What are the disadvantages of short attention span?

When my phone buzzes, I force myself to look away, fighting the urge to pick it up. It always fails. I tell myself it’s just a quick minute and that I’ll finish later. However, next thing I know, it’s been an hour, and I’ve just wasted my time switching from app to app: Snapchat, Tik Tok, Instagram. From personal experience, when I am faced with long, complex and wordy texts, tasks, or lectures, my brain doesn’t know how to process them as well anymore. Books have become harder to read, we get upset when having to redo something more than once, memorizing information has become more challenging, and giving up seems to be getting easier by the day, as reported by the Pew Research Center study. I find myself reading fewer books than I used to, mainly because I can’t keep focused and get bored after the first 10 pages as my patience levels have become increasingly low. A study by the National Institutes of Health found that teenagers who spend over two hours a day on their screens receive lower test scores. Endless algorithmic content makes it increasingly difficult for students at school to stay focused and on task, as they aren’t accustomed to such intense levels of concentration. Teenagers’ attention spans are dropping faster than ever, and have huge impacts on our everyday lives.

Short attention spans screw up productivity as you’ll no doubt find yourself switching between tasks more frequently, leading to interruptions and increased cognitive load. This then leaves us feeling mentally exhausted, leading to decreased productivity and even sloppy work. Another way short attention spans are wreaking havoc on our work is that it affects our ability to learn and retain information. When we are unable to focus for extended periods, we may not absorb information effectively, leading to gaps in our knowledge and understanding. This can also affect our problem-solving abilities as we may not be able to fully comprehend complex problems and find solutions. In addition to work performance, short attention spans can also have negative effects on our overall health and wellbeing. Constantly checking your phone and being bombarded with notifications can lead to increased stress levels, anxiety, and decreased mental health.

Most of us think we’re good at multitasking, we’re pretty terrible at it, overall. Computer scientists and psychologists have been studying attention spans for about 20 years, over which time the average time that a person can focus on one thing has dropped from around 2½ minutes to around 45 seconds. Kramer says exact numbers can fluctuate, but research has certainly suggested that we can’t pay attention as well as we used to. We used to watch the news when we came home in the evening, maybe also in the morning, now you can get that information in real time — in fact it may pop up on your screen. Indeed, our screens are now everywhere, not just in our living room or office, but in our hands and in our cars. I think a lot of changes in vehicles — cars, trucks, what have you — have led to difficulty in focusing on what’s in front of you. Moreover, Kramer notes the ability to find information is just a click away — meaning that a distraction — or anything that takes your mind and efforts away from what you’re trying to accomplish — can quickly usurp a previous task and refocus your attention. Even if you’re not looking at it when you’re on the phone, focusing on a conversation with a boss or partner can be distracting. Scientists can see this happening by examining the brain with an MRI or other non-invasive brain imaging techniques such as eye tracking or recording electroencephalographic information with electrodes placed on the head. There are a whole bunch of neural networks — over 20 — that have been mapped out that relate to different aspects of memory, reasoning, problem-solving, attention and so forth. We’ve in the past looked at the ability to multitask and what networks are activated and which networks are overactivated when you’re trying to do more than you can do. But do the training benefits transfer from these well designed studies to real world tasks and skills, our world these days is just full of distractions and there are certainly ways to limit those distractions with focused and divided attention training, mindfulness training, and increasing cardiorespiratory fitness.