Pod Insights All In The Mind The fight for focus in a world of distraction About this episode Be honest, how many times have you checked your notifications in the last hour? Or opened a new, totally unrelated tab? Or stopped what you're doing even though you really need to do it?
Distractions are everywhere. And whether they're self-imposed or coming from our environment, it can be hard to focus.
Today, we explore the ramifications of our rapidly shrinking attention spans, debunk some myths about focus, and discuss the art of taking a break.
You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode first aired in March 2025.
Guests:
Dr Emma Fitzgerald Clinical Neuropsychologist
SebEmma's son and distracted teenager
Gloria Mark, PhDChancellor's Professor Emerita, University of California, IrvineAuthor, Attention Span https://gloriamark.com/attention-span/
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Bella TropianoTo find the transcript for this episode, head to itsoriginal webpage https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/fighting-for-focus-age-of-distraction/105034906.
Extra info:
Gloria's The Future of Attention https://gloriamark.substack.com/ substack
Smartphones in the nursery: Parental smartphone use and parental sensitivity and responsiveness within parent–child interaction in early childhood (0–5 years): A scoping review https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/imhj.21908Ditching your smartphone won't stop you being distracted, study finds https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2025-03-30/smartphone-distraction-digital-devices-training-brain-focus/105093514
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0:37 Speaker 02 Hello, it's Sana here from All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. We are replaying some of our most popular episodes from 2025. And I have to say, I'm not surprised that this one is on the list because it's an episode all about focus. This is an issue a lot of us struggle with, myself included. Here is the episode.
0:59 Speaker 03 The Japanese have this expression, which I love. It's called yohaku no pi, which means the beauty of empty space. I started out as an artist and what we learned in art is that the figure that you're painting, it's really important, but what's also important is the space around the figure because that really helps frame it and really helps set it off. And so when we think about our days, we think of packing as much as we can and we don't think of leaving empty space so that our minds can refresh.
1:41 Speaker 02 We are living in an age of distraction. Insta, TikTok, X, the news cycle, WhatsApp group messages, email, Slack. It's a bloody wonder any of us get any work done. Like just writing this intro, I post a look at my Instagram twice, weirdly LinkedIn once and a few news sites thrown in for good measure. I don't just feel scatterbrained, I am scatterbrained and I'm not alone.
2:10 Speaker 04 Yesterday I had a very tired brain and I just found myself going to my phone quite frequently, so much so that I had to like sort of check myself.
2:18 Speaker 05 An hour task with distractions, it'd probably take me like two hours, two and a half hours.
2:23 Speaker 02 This incessant phone checking and task switching, it seems to be feeding a vicious cycle, which goes something like this: we're distracted, so we're not focusing as long on tasks. We're not focusing, so our attention spans are decreasing. Our attention spans are decreasing, so the world around us is changing to accommodate that. Think quicker edits on film and TV, shorter tests for students, podcasts listened to on double speed. All of which is further entrenching this frenetic new normal.
2:57 Speaker 03 We're humans. We're inherently lazy. And so, you know, as soon as the going gets tough, it's just way easier to pull away. And, you know, if you're watching TikTok, you get a reward every 15 seconds. And so there's a habit that we've developed. And habits are very hard to change, especially if you're getting rewarded for doing this habit.
3:22 Speaker 02 So in this episode, we're going to find out just how bad our attention spans have really gone over the last few decades, why all this distraction leaves us feeling so exhausted, and whether strategies for staying focused, like the Pomodoro technique, really work.
3:41 Speaker 02 This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, the fight for focus and whether it's a losing battle.
3:52 Speaker 02 Okay, cool, cool. How's the weather down there today?
3:54 Speaker 04 It's actually beautiful.
3:56 Speaker 02 Yeah?
3:56 Speaker 04 Another autumn day with no rain.
3:58 Speaker 02 This is Emma Fitzgerald. She lives in Adelaide and she's a neuropsychologist, which means her job is all about cognitive function and focus.
4:08 Speaker 04 I assess clients who have some sort of cognitive impairment. So I assess attention and concentration and distraction, impulsivity, but also all the other cognitive functