Why focus feels impossible and it's not your fault

Here's what Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus taught me about teens, tech, and why we're all struggling to concentrate.

I started reading physical books on the tram a few months ago. It became a non-negotiable. It’s a tiny, quiet rebellion against the noise of my phone.

I either read, people watch or stare out the window.

It’s good for my brain. I feel more grounded when I get to work and more human when I get off the tram after a day of teaching. I used to spend the whole ride stuck to my iPhone, scrolling and “engaging” on LinkedIn, pretending I was hustling by maximising the dead time. Or I was avoiding my untamed thoughts. Think, scroll, distract. Think, scroll, distract.

Now that I’m released from my screen (for most rides - I’m not perfect), I notice just how many faces are lit up with the blue light at 6:30 a.m. The tram is full and eerily silent. We’re all in our separate little virtual worlds.

It makes me sad. Are we all happy ignoring each other, mesmerised by the fast-paced feed of TikTokers and YouTube learnings? Or are we all secretly missing a once-upon-a-time life that was simpler, more connected, and less lonely? Anyone under 30 on the tram won’t remember that, though. They don’t know the world of ‘before’.

The week’s tram read was Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. A guy I went on a date with a few weeks back recommended it to me. I’m so glad I met him because I needed to read this book.

Reading Stolen Focus at home and on the tram

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What I learned in a nutshell

We’re struggling to pay attention, and it’s NOT our fault.

It’s the way the world is designed now. The rise of technology, the tools, and the systems that profit from our distractions have hacked our wiring and mainframe. We live in a culture that rewards speed, multitasking, and constant stimulation. We're like the rats in the cocaine-water experiment, going for the next hit because we can’t cope with the world around us. (FYI when the environment changed the rats stopped going for the drug and drank the clean water).

I see it in my classroom, friendship group, and myself.

We wonder why students struggle to stay engaged during class, why young people feel anxious and overstimulated, and why we, as adults, can’t stay on task for half an hour without checking our phones.

One study Hari cites says,

“We touch our phone 2,617 times every 24 hours”.

What the heck?! That’s touches, not opens. We can’t leave the thing alone; it’s become a security blanket, a prosthetic limb we can’t function properly without.

We (society) label this ‘grabbing the device’ as distraction, or even attention disorder, and in ‘bad’ cases, diagnose, even medicate it, as if the problem is in our brain.

But what if it’s not us as individuals?

What if it’s how society has changed and how childhood is now designed?

No matter our age, most of us are overstimulated, live predominantly indoor lives, and are under-rested. That’s the product of the age of technology.

Tech companies are conditioning us to be this way. They depend on it because our attention is their profit. Gross.

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Multi-tasking is BS

The first section of Hari’s book introduced me to ‘switching’. I’m guilty.

Switching is when we flit from one thing to another, often to look at our phone or check an email. It’s having multiple laptop tabs open and switching back and forth between online and in-person activities. Welcome to the world of ADHD on steroids (even for the ‘normies’, AKA neurotypicals). This is a taster of our manic minds on offer for anyone to try out.

Every time we switch, we don’t just lose seconds, we lose the ability to go deep. We’re training our minds to skim the surface of tasks and be ever ready to jump back into them. It’s not just the time it takes to move between tasks that we lose, but the time it takes for our brain to adjust to the ‘new’ task.

No wonder I take ages to finish stuff unless I’m under pressure. I can’t count how often I’ve half-read an article while half-thinking about dinner and half-replying to a message. That’s not Focus. That’s distraction dressed as productivity.

Imagine the students’ experience of sitting for hours a day, screen learning with an entire virtual world open on different tabs behind their subject’s learning platform, and probably a phone buzzing for attention in their pocket. Every time they ‘switch’, they lose the chance to learn, retain, and cast to memory.

To counter this, we need to work on flow—that elusive, immersive state in the present moment and time dissolves.

It makes me roll my eyes when people say, ‘get in flow’ because it’s bloody hard. As a writer with ADHD, I get it once in a blue moon. But what chance have I got if my phone is facing me or my Instagram tab is telling me so-and-so is going live in a cafe to share about egg benny with pulled pork and apple dust!

“When you’re approaching death, you won’t think about the likes and retweets, you’ll think about the moments of flow.”

Hari gets readers to consider the cumulative effect of loads of people not paying attention. Get this: if the greatest thinkers on the planet can’t put their heads together for long enough, they can’t solve the world’s problems. We need to solve the attention crisis before we can solve the climate crisis.

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The rise of tech

Hari interviews the folk in The Social Dilemma documentary and other behind-the-scenes of Google engineers. He points out that the people who designed our phones and social platforms don’t let their own kids use them.

The former Facebook and Google engineers send their children to tech-free Montessori schools.

The companies themselves host internal mindfulness workshops while pumping out apps that destroy our capacity to be mindful. They know what they’ve built and they know it’s not safe.

