Don’t you find it strange that, despite your brain’s ability to produce amazing work and be creative, you can’t seem to focus for longer than 15 minutes? Do you feel like your attention span is decreasing over time? More importantly, are you wondering how to increase your attention span?
The answer to increasing your attention span lies in learning how to ignore distractions and focus on a single activity rather than multitasking.
But this isn’t easy. Only five years ago, people didn’t expect to receive instant responses to emails and phone calls. Technology didn’t make us as widely available as it does today.
If you’re finding yourself unable to go about your day without checking social media, you’re not alone. As it turns out, human minds are becoming increasingly (and alarmingly) easy to distract across generations and ages.
How to Build Your Attention Span With Willpower
Remember the time when you’d send an email without expecting a response within hours? Or when a person you called didn’t respond, and you simply assumed that they were busy and patiently waited until they called back?
Those days seem to be long gone. Due to the influence of technology, we are all made a lot more available than we arguably should be, and instant responses are expected.
Chances are that, if you went on a getaway trip and turned off your phone for longer than 24 hours, someone would report that you’re missing. You could easily come home from your vacation to discover your entire family fearing the worst!
While the modern lifestyle does promise a swift response to any safety threats or concerns, we are simply left without a possibility to disconnect and spend a day or two without devices. As it turns out, this has more severe repercussions than anyone could imagine.
While some studies show that college students aren’t able to spend longer than five minutes without checking their phones, people of all ages, including children, suffer from the inability to do uninterrupted work for longer than 10-15 minutes.
Some of the interruptions are self-made, like checking your phone or email, while others are imposed, like receiving phone calls and notifications that pop up on your screen.
As a result, your brain begins to anticipate these interruptions, keeping you on edge and unable to focus on a single thing.
Some of the signs that you might have a decreased attention span include:
- Getting tired quickly after doing a short amount of work
- Being unable to do a single task for longer than 15 minutes
- Feeling fatigued to the point where you can’t follow a conversation
- Frequent and unintentional mind wandering
- The inability to control and stop mind wandering
- Feeling anxious if you don’t check devices every once in a while
- Having poor memory and having to read or listen to information a couple of times before understanding it
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwyHk8OkGng
Studies show that the average person’s attention span is steadily decreasing and that our minds are becoming increasingly distracted to the point of compromising our own safety, health, and productivity.
As it turns out, the number of people who were injured due to a lack of focus in 2010 was triple the number in 2004 and had doubled by 2015! To compare the numbers, around 600 people across the US got hurt due to a lack of attention in 2004, while this number exceeded 3,000 in 2015.
What Is Attention Span and Why Is It Important?
Your attention span is the ability to remain focused and resist distractions. When you have an optimal attention span, you are able to follow long lectures, listen to an audio recording, and participate in group activities without your mind wandering.
A healthy attention span is necessary for daily functioning, academic achievement, learning, optimal performance at work, and maintenance of healthy friendships and all other relationships.
But it’s often difficult to stay focused. When there’s a real, justified reason for it, like being ill, in pain, upset, or tired, a depleted attention span is understandable.
But if the inability to focus becomes chronic, it could mean that you’ve developed distractibility. Distractibility happens when you’re unable to control how you’ll respond to spontaneous distractions.
Being easily distracted isn’t good because it suggests that you can’t keep your focus on relevant activities and instead give your attention to low-priority occurrences and information.
It’s easy to understand why being easily distracted is not good. It means that you’re sacrificing beneficial activities for those of low value and significance; hence, doing whatever you can to recover the power to focus should be one of your priorities.
What Hurts Your Attention Span?
If you can’t find a clear reason for having trouble staying focused, like a distressing event or an illness, then perhaps the reasons lie in some of your habits. There are numerous things that you might be doing to make yourself more productive that could have an adverse effect on your attention span like:
Attention “Spam”
Choosing not to give attention to noises, pings, or text messages is difficult despite knowing that doing so will help reclaim mental sharpness and focus.
The fear of missing out is frequent in people who are attached to their electronics, and resisting it is made more difficult if you’re unable to unplug due to work.
Multitasking
Juggling multiple things at once can be useful from time to time, but it’s not good for your attention span or mental health. Doing multiple things at once causes more errors, and it takes a longer time to finish all of the tasks successfully.
Despite feeling like you’re achieving more, multitasking actually allows you to dedicate only portions of your attention to each task. This not only decreases the quality of your performance but also trains your brain to anticipate doing multiple tasks at once, even when it’s necessary to focus.
You see, your cognitive resources are limited. When your cognitive network is stretched between different activities, it frequently switches focus. Technically, you can pay equal attention to multiple tasks at the same time, so your focus simply jumps from one task to another.
When this is happening, the time needed to perform each of the tasks is prolonged, and the activities are done with less accuracy, precision, and quality. Multitasking is likely to feel good because you get a sense that you’re achieving more with less time. But it is the opposite.
Studies showed that multitaskers achieve less than people who focus on a single task. Errors, mental fog, tiredness doing superficial work, and all other hurdles that arise from doing too much at once leave you with too many negative outcomes to fix later on.
For example, if you try to clean your home while listening to an e-book, you may find that you missed out on large portions of the audio recording, while superficial cleaning might leave you with additional chores the next day.
Or if you’re typing on your laptop while on the phone, you might miss out on important information from the call and then have to call again to double-check.
If you look at your work, you might realize that you made quite a few errors while you were talking on the phone, and now you have to spend extra time correcting your work.
These examples are backed up with studies that show that people aren’t nearly as good at multitasking as they think they are. Indeed, multitasking can be useful from time to time, but if it becomes a pattern, or worse, a lifestyle, rest assured that your speed, sharpness, and performance will only decline over time.
Overall, multitasking slows down your thinking and increases errors. But it leaves you feeling happy with yourself and can be exciting if you get to distract yourself from an unpleasant activity (cleaning or writing a report) with a more fun activity (listening to e-books or watching TV).
Stress and Sleep Deprivation
Often related to overworking and stress, problems with sleep deplete your mental capacities and make it difficult to focus. But how do you regain healthy sleep when you can’t seem to catch a break? Balance is key.
One of the first things to do if you want to sleep healthily is go to bed at the same hour each night and get up around the same time in the morning. This is easier said than done for a lot of people who just find it impossible to go to bed before midnight.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_tiLg4BuOU
How to Enforce Cognitive Control and Build Your Attention Span
A compromised attention span is the main contributor to all things keeping you from feeling awake, alert, and productive, but it’s not the only one. In fact, it is the result of several other factors.
After learning about what attention span is, you need to understand that your brain activity is wired to look for new information and stimuli. It has a natural need to shift focus to new, unfamiliar things.
But there are circumstances in which this natural curiosity can become harmful, and that is when you can’t stop yourself from paying attention to every little distraction.
The battle between your instinctive, or primal brain, which aims to pick up as many possible threats, and those parts of your brain that enable “cognitive control,” or conscious choice of what to think about and what to focus on, is as old as the human species.
Now that we live in a world in which lions, snakes, or mammoths can’t attack us from behind, the rational parts of the brain should prevail. And they have for centuries before the internet and electronics.
Simply put, cognitive control includes a range of abilities that all boil down to being able to intentionally choose where to place your focus and thoughts despite inner and outer stimuli and distractions.
A person who can perform a task despite having a headache has greater cognitive control than a person who feels unable to focus due to it.
| Cognitive Control | |
| Do: | Don’t: |
| Note a distractionShift your attention to important activitiesBe mindfulBe balancedUnplug while working (1-3 hours/day)Sleep and eat well | Try to remove all distractions from your lifeMultitaskNeglect emotional needsOverscheduleAvoid tasks that are important and beneficial but unpleasantDistract yourself from unpleasantness by multitasking |
To gain cognitive control, you need to learn how to ignore non-essential distractions, which often isn’t easy.
It is a process in which you practice staying on top of the important work you’re doing, whether it’s craftwork or computer/office work, and purposefully choose to ignore your phone, coworkers chatting, traffic noises coming from the outside, or notifications popping up on your screen.
There’s a little bit more to this process, which is why reclaiming the power over your brain requires following these recommendations:
Abandon Multitasking
To stop multitasking, it is necessary to stop indulging in the need to avoid the unpleasantness of seemingly tedious tasks.
In a way, finding an escape in taking short breaks to check social media fills a void that occurs if you’re spending too little quality time with friends and family, so your need for connection and intimacy isn’t met.
But the solution to this is to pay better attention to your work-life balance instead of having your work life intertwine with socializing. Doing this might be difficult at first, but it will help you train your brain in distinguishing when it’s time to work and when it’s time to play.
Meet Your Need for Movement
A human body is made to be active. Interestingly, people who live sedentary lifestyles tend to struggle with anxiousness and mental tiredness more than those who work physically demanding jobs. One of the reasons for this is the great overload of the mind combined with a neglected need to move.
Exercising is a must for a healthy body and a healthy mind, and studies showed that people who exercised regularly had better cognitive control and, consequently, better focus and attention span. But how does physical activity affect cognitive control?
You see, when you exercise, your cognitive abilities are as equally engaged as when you read, work, or study. There’s no less mental activity when you’re working out, but you feel like you’ve switched off your mind. Why is it so?
The reason for this is simple. Physical activity requires focus, and its pleasant, relaxing nature doesn’t make you want to distract yourself from it.
Instead, even those who didn’t use to like working out find that it becomes more and more fulfilling over time. People even get addicted to exercise!
Exercising is a great way to learn how to focus because you train your brain to be present and fully engaged in a single activity you’re doing and to find satisfaction in it. Exercise also counts as playtime, at least when you get used to it.
Physical activity fulfills your need for movement and play. Despite being adults, we all have natural needs to indulge in play, but these needs are largely neglected at the expense of performing chores and duties.
Enjoying movement bridges your gap between focus and satisfaction, provides relief from stress, and leaves you fulfilled enough to not view daily tasks as tedious and boring.
Get Regular Sleep
If your entire day is jam-packed with activities and routines on the one side or filled with mundane activities that don’t fulfill your need for physical and individual activities on the other, your physical and mental balance becomes disrupted.
You will find sleep difficult if you don’t expend your energy during the day but also if you don’t take sufficient breaks and structure your time well between work and your personal life.
Aside from improving your diet, having a better thought-out daily schedule, and spending enough quality time with friends and family, you also need enough time to unwind.
Most doctors, life coaches, and success manuals will tell you to block your daily hours, and plan within your ability to perform. But very few will remember to tell you to transition carefully between daily activities.
For example, if you spend eight hours at work, and then set aside an hour for chores and an extra two for friends, you should leave at least 30 minutes between your activities for some peace and quiet.
Cramming too many chores into your daily schedule won’t leave you with enough time to replenish physical and mental energy, so this need to just spend time doing nothing will emerge right before you’re supposed to go to bed.
This is why, despite feeling dreadfully tired, you may find yourself wanting to spend extra time just sitting in your chair and looking out the window or doing something mundane like looking at yourself in a mirror.
Accept the fact that your mental battery needs recharging, and don’t expect yourself to be at full capacity during the day.
As you can see, healthy sleep results from a well-balanced lifestyle and a careful measure of your needs versus goals with great consideration for capacities. Knowing this, you might realize that you just can’t squeeze all of your wants and needs into a single day.
In this case, time-blocking shouldn’t be done by hours but perhaps by days. That’s right! You’ll feel more satisfied if you dedicate two afternoons, or even a single one, to socializing than if you have a quick Starbucks meet-up with your friends.
Here, quality becomes more important than quantity, and the same goes for exercise and hobbies.
All combined, fine tweaks in your daily schedule that introduce more meaning into pleasurable activities over less time could easily result in less pressure and eventually better life balance and more quality sleep.
Give Your Activities Mindful Meaning
Mindfulness, whether in the form of meditation, reading, journaling, or practicing art, is proven to improve well-being and help you regain focus, clarity, and increase your attention span. But mindful activities on their own aren’t what alter your mindset, quiet rushing thoughts, and soothe fears.
