to the work week so that no one is too tired to pay attention. Third, we must reimagine childhood as a place where kids are free to play, both at home and at school. The capacity of individuals to pay attention will drastically increase if we attain these aims. Then we'll have a firm core of concentration that we can utilize to drive the battle farther and deeper.

Author’s Style

Johann Hari’s writing is engaging, though a little all over the place. He tends to switch between topics and ideas often, which is ironic considering the very first factor of attention loss he discusses is constant switching. The chapters lack a defined structure like other books in the genre. Hari noticeably overuses the em dash — with more than 1,200 instances in the book.

Author’s Perspective

Johann Hari is a British-Swiss journalist and author. He is a social and political sciences graduate from King’s College, Cambridge. He has written for the Huffington Post and for the Independent , which suspended him after he admitted to instances of plagiarism and fabrication.

Stolen Focus isn’t meant as a self-help book that promises better focus by following some simple steps, and Hari admits that he himself still struggles with maintaining focus. He rather aims to create awareness of the main factors that decrease focus and highlight the need for taking action against surveillance capitalism.