Blinking Lights and TikTok Dances are Destroying Your Attention Span
Three strategies for repairing your attention span
Wake up, scroll. Sit on the toilet, scroll. Drive to work, scroll. Scroll scroll scroll like there’s no tomorrow. For hours each day, you are exposed to increasingly fine-tuned brain rot designed to capture your attention.
The result: mind fog, eye strain, and a deep-fried attention span.
One day, I will be telling my kids how I used to be able to scroll to the bottom of my timeline. They will probably feel how I did when my dad told me his family TV was black and white and only had four channels. Yet, there is a stark difference between the development of new TV channels and the proliferation of half subway surfer, half movie clip content that clogs our phone screens today.
Television has been around for quite some time now, yet only in the last 10 years, can we carry a handheld, battery-powered TV in our pockets (among other uses). The popularity of the smartphone is undeniable:
Tangentially, the popularity of social media, particularly video-oriented content, has risen rapidly following advances in mobile processing power, display resolution, and the development of social networks. Today, short and long-form videos comprise almost half of marketer’s social media content strategy:
The takeaway: more smartphones + more videos = more people watching videos on smartphones, but why is this bad? This is bad because social media companies are competing for, and therefore optimizing their content algorithms on, your attention. The longer they can retain your gaze, the more ads they can serve you, and the more money they can rake in to buy property in Hawaii (looking at you Zuck). Now, supporting a social media or internet-based company is not inherently bad, but when they are optimizing for your attention and their optimizations are working, then some not-so-desirable negative externalities can arise.
While I could research and write ad nauseam about the societal changes that have arisen from social media, I will focus this piece on the damage this is doing to your attention. The optimization on attention has incentivized content to be shorter, more dynamic, and more captivating. This has resulted in some truly odd trends, such as the video collage trend, where a user mashes together multiple videos on the screen to retain a user’s attention when one bores them. For example.
The human brain is designed to intake information. The more information we intake, the better decisions we can make about our world, and the better we can thrive as an individual and as a collective. Social media companies are abusing this aspect of humanity, and in turn, damaging our attention. These video collages, bombardments of images, and never-ending feeds of brain rot collectively work to deep fry your dopamine receptors and render you unable to pay attention to low visual stimulus activities. No longer can your brain be captivated by an unmoving, yet magnificent piece of art, or focus long enough to read a page of a book without checking your Instagram notifications.
So what can we do? How do we fight back and regain our attention spans? This question has been pervading my mind for the last several months. The challenge is not only identifying strategies but also being able to stick to these strategies long-term. Repairing your attention is no simple task; you must first realize that you have become addicted to scrolling. You are addicted and you need to fight this addiction and enjoy simply being; without the need for mental stimulation.
For me, I have developed three main strategies to work on restoring my attention span:
- Do boring things without additional stimulus
- Read a damn book
- Put. it. down.
The first strategy was developed out of a somewhat embarrassing realization about myself, I could not do anything without a podcast or YouTube video playing in the background. Whether it was cooking, cleaning, or even showering… To my defense, this was only a desire for auditory stimulation but an unnecessary one nonetheless. This strategy is an excellent exercise in mindfulness and I relearned how enjoyable it can be to let your mind wander, allowing information to flow out from it instead of clogging it with new stimuli.
Reading a book accomplishes three things at once and is probably the most effective strategy. First, it forces you to maintain focus for an extended period of time on something visually static. Second, it satisfies your desire for entertainment (if you don’t like reading then you aren’t reading the right book for you). Lastly, and most importantly, it forces you to visualize the story. I recently read Dune, yet given how long it has been since I had read fictional literature, I often found it difficult to truly visualize the author’s detailed descriptions of the landscape of Arrakis or complicated gadgets. However, when I encountered this issue, I would slow down and force my mind to piece together the image in my brain with each word. This exercise forced me to focus deeply on a single idea by transposing words to images. This cognitive work is meditative, helps augment your vocabulary, and enhances your ability to visualize language and therefore communicate better with others.
Lastly, have some self-discipline and take ownership of your path towards repairing your attention and put. it. down. The best way to eliminate yourself from your social media addiction is to ween yourself off content and focus on something else. There was plenty to do before social media and there is even more to do now. I am sure you can find something else to do, like that pile of laundry in your closet or stack of dishes in your sink.
Or take a look outside; be careful though — other humans are out there.