It is a meaningful lifestyle that improves well-being. Mindfulness, as a concept and a process, is all about being in touch with your true self. But your true self isn’t an abstract concept or another secret person living inside you.
Mindful activities, in their truest form, are those that are meaningful to you. Reading poetry because it’s said that it’s healthy won’t help if you don’t enjoy it. Painting when you don’t feel like it isn’t mindfulness, and neither is meditating if you practice it like a chore.
Mindful activities become such if they evoke a sense of intimacy and comfort. Mindful activities help you be honest about your thoughts and overcome fears by becoming aware of your strengths. In this sense, your choice of daily mindfulness activities should be those that are natural to you and soothe your personality.
Even a plain walk can be a mindful activity if you visit a place of intimate, personal significance. Instead of writing when you don’t feel like it, you can take a look at old photo albums and bring back some of the happy memories from childhood.
Similar to exercise, these meaningful activities also engage your mind, quite like work or studying, but in a purposeful, pleasant way.
The more you spend time doing meaningful activities, the better you’ll be able to see meaning in the activities you otherwise don’t like. You won’t feel the need to avoid them, and it will be easier to resist distractions.
Enjoy Nature
Spending time in nature, and even just looking at nature pictures, has been found to help people with depression and ADHD improve their attention span.
The exact reasons are still being determined, but time in nature has been found to improve memory performance across different groups of people.
Whether it’s fresh air, free of pollution and rich in oxygen, or pleasant forest scenery, nature has the power to help people heal and replenish.
Learn How to Ignore Distractions to Build Your Attention Span
At the very least, you should train yourself to not respond to any interference for at least an hour a day. You can’t directly change how your brain reacts to calls and notifications, but you can control your actions.
In the beginning, your goal shouldn’t be to stop paying attention to distractions. Instead, you should focus on stopping yourself from addressing them.
Don’t read a text or an email as soon as they arrive. Leave your phone in your bedroom when you’re taking a shower. Small actions like these will help you stop fearing something dreadful will happen if you unplug. Gradually, you’ll become able to forget about gadgets for hours at a time.
This will help you focus better on your work and stay fully focused on what you do. Remember ignoring distractions isn’t about eliminating all technology from your life. It is about developing your ability to control whether, when, and how you respond.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4Yvq-g7_Y
Short Attention Span FAQ
Why Do I Feel Nervous When I’m About to Do Important Work?
A reduced attention span often pairs with anxiety and depression, which root in insecurity and fear.
You could be looking for ways to calm down when you’re insecure about your capabilities, which is why you might resort to multitasking or procrastinate by checking your phone every couple of minutes.
If you recognize that fear and nervousness are behind your attention problems, then you should try to calm and encourage yourself instead of distracting.
Do I Have ADHD or Depression?
A short attention span is one of but not the main symptom of ADHD, depression, and anxiety. Alone, it doesn’t mean that you have either of the conditions. Your first guess, when looking for a cause, should be lifestyle.
But if you’re worried about your health, you should first talk to your physician. They will run extra checks and let you know if your short attention span requires further investigation.
Conclusion
Being unable to focus on important tasks is not only difficult, but it could also keep you from reaching your full potential at school, work, and in your personal life.
A short attention span is one of the common symptoms of several illnesses, but being easily distracted doesn’t necessarily mean that you have anxiety, depression, or ADHD.
As you learned, lifestyle, habits, and addiction to electronics can rapidly harm your ability to discern what’s relevant. A lack of balance can make it difficult to focus, and the best way to regain that ability is to practice control.
Cognitive control is a mastery of purposefully choosing to place your focus on what you find important. Your distractibility might be due to tiredness, anxiousness, or emotional unfulfillment, but it is also a learned pattern.
To build up your attention span, it won’t be enough to simply work on its causes. You will have to practice cognitive control, which is done by choosing to ignore distractions despite the unpleasantness this will cause. Control of your mind, actions, and life is imperative to find mental clarity and, with it, build up your attention span.