Why we can’t pay attention

Published on Psychology Today

I’m a full professor and the chair of the psychology department at my university, which means I frequently give hour-and-a-half long lectures for classes and conferences, and even more frequently sit through such lectures. But even though I’ve been at this for years, I can’t for the life of me pay attention through an entire session. My mind wanders to other things I have to do that day, or what I’m making for dinner that night, or how many emails I’m going to inevitably have to deal with when I get back to my office. I’ve tried practicing mindfulness to be more present and live in the moment, but it’s not easy to sit and concentrate on my breathing for several minutes without my mind wandering off. I can’t even concentrate on a task at work for long enough that I’m not glancing at my phone every few minutes. Why can’t I just pay attention?

If this sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. A group of researchers followed adults in their jobs for an extended period of time and simply monitored what they were doing on their devices and how long they stayed on one task at a time. The researchers found that adults averaged about three minutes on a single task without getting distracted by something else, and they barely spent more than two minutes using any software or paper document before switching (Gonzalez & Mark, 2004).

The data look even worse for college students. In another study, researchers looked at college students’ computer behavior over a 10-hour period and found that the average length of time college students spent on a single task without switching was 19 seconds. In fact, 20% of all content students interacted with was only viewed for 5 seconds or less, and 75%—that’s almost all of the content they engaged with for a 10-hour period—was viewed for less than a minute (Yeykelis, 2014).

Maybe you’re thinking, this isn’t a big deal, I’m an excellent multi-tasker. That might be true, but in general multi-tasking comes at a cost (for everyone). Research has shown that when you’re engaged in a task and you switch to something else, even just briefly—maybe you’re working on writing something for your job and quickly look at your phone to answer a text—you’re going to be slower and less accurate at the original task because of that momentary task switch. This has been dubbed the “switch cost effect” in the psychology literature (Hari, 2022). It suggests that there is always a cost to switching tasks, even if you only get distracted for a second. Indeed, there is a good reason why 20% of all car accidents are due to a distracted driver.

What is most shocking about these studies is that they were done 10-20 years ago. Can you imagine how things have progressed now that there are so many devices at our fingertips? Fully equipped with an endless amount of information and choices?

It turns out that too many choices can be costly for attention as well. In a series of studies researchers presented adults with consumer goods or college course options and afterwards had them complete an unrelated task. They found that having lots of options led to people having less self-control, less persistence, less accuracy, and more procrastination on subsequent tasks. In other words, having too many choices causes fatigue—it strains your brain’s ability to function or complete other tasks (Vohs et al., 2018).

And with an abundance of choices at our fingertips, information now comes at us faster than ever before, which is also bad for our attention. For example, when simply looking at the pace of popular media over the last several decades, researchers have reported much faster news cycle turnover rates, and networks attempting to squeeze more and more information into the same amount of time. This inevitably leads to us spending less time on any single topic (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2019).

Another thing that hurts our ability to pay attention is stress, and unfortunately stress is also on the rise. Approximately 37 to 49 percent of adults report feeling stressed daily, which is a large increase over the past 20 years. Rates of anxiety are also rising, with a 52% increase in new cases of anxiety in young adults since 1990 (Chajut  & Algom, 2003). Even mild stress can reduce one’s ability to pay attention (Skosnik et al., 2000), and intense stress or trauma is even associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Brown et al., 2017). Indeed, over 7 million US children (a whopping 11 percent) are diagnosed with ADHD every year, which is a giant increase over the past decade.

So what do we do? How do we revive our dying attention spans? The first is obvious—try to reduce stress. Research has shown that attentional capacities (and even ADHD diagnoses) can be remedied by reducing stress (Liston et al., 2009). Another is to put your phone away when you need to concentrate, as every little sound, text, and notification can mean you will be less efficient at a task and may even make more mistakes.

The last thing is to do your best to choose tasks that have a clearly defined goal, and that you have some internal motivation to complete—something that’s meaningful, and right at the edge of your ability. Research suggests that tasks like these help you get “in the zone”, or what scientists call a “flow state”. This is where you can concentrate for long periods of time. The only way I can get into a flow state is to clear my schedule so I can’t be interrupted. And instead of taking breaks randomly when you happen to get a text, schedule time for breaks that occur at natural stopping points, making it easier to pick the task back up again later.

All and all, with the speed and abundance of information, decision fatigue, and a more stressful environment than ever, it’s not surprising that our attention spans have suffered. This week, try to do something for yourself to reduce stress, eliminate distractions, and stay in the moment—it might be just what you need to enhance your ability to concentrate, and get things done more quickly and efficiently.

Photo by flickr/amenclinicsphotos

References

Brown, N. M., Brown, S. N., Briggs, R. D., Germán, M., Belamarich, P. F., & Oyeku, S. O. (2017). Associations between adverse childhood experiences and ADHD diagnosis and severity. Academic pediatrics, 17(4), 349-355.

Chajut, E., & Algom, D. (2003). Selective attention improves under stress: implications for theories of social cognition. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85(2), 231.

Gonzalez, V., & Mark, G. (2004). Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness”: Managing Multiple Working Spheres. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004).

Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can't pay attention--and how to think deeply again. Crown.

Liston, C., McEwen, B. S., & Casey, B. (2009). Psychosocial stress reversibly disrupts prefrontal processing and attentional control. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 106(3), 912-917.

Lorenz-Spreen, P., Mønsted, B. M., Hövel, P., & Lehmann, S. (2019). Accelerating dynamics of collective attention. Nature communications, 10(1), 1759.

Skosnik, P. D., Chatterton Jr, R. T., Swisher, T., & Park, S. (2000). Modulation of attentional inhibition by norepinephrine and cortisol after psychological stress. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 36(1), 59-68.

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2018). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. In Self-regulation and self-control (pp. 45-77). Routledge.

Yeykelis, L., Cummings, J. J., & Reeves, B. (2014). Multitasking on a single device: Arousal and the frequency, anticipation, and prediction of switching between media content on a computer. Journal of Communication, 64(1), 167-192.