Why You Can’t Focus

Focus is hard. And in the years since I’ve started writing, it has gotten harder.

Diagnoses of ADHD (including self-diagnoses) have skyrocketed. While it’s likely that some of this is due to a lessening of stigma around mental health issues revealing what was already there, anecdotally, it appears that people are having a much harder time concentrating than they used to.

The number of people I know who struggle to finish reading a single book, or who can’t seem to stay on task for more than twenty minutes without opening their email, seems to be getting worse.

Are Smartphones Ruining Our Brains?

While technology certainly plays a role in our collective distractibility, it’s probably not the case that Google is literally making us stupider, or that we’ve lost the ability to focus. I agree with cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, who raises his eyebrows at the idea that our fundamental brain architecture could be reshaped in this way.

Instead, there’s a much simpler explanation for why focus is hard — and why it has gotten harder. In short, the ability to sustain attention on something is a function of two factors:

1. Pull. This is how much an activity draws in and motivates us to sustain our attention. True multitasking is a myth, and our attention can only focus on one thing at a time. As a result, the pull of an activity is always defined relative to everything else we could possibly be paying attention to at this moment.