Is your attention span really getting shorter? Here’s how to fix it

As I stare at the blank Google Doc in front of me, the familiar “ping” of my email inbox sounds. Better check that, might be important (it isn’t). While I’m distracted, maybe I should scan Slack for any messages from colleagues. Someone’s shared a link to a funny story; I start to read it while flicking between tabs on my internet browser. I wonder what’s happening on my phone. A friend has sent me a meme I saw two days ago, during another productivity-sapping scroll. Asos is offering me another discount code. HMRC is texting me about my tax return. Then I hear the “ping” again. Back to the inbox!

These are just a few of the useless directions in which my attention wandered while trying to start writing this. The fight to keep my focus in check for long enough to, well, actually achieve the things I’m employed to do is a daily battle of attrition, however many times I try to embrace the Pomodoro method (setting an alarm for 25 minutes, working solidly, then taking a five-minute break) or listen to trippy binaural beats on YouTube (the two different sound frequencies are meant to help you focus). And when work ends, I’m prone to double screening – scrolling social media on my phone while watching TV – or even checking said phone when I’m supposed to be mid-conversation.

Surely, I used to be better at focusing: I powered through weighty, wordy tomes like Bleak House when I was a student just over a decade ago (although I didn’t have an iPhone, an Instagram account or 500 WhatsApp groups to attend to back then). I’m certainly not the only one who feels this way. In a 2023 study from King’s College London, 49 per cent of participants said they feel like their attention span is shorter than it used to be, with 47 per cent claiming that “deep thinking” is a thing of the past. 50 per cent, meanwhile, said that despite their best efforts, they can’t stop checking their smartphone when their attention should be elsewhere. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have estimated that the average worker checks their emails 77 times a day.

So are our attention spans in crisis, and is social media to blame – or is it a useful scapegoat for our wandering minds? “By ‘attention span’, we mean the amount of time someone can sustain focus on a task without becoming distracted,” explains Dr Chris Fullwood, a cyberpsychologist and senior lecturer in psychology at Birmingham City University. “It’s important to note that attention span is not a fixed trait. While it does tend to improve with age, peaking in our forties and then gradually declining, it can also vary from moment to moment.” It can be impacted by “mood, emotions and physical states like hunger, fatigue or stress” and is “shaped by both biology and the environment”.

And that environment has certainly “changed dramatically”, Fullwood says. We’re now surrounded by an ever-increasing number of stimuli competing for our focus, driven by what’s often called the ‘attention economy’. “Companies invest billions in designing technologies and apps to capture and retain our attention because, in many cases, their revenue depends on it,” he adds. 

Dr Donald Masi, consultant psychiatrist and associate medical director at Priory Hospital Roehampton, agrees .“Each platform collects data on the optimum length of videos and other content to increase engagement,” he explains of the attention economy, and creators often use this information to make their posts even more attention-grabbing. “Over time, this can cause many to experience real issues with their attention span when trying to focus on longer, more complex ‘offline’ activities.” 

The human brain is wired to value novelty and connection: social media platforms can provide us with both, and they tend to have been developed to activate the brain’s reward system. When we receive a new notification (even if it’s for something ostensibly tedious like a new email) or flick onto a new Instagram story, we get a pleasurable hit of dopamine. To repeat the same rush, we do the same thing again and again. An unread message or notification can even “provoke feelings of anxiety”, Masi adds, and so “our attention is diverted to address that visual or sonic cue, no matter its level of objective importance”. Such is our phone’s pull that studies have found that having a smartphone within your eyeline can be distracting.

When you do pick up your phone for a quick break, or briefly switch tabs from your work task to have a look to see whether your favourite clothing brand has started its sale yet, you’re not just losing the time spent scrolling. Another study from the University of California, Irvine, estimated that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to your original task after an interruption. This is known as the “switch cost”. Tot up the amount of times you’re pulled in different directions during the average working day and it’s surprising that anyone ever manages to get anything done. Modern work life drags our attention here, there and everywhere; we’re often expected to stay on top of various forms of communication, while also doing the more concentration-intensive parts of our jobs, and being constantly available to “just jump on a quick call”.

Technology is “not necessarily” to blame, “but it does interfere”, Fullwood says. We don’t yet have enough long-term studies to work out whether our attention spans are declining, and whether social media is entirely at fault. As ever, it’s important to remember that correlation doesn’t equate to causation. Plus, Fullwood adds that fears over tech’s impact on our concentration are not new worries, as “similar fears were raised about television decades ago”. He also notes that “attention problems might stem from inherited traits rather than external factors. In fact, research indicates that genetics play a significant role in conditions like ADHD, often outweighing environmental influences.”

Rather than losing the ability to concentrate entirely, it’s more likely that we’ve just gone “‘rusty’ where some really basic human skills are concerned”, says Dee Johnson, addictions therapist at Priory Hospital in Chelmsford. The good news, she adds, “is that we can get back the same dopamine hit from external things that bring us joy, but it takes practice and effort, as once the brain has learnt a behaviour that provides a quick ‘hit’, understandably it wants to keep repeating it”.

So how can we work to reclaim our focus? First, it’s time to let go of the myth of multitasking. “While we can kid ourselves that we can focus on more than one thing at a time, in reality it is not really manageable [at] a decent level of concentration,” Johnson says. Instead, we might be better off just giving one task our full attention until we’ve completed it – this will help to minimise that “switch cost”.

It’s worth thinking, too, about the times of day when you’re most productive: are you someone who tends to blast through their to-do list first thing in the morning, do you have a post-lunch slump, or are the afternoons your best time for “deep work”? Once you’ve figured this out, you might want to consider scheduling your more involved tasks for these periods; you can turn off your notifications while you’re focusing, and try “batch checking” your emails and messages during the times when you’re usually a bit less efficient (of course, whether this is feasible will depend on how flexible your working day is, and the type of job you do).

Johnson also recommends “fix[ing] actual times and dates in your diary that will do a non-device-related activity” – scheduling something means it’s much more likely to happen than if you just keep hand-wringing about your screen time. Afterwards, she suggests, “Really evaluate the benefits that you gained from it. You will be surprised how much more you will remember of what was said and done.”

Ultimately, Fullwood says, “Technology isn’t inherently bad for attention – it’s how we use it that matters.” I’m still not sure I can trust myself to do that mindfully – which is why I’ll be hiding my phone in the room next door for the foreseeable. Maybe I’ll have a quick scroll first, though, as a treat.