“The average American teenager sends a text every six minutes they’re awake.”

These platforms were designed to be addictive. They use behavioural psychology, hijack dopamine loops, and learn what keeps you watching longer. Surveillance capitalism…(I wrote about it last week), it works like this:

1. The more time you spend on the app, the more data they get.

2. The more data they get, the better they keep you there.

3. The longer you stay, the more money they make.

Even YouTube, one of the tamer platforms, was found to push people toward more extreme content because that’s what holds attention.

Likewise, a study reports that 64% of people who joined extremist groups were directed there by Facebook’s algorithm. And when the internal team raised the alarm, they were shut down.

What chance do we or our kids have?

No wonder they can’t concentrate. The apps they live on are literally designed to bypass their developing prefrontal cortex and keep them in a loop of constant checking. And the more dramatic content they see, the more they’re offered, the more they want = DOOM SCROLL.

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It's not just our brain, it’s our body too

Our attention isn’t screwed solely because of tech.

It’s also our diet and sleep. Hari shares that exhausted people can’t think straight. Our lifestyle of working long days, five days a week, playing hard (for some) and never fully resting (thanks to screens) is screwing our sleep pattern. In addition, many people sleep next to screens and use them right before bed and first thing in the morning.

His research shockingly shows that the average teenager sleeps like a new parent or a soldier on duty. What chance do they have in class?

Add in sugar crashes, jittery energy drinks, anxiety, with no mental downtime, and of course, their attention is shot. No wonder kids can't sit still or zone out. They’re exhausted and overstimulated. None of us can self-discipline and focus under those conditions.

And hands up who reaches for a coffee and a croissant to power through a morning? No wonder we have an

“aggressive crash, as it’s like putting rocket fuel into a Mini; we burn out quickly.”

Teachers are notorious for fuelling up on caffeine to cope. None of us, teachers and kids, are doing the greatest job at self-care in this manic age.

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Childhood has changed

I’m grateful I grew up in the era of playing outdoors. I used to disappear for hours with friends from across the village, build dens in the woods and come home by curfew.

There was no way my parents could contact me. I was taught about stranger danger. Scrapes, bruises, fall-outs and make-ups were all part of growing up and learning.

Nowadays, unstructured and unsupervised play has been squeezed out of children’s lives. Kids rarely get to find things out for themselves. Because of screen life (predominantly) and the perceived dangers of what lurks outdoors (overbearing parenting—I’m sorry, but that’s what it says), children are cocooned. Ironically, they’re consumed in a virtual and adult world full of unmonitored, unfiltered dangers.

Hari raises the point that if kids don’t get lost in their imaginations, get bored, and then get creative and boisterous outdoors, they won’t learn how to live in the real world.

And they don’t blow off steam. That makes it hard for them to focus in class.

Finnish schools have it right: every 45 minutes of instruction is followed by 15 minutes of unstructured play. It works.

Maybe I’ll learn Finnish and move to Turku, I liked it in 2015 and have a friend there!

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It’s time for an attention rebellion

I’m losing my own attention now and probably yours, so please read the book for the sections on ADHD, pollution, trauma, and confinement.

As Hari closes, he calls for an attention rebellion. This isn’t through digital detoxes—because they don’t work—but through collective action. An ‘attention rebellion’ is a movement to take our minds (and our kids’ minds) back from the systems that steal them.

He calls for

• Banning surveillance capitalism

• Introducing a 4-day working week

• Rebuilding childhood to let kids play freely.

“We are free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back.”

And on a personal level…

He admits he hasn’t mastered focus. It’s a work in progress. I was relieved to read that because I’m studying this stuff, have the knowledge that it’s bad for me, have a background in addiction recovery, yet still I struggle.

I’m following in his footsteps, implementing the changes he made in his life.

1. Committed to stopping switching so much (he uses a kSafe to lock his phone away),

2. Speaking kindly to himself to encourage getting into a flow state,

3. Taking time away from socials (months),

4. Carving out time for ‘mind-wandering’ walks,

5. Getting 8 hours of sleep with no screen time 2 hours before bed,

6. Letting kids in his life play freely.

By the end of his book, he calls for us to focus together so that we can live full lives.

That’s what I’m doing, offering a space and a way to work together.

If you’re interested in being part of this attention rebellion, hit subscribe to receive the FREE e-book coming soon. REAL HAPPY: How to ease tweens and teens off screens and into the real world. (Working title).

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Today, I’ll try to disrupt the status quo on the tram. I’ll smile and make eye contact with at least one person in an effort to say, ‘Hey, I see you.’ Usually, people smile back in surprise.

I’ll notice my distractions and come back to the task I’m supposed to be on.

I’ll switch my phone off for periods.

I’ll use the Freedom app to block out 10 hours of uninterrupted time around bed.

And I’ll get on with writing the FREE e-book dropping here soon!

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This is an attention rebellion.

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Suze x