- I kind of feel like my attention span is dying. It's just like whenever I try and do anything, I start craving some sort of distraction. I can't just focus on one thing at a time, even if that thing is sleeping.
But I have things I wanna do, things I wanna focus on. I just don't, because refreshing Instagram is always gonna be easier. And it's a problem!
And I'm tired of it. I am tired of feeling like my life is so far out of my own control. So today we are figuring out how to stop scrolling and how to start paying attention.
Thank you to our patrons for supporting the channel, and Headspace for sponsoring a portion of this video. With focus music, motivational exercises, guided meditations, and more, Headspace has over a thousand pieces of content to help you be kind to your mind. If you wanna see how Headspace might be helpful to you, you can try it out completely for free for 60 days.
All you have to do is sign up with our link in the description, or scan the QR code on screen. So what's in the box? This is an electroencephalogram, or an EEG.
It measures electrical activity in the brain, which are associated with certain performance metrics, like attention, excitement, and stress. Does that look good, how do I look? Now, these things usually look a little bit more threatening and wiry.
However, I reached out to this brand called EMOTIV that creates more simplified consumer options. They gave me a little discount so I could actually afford this for the video. And I look like a cyborg.
I think it looks cute! Okay, so these are my brainwaves, and if I focus on it really hard, it should be able to translate these into more understandable metrics, like attention. Look at that, you see the building attention and spike in excitement, that's my brain!
I kind of feel like a video game character and these are my stats, this is cool. Now, you should note that EEG data can be pretty noisy and things like movement can really impact the results. However, I think that having any level of recording is an improvement because I basically never pay attention to my attention.
It only ever really comes up when I'm feeling guilty about my screen time, or I realize that I've done nothing all day. And only having these really infrequent and negative interactions with my problem makes it really hard to be objective about the whole thing, to understand how bad it actually is, and see if it's getting better or worse. But now, with the help of this brain scanner, I finally got to measure a baseline for my attention span without getting bogged down by guilt or forgetting to focus on my focus.
I wore the EEG while I worked, ate, exercised, and relaxed. I did take it off a few times because it could get pretty uncomfortable after really long stretches. But overall, it was pretty easy to ignore while I just lived my life for the rest of the week.
Alongside the EEG, I installed a program to automatically track how often I switch tasks on my computer, and I recorded how many times I picked up my phone. Did you know that you can't actually export your screen time data? Then I wrote a quick script to compile all this data and visualize it.
Here is my life for the past three days. Ooh, the x-axis is the number of hours in a day. These blue bars represent the number of times I picked up my phone.
This gray line tracks how productive I was at my computer. And these colored lines are the median performance metrics from my EEG. Now, some highlights include this moment where I picked up my phone to start debugging the app that I was using to scan my brain, and then I ended up opening Instagram and spending the next two hours on it.
However, during my meetings the next day, I was like super interested and attentive, right, great? No, it's because I kept picking up my phone. I was supposed to be on a call!
I kept opening up Instagram! But it's not all bad news. There are these instances where I put down my phone, I get into the zone and my brain just lights up.
The only issue is that in my eight-hour workday, it only happens for like an hour. It's over here at like two o'clock, or five o'clock, or ten o'clock. Now, something similar does happen to my brain when I am working out, but how often am I doing that?
All this is to say is that for these 16-ish hours that I am awake, I'm only engaged and focused for like 12% of it. The rest of the time, the 88% of the time, I'm all over the place. I'm checked out or I'm distracted.
This could be most of the rest of my life unless we do something about it. So let's do that. So I started looking for any books about attention, focus, and distractions, and I found a lot of them.
There was just one problem: They're all identical. They invent different buzzwords, and they switch up the personal anecdotes that they blur with legitimate science. But fundamentally, if you've read one, you've read them all.
Fortunately, you don't need to read any of them because here are the three things that you actually need to know if you want to fix your focus. One, attention and focus are different things. Attention is a broad concept that boils down to our general awareness.
While focus is one process that controls that awareness, concentrating it on something specific. Two, focus is a limited and exhaustible resource. So you can only really focus on one thing at a time, and your ability to do that will tire out the further you get from rest.
Three, focus also filters out distractions. The more there are, the more of your focus is being wasted. Now, some research exists suggesting that certain forms of cognitive training can increase your capacity and ability to focus, but the type of training and the effectiveness has varying results.
The brain is complicated and there's a lot of nuance in the details, especially when you're trying to find things that work for you in your specific circumstances. So to fix my focus, I'm actually only going to do a handful of very simple things that support what we know about focus. Here's the plan.
First, I need to manage my distractions, starting with the obvious: my phone. I deleted the apps that I never use, set up time limits for the apps I use way too much. Everything except for my wallets.
And muted basically all of my notifications. I also installed this app that replaces icons with text. So now I need to put in a little more effort before I open anything.
I also changed my display to gray scale. I have never wanted to use my phone less. Oh, this sucks.
I wasn't kidding. Almost immediately, my phone pickups and screen time dropped dramatically. However, the silence made me notice the sheer number of internal distractions I have too.
