SYSK TRENDING - How to Improve Your Focus

Something You Should Know

This episode of 'Something You Should Know' explores the growing challenge of maintaining focus in a hyper-connected world, featuring journa

Key takeaways

• The human brain can only focus on one or two things at a time; multitasking leads to 'switch cost' effects that reduce performance, memory, and creativity.
• Sleep deprivation is a major factor in impaired attention—sleeping less than seven hours nightly causes cognitive decline comparable to being legally drunk.

Main topics

• The science of attention and cognitive limitations
• Impact of multitasking and digital distractions

Notable quotes

Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces.

When you're tired, you can appear to be awake—but whole parts of your brain can have literally gone to sleep.

Conclusion

Focus isn't lost due to personal failure but stolen by modern life's demands—distractions, poor sleep, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:04) The Speaker 5 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 3 (0:15) The new Speaker 5 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 4 (0:31) If it feels harder than ever to concentrate, you're not imagining it. Distractions are everywhere, and many of us struggle to stay focused long enough to do our best work, or have a meaningful conversation, or even enjoy a good book. But what if the problem isn't just a lack of skill or ability or willpower? Today, you'll hear why our attention is under attack. and what's really stealing our focus, and more importantly, what we can do to get it back. That's why today's SYSK Trending topic is How to Improve Your Focus. My guest is best-selling author Johan Hari, who has spent years investigating the science behind attention and how to reclaim it. It's an eye-opening conversation with practical ideas you can put to work right now and in the future. And we'll begin right after this. Speaker 3 (1:46) The new Honda Speaker 5 (1:49) City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 4 (2:00) Pay attention. How many times have you been told that in your lifetime? Pay attention. Yet today, paying attention is hard because, well, there are so many distractions and other things to pay attention to. We try to multitask, and that doesn't work out too well. So instead of focusing deeply on the one thing we need to focus on, we focus a little bit on a lot of different things. And that's a problem. Johan Hari is a journalist and best-selling author who has explored this problem of lack of focus and the damage that it does and what we can do to fix it. Johan is author of a book called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. Hey, Johan. Hey, Speaker 1 (2:48) Mike. Speaker 4 (2:48) Great to Speaker 1 (2:48) be with you. Speaker 4 (2:49) So I suspect most people have had that sense that, you know, you can't seem to pay attention to just one thing. We hear about attention deficit disorder. So what's going on here? What did you discover? Speaker 1 (3:03) Well, I would say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And when your focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down. Your ability to solve your problems breaks down. You actually become less competent. You start to feel worse about yourself. I could feel this happening to me with every year that passed. Things that require deep focus that are really important to me, Mike, like reading a book, having deep, proper conversations. We're getting more and more like kind of running up a down escalator. You know what I mean? Like I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this is happening to a huge number of people around me. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred kids who've been identified with that problem. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. So I wanted to understand what's happening to us and crucially, what do we do about it? Right? So I went, I traveled all over the world from Moscow to Miami. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus, different aspects of this. And I learned that there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing in recent years. So anyone, if you're listening and you're struggling to focus and pay attention, this is not your fault. Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces. But once you understand that, we can begin to reclaim it for ourselves and for our children. Speaker 4 (4:51) So what are some of the things that are sapping our attention? Speaker 1 (4:55) I'll give you an example of one that will be playing out in the lives of almost everyone listening. I went to interview a man named Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. I went to see him at MIT where he's a professor. And he said to me, look, You've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any time scale. Any of us are going to see, you can only think about one or two things at a time, but what's happened. is we've fallen for a mass delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is Professor Miller and his colleagues, scientists like him, they get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle. You're switching very quickly. You're going, wait, what did Mike just ask me? What's that message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the TV about Ukraine? What's the message on Facebook? Wait, what did Mike just ask me? We're all doing that juggling a huge amount of the time. And it turns out it comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. What it shows is when you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You'll make more mistakes. You'll remember less of what you do. be less creative. The evidence shows this is having a huge effect on us. I'll give you an example of a small study that's backed by a