Why Society Sucks at Staying Focused

If you’re familiar at all with our Wellness Blog, you know we often talk about solutions to feeling tired, nasty, unfocused, and stressed. Well, more than often – it’s kind of pertinent to our whole thing: MTE. But a question we haven’t yet addressed in detail is, why is it so hard to stay focused in the first place? Is it us? Is it life? Is it the screens? The imminent political and environmental doom of it all?

Ask us and the answer is all of the above. But that’s some elder millennial ennui, and we deal with science here at MTE. We wanted to really hone in and focus on focus – what’s happened to us? Are we getting dumber or more distracted? And can we blame our parents for this one? No, sorry.

First, What is Focus?

Will you find an article on attention spans that doesn’t mention that 2015 study indicating we have the attention span of a goldfish? No. Which is kind of a bummer, because that whole “8 seconds” idea doesn’t actually tell you anything useful. When we talk about focus, we’re actually talking about several physiological and neurochemical processes working together at once to allow you to pay attention to a specific stimuli while filtering all the others out:

• The prefrontal cortex deals with executive decision making. It works with other regions in your brain to prioritize thoughts, organize decisions and control impulses.
• The reticular activating system in the brain stem regulates arousal and decides what stimuli is important enough to make it to the brain for attention in the first place.
• The thalamus is a relay station for sensory information – think of it as a vintage mailroom, stuffing relevant paperwork into hundreds of tubes that send them to the right place.
• Specific neurochemicals associated with learning, memory and attention are key signalers for focus, especially concerning your working memory and inhibition control, both of which are crucial to sustaining attention.
• The autonomic nervous system balances the sympathetic arousal and the parasympathetic wind-down to keep the brain alert but not stressed while you’re trying to keep focused.

All of these processes must play together nicely for you to do things like spend 5 hours writing a paper or to switch attention from reading about statistical theory to leaning into that 6^th mile of your run without the quality of any experience suffering.

Wait – what were we talking about?

What Happened to Our Ability to Focus?

We are not machines – our ability to pay attention isn’t bottomless. That attention resource can be depleted by time spent focusing, but it can also be depleted by too many stimuli. Our world today, even compared to 40 years ago, is a constant bombardment of stimuli. Is there an inverse relationship between number of stimuli and time spent sustaining attention? Kind of seems like it.

A recent analysis of the literature on social media, digital technology and AI’s effects on cognitive function discusses attention in detail, citing findings from several studies, which include:

• Mindless Facebook scrolling was associated with decreased ability to pay attention and increased feelings of distraction.
• Constant smartphone use was associated with poorer ability to control attention.
• More screen time was associated with an increased risk of ADHD symptoms.
• Student focus time was only 6 minutes in the presence of any digital distractor.
• Heavy video game usage was associated with decreased ability to sustain attention and increased distractibility.
• Children who use digital devices for 2+hours per day had lower cognitive scores than those who use them less.

One particular study in this review is worth discussing more, both for its intricate analyses and very scary findings. They looked at “media multitasking”, which is especially pertinent because it’s not just ever-present digital stimuli attenuating our attention spans; multitasking is also associated with decreased ability to sustain attention. Media multitasking, then, is the consumption/participation in more than one form of media at a time. It’s multitasking for the new age – and it’s not good.

This study found that the decrease in social, impulse and cognitive control observed in many previous studies on this subject may be directly related to neurodegenerative processes in the brain. They found that media multitasking has an inverse correlation with grey matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex.

In English, that means that a brain structure absolutely vital in attention, memory, emotional regulation, cognitive control, and decision-making – among other things – was less healthy in people who used multiple modes of digital media more. Grey matter is the stuff where all the good neural connections and synapses happen. Less of it in the ACC leads to poor cognitive control, impaired emotional regulation, problems in decision-making, and lowered attention and focus.

So that’s fine. That seems fine.

Getting Mired in the Mud of Multitasking

While we’re on the multitasking vibe, let’s talk about regular multitasking. You can be the most off-the-grid human and you’re still multitasking – promise. Feeding the chickens while fending off a hungry baby goat while it’s raining and you’re slipping in the mud? Handling an annoying coworker talking at your desk while you’re trying to finish a report and reply to an urgent email? Both are multitasking. Same same.

Now that we’re all on even, muddy, ground, let’s talk about why multitasking is not healthy. This might be especially confusing, seeing as how we prize overloaded working parents as “super moms” and feel like it’s normal for a PhD student to do 60 hours per week of academic stuff while holding down another 20 hours per week job outside of it. Obviously, we all need more time. But we also need better organized time.

If you ask the indifferent gods of hard scientific data what’s wrong with multitasking, they’ll first tell you it’s a joke, as our brains and minds are not built to do it. But after that, they’ll tell you:

• There is a quantifiable cost, referred to as a switch cost, of multitasking; tasks take longer to accomplish and are accomplished with more errors.
• Heavier media multitaskers pay higher switching costs than lower media multitaskers.
• Multitasking hurts working memory and long-term recall.

This all ties back into the principle that attention resources are limited. And in today’s world, we’re almost always asking more of ourselves than we are biologically capable of, whether it’s asking teenagers to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day or asking employees to pick up the slack of another position that’s been vacated. Not okay, either way – especially if that grey matter study proves true.

But is There Hope, Though

So – how do we reach this promised land of productivity? First, realize it’s not your fault – you’re stretched too thin on a biological level. After that, it’s the paraxanthine for us. And the ashwagandha. And the saffron. It’s really just all the stuff we put into MTE. Nutritional science is real – there are healthy alternatives to caffeine everywhere to be found if you know what you’re looking for and have the motivation to figure out the ideal concoction.

MTE’s ingredients list is short for a reason – literally every single one matters, and that’s it. Why add anything else? Two key focus boosters in this feel-good productivity drink are:

• Paraxanthine: A caffeine-metabolite, this nootropic uses different pathways than caffeine in order to boost energy and support focus and cognition. Since it doesn’t increase cortisol, heart rate and blood sugar to do it, paraxanthine energy drinks offer all of the good and none of the bad.
• Saffron: Not just a stupid-expensive herb, saffron’s nootropic benefits on focus, attention and cognition are so evident that clinical studies are exploring it as a combination or adjunct therapy for ADHD. Three recent studies observed saffron significantly reduce symptoms and scores indicating attention deficit severity in just 6 to 8 weeks.

Along with your best focus-boosting efforts – keeping a nutritious diet, prioritizing sleep, staying active – MTE is a tailwind propelling you towards that elusive but definitely attainable goal of simply being able to pay attention. And with focus comes increased productivity! Automatically ahead of the game – a shark amongst goldfish, if you will.