It’s not very often we get the chance to take things slow or move at a leisurely pace through life. In fact, I feel as if I have grown up quite the opposite, living in a world where the faster something can get done the better and how well you multi-task is something to brag about. I have always seen people around me rushing and trying to complete a variety of tasks in a small amount of time, leading to exhaustion and burn out. But reading more about our fast-paced world, I now know how detrimental it is to our personal health and our society. A lot of what we call great work ethic or being extremely productive usually also fits into the myth category. What we have been told by society of how to work is the opposite of what we should be doing. Let me explain…

This week I started reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. It has been a great read so far and has been very eye opening. Hari covers the topic of why we are all struggling as a society to focus and why it is so hard for us to concentrate and pay attention. In his first chapter, he interviews Professor Lehmann from Denmark, where they talk about the “deterioration of focus” a lot of us are experiencing. While we may all first blame our faster internet or the invention of the smart phone, these aren’t the only culprits. In Lehmann’s research, he found that one reason is the acceleration of information. We currently live in a time where information travels fast and where we can educate ourselves on just about any topic, any day or time. But years ago, this wasn’t the case, it would take people days or weeks to hear news or information, if something was happening across the globe it would sometimes take even longer for people to hear about it. What Lehmann found was that the flood of more information is keeping us jumping from topic to topic, where we can’t focus on one story for very long. As information gets relayed faster, there is more information for us to take in, so naturally we are trying to read, analyzing and comprehend as much as we can, at a pace we can’t keep up with. I encourage you all to listen to the (fifth listed) interview recording with Professor Lehmann from chapter 1 on the Stolen Focus website, where Lehmann explains this speed up of information. Hearing him talk about how our attention span is struggling to stay on one topic was very grounding for me. I now know that this shift isn’t just in my head but that there is actual data behind our faster lifestyles.

As I continued reading, Lehmann expanded and mentioned that one of the downsides of this speedy lifestyle is that we are comprehending and remembering less. Because most of us are moving at a pace that is unmanageable, it makes sense that our brains are absorbing less of what we are doing. If we want to really remember something specific, we need to slow down. If we could just practice moving slower more often, we could then begin to train our attention and focus. One exercise that would help is the New York Times Attention Experiment. If you scroll down and decide to start the experiment, you will be greeted with the painting Nocturne in Blue and Silver by James McNeil Whistler. The site shows you this painting for a full ten minutes, your job is only to stare and take in this piece of art. While this may seem like a simple task, you will soon realize that it is hard to slow down like this and a wave of anxiousness may hit you. I personally had a difficult time making it through the ten minutes. I consistently had the thought of “what else can I be doing while doing this” and was very fidgety. But there is some hope as Lehmann said, we just need to be aware when we are moving too fast and simply just slow down.

Slowing down our lifestyles is of course easier said than done. Most of us have our emails, text messages and social media apps open all the time, in our pockets or glued to our hands. As someone who has experienced this “never being offline” era, it’s hard to imagine slowing down like I did for the New York Times experiment, multiple times a day. There are just too many notifications telling me to read this or check that. One artist – Ben Grosser, has also seemed to experience this hectic lifestyle, created the website Stuck in the Scroll as a public confessional about how often he scrolls on the app Tik Tok. We all know these social media apps are designed to keep us stuck in a mindless scroll and literally steal time from us. But Ben is trying to take his power back from these big corporations by changing his habits and limiting his app usage. I believe we could benefit from what Grosser is doing here, a great first step being to limit our own app usage (which you can find out on most smart phones) and then try to cut down your time each month. While it may take some time to get use to not picking up your phone the instant you feel bored, it would help our attention span in the long run, as we age.

In just the first couple of days of reading Stolen Focus I have felt a shift within myself when I want to try and focus on something. I now do work in a different room from my phone, or purposely go to a quiet location where I know there won’t be background noise. These small changes have helped and I’m excited to continue learning more about our attention and how it is struggling in this day and age. This was a book I wouldn’t have picked up normally to read, but each page has me more engaged with each turn. In the coming weeks I plan to keep blogging and informing my audience on Stolen Focus, so stay tuned!