These passing thoughts that just take me off task, like wondering if I need to buy more toilet paper, wishing I learned a musical instrument as a kid, or thinking about what I'm gonna have for dinner. They were rarely urgent, but often important enough that I didn't want to ignore or forget them. So I dedicated a page in my notebook to quickly write them down for later.
When later came, I sorted through those thoughts based on action, importance, and time sensitivity. And kept it in mind when I was building my schedule, which got way more specific. Now, I'm usually the type of person who only puts like events in my calendar, a normal person.
However, a lot of the books that I've been reading have recommended time blocking or timeboxing. I don't know, it's just setting aside time to do individual tasks. Apparently it helps you avoid the temptation to multitask.
So every morning I took all of my work, chores, exercises, and hobbies, and plugged them into my calendar. Now, I found that the secret is that it's not as simple as just putting an hour aside for each thing. Since focus is an exhaustible resource, I need to take into account my energy levels throughout the day and how much effort each task is gonna take.
Like reading research papers and writing takes a lot of focus for me. It's just really boring. But listening to audio books, or animating, I'm locked in.
I actually find it really hard to disengage from the tasks that I really enjoy. So I find myself thinking about them, or even continuing to do them past their allotted time, which means that I should probably think about those switching costs when I'm building my schedule out for the day. Eventually I realized this process could be a little more automated, so I got Taha to put the process together in a Notion template.
Now I can input tasks, tag them, and it'll show me an order that I can drag into my calendar. I found it useful, and if you wanna give it a try, I'll include it in our next newsletter. But once I controlled my external and internal distractions and built out a schedule that minimized multitasking optimized for my energy levels, all that was left was actually focusing.
It was amazing. I was using my phone less and getting more done. My brain was lighting up.
I was way more engaged in everything I did. I found different soundtracks to make it easier to get in the zone, and life was great, until it wasn't. It is 12.
I haven't left bed yet. I've just been using my phone, full color. Every 15 minutes, I hit "Remind me in 15 minutes.
" And then 15 minutes later I do it again. Just feels like we're back where we started. I ended up using my phone for seven hours that day, more than I had all week prior.
I had things I could do, things I should do, but I just couldn't bring myself to get up. I am kind of proud that I managed to pull up my code on my phone and see if there were any clues in my data that could explain what went wrong. I know, it's pathetic, but it was a small victory that led to an interesting discovery.
The nights that I used my phone past midnight led to days where I felt more distracted and picked up my phone more often. I learned in an old video how important sleep could really be. So I decided to just give up on the day, get some sleep, and try again tomorrow.
Aargh! I feel like I'm drowning. It's like I'm not doing anything hard, right?
I'm just doing my stuff. I'm just trying to focus on it more, except I'm trying so hard to focus that everything is making me on edge. Like my cat will try and get my attention, and I'll be annoyed at him for wanting pats.
It's like there's sand falling and I'm trying to catch all of the sand, and you can't do it. Am I making any sense? I really need to make every grain of sand count by like doing everything on target, and even if I'm enjoying something, I can't, because I need to move and catch different grains of sand.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, what did you just say? - Have you ever thought about just meditating, and doing nothing? Taking a step back away from the thing that you're working on, and not working, like taking a break?
- Maybe it was because I was desperate. Actually, it is totally because I was desperate, but I decided to try meditation. The only issue is I have no idea how.
Luckily, I have Headspace. I should probably turn the color on, just so that you guys can see what the app actually looks like. When I asked Headspace to sponsor a portion of this video, I genuinely thought I was only going to use their focus music and white noise, because I love listening to those to the point that it is ruining my YouTube recommendations and Spotify wrapped.
So it's just great to have access to Headspace's collection. But Headspace also has stretches, workouts, podcasts, and meditation. They have content specifically for beginners, like me, who don't know where to start.
It's in their Basics course. But if you don't wanna commit to that, they also have shorter exercises, including my favorite thing I discovered on this app, which is, "Star Wars: Breathe with Yoda. " It's a one-minute breathing exercise and Yoda's just sitting there, levitating rocks, I love it.
However, they also have longer, less structured stuff for people with more experience. Just the sheer amount of variety is probably my favorite thing about Headspace. They bring together so many resources to help you be kind to your mind.
So even if meditation doesn't end up helping, maybe movement will. Or, another cool thing that I found. This is so sick, they have ASMR, and there's like a thing at the bottom that lets you control the balance between voice and like environmental noise.
Headspace, do more of this! If you wanna try out Headspace, completely for free for 60 days, you can sign up using the link in the description or scan the QR code. Okay, let's learn how to meditate.
- [App] Hi, and welcome to session. . .
- Hi! My first experience with meditation was strange. Now, the voice kept telling me to focus on my breathing, but I might've focused a little too hard because I was worried I forgot how to breathe.
I should wear my head scanner thing for this. Back to breathing. But eventually, I think I got the hang of it.
And, after 10 minutes, how am I supposed to know if meditation's working? Is there a light, like what happens? - I don't think there's an exact science to it, it's just, you're supposed to just feel better, or feel changed.
Did it do anything? - I don't know! Do you just keep doing it?
- That's kind of it. I know that's probably not what you wanted to hear but. .
. - So I just trust the process? So, for the next few days, I continued with my focus schedule and wore my EEG, but I also tried to meditate in the morning, or evening, or just random moments when I felt like it.
And then, something kinda wild happened. Meditation works! And I wish that I could tell you this because I've achieved enlightenment, or I have a newfound sense of peace.
But, no, I just feel normal, about as normal as the distribution of the sample means of my experimental populations, justifying the use of a two sample T-test, resulting in these P values. Ooh, how significant! This EEG has seriously paid off, because even though I don't feel that different, I was able to use its measurements to do some statistics and find that meditation has improved basically all of my performance metrics: engagement, excitement, interest, also stress.
But that might be because I was wearing this when you guys sold out our last merch drop in less than 24 hours. Thank you for that. So a good stress.
The coolest thing is that all of this is on top of what I already gained by minimizing distractions and avoiding multitasking. At least according to these regressions I ran. But the benefits of meditation came at a surprising cost.
You see these peaks of intense focus? Yeah, those stopped happening. But I also stopped experiencing these huge dips.
Now I'm just. . .
fine. This whole thing is just. .
. fine. You know, I started this video because I wanted to feel more in control of my attention.
I didn't wanna have to rely on being distracted every single second. And you know what? Done.
I am literally, statistically more engaged. And anecdotally, I was doing the dishes the other day and I started playing a podcast out of habit, and then I realized I'd rather just clean in silence. Who am I?
I know I should be happy. Happy that, for folks without attention disorders, fixing your focus is as simple as minimizing distractions, avoiding multitasking, and maybe meditating if it all gets too much. I should be happy!
But I'm not. Like, I think it's really cool that meditation can work, even if you don't know how it works. But I'm me, and I need to know how.
So I guess if you only cared about fixing your focus, the video's done, you heard my advice. But, if you are like me and you wanna know why, come with me, 'cause we're gonna find out. It was strange getting to the bottom of this, because I was looking for an answer when I didn't really have a question.
I just had a sense of unease because I had solved my original problem without understanding how or why my solution really worked. It was only after spending the day in the library, flipping through any book I could find about meditation, when I realized my question and its answer. You see, earlier, we learned how focus works according to science.
And the tips I found in those productivity books were in line with that. They should have helped me stay focused, but they didn't, not in the long run. However, when I added meditation to the mix, it all worked.
The question is how? Specifically, how did meditation influence my focus differently than productivity tips? Okay, so meditation, as we know it, originated in India with Theravada Buddhism.
However, it's since evolved into a wide range of practices used throughout the world, including more secularized and instrumentalized forms that became popular in the West, with books like "Wherever You Go, There You Are. " This approach to meditation became known as "mindfulness based interventions. " And it has two main forms, open monitoring, where you observe your experiences in real time without reacting.
You just recognize things as they are. And focused attention, where you concentrate on something specific, like breathing. Now the interesting thing is that this religiously informed framework, with origins from thousands of years ago, has a lot of surprising parallels with our modern scientific understanding of attention.
In fact, some Buddhist practitioners have been found to outperform the norm at attention-related tasks, suggesting that meditation is, at least in part, helping them focus. Now, I should probably say that a lot of this research, while promising, is still inconclusive. Meditation, and even attention, are still kind of nebulous concepts that make it difficult to achieve rigorous scientific consensus.
However, despite the similarities I found between religious theory and these pop science attention books, I did notice one key difference: how they manage distractions. You see, the pop science and productivity books I read emphasized cutting out distractions and building walls in your space and schedule to protect your focus. This is straightforward in concept, but really difficult to maintain if you have a lot of responsibilities that are outside of your control.
In contrast, the mindfulness approach targets your focus directly, cultivating it to be easier to command and resilient to distractions. This forms a sort of spectrum, where you either reshape your environment to restore your attention, or reinforce your attention to endure the world. Now here's the thing, when you feel your attention span slipping through your fingers, that pop science productivity approach is really tempting, not only because it's unavoidable, like a lot of the content around reclaiming your focus is for the sake of using it on something else, but it's also tempting because the advice is so tangible.
You turn off your notifications, you build out a schedule, you get rid of the distractions, and see it replaced with things that you do care about. Compare that to meditation, which is so subtle that if I wasn't wearing an EEG for three weeks, I would've just assumed that it did nothing. However, the average person like you or I can never fully control our environments, and the supports we use to try are shockingly fragile.
So if they break, when they break, all we're left with is our core ability to focus. And if that sucks, we end up where we started. That's why I think meditation helped me out.
The whole exercise is realizing that your mind naturally wanders, but you also have the power to nudge it back to where you want it to be. Now, I'm obviously not gonna go full tilt and become a Buddhist monk because, to be honest, can't pull off orange. However, the great thing about a spectrum is that we can find ourselves somewhere in the middle, structuring our days more thoughtfully and lowering the noise, not to a silence, but to a gentle hum that we can enjoy at our own pace.
But either way, have a lovely day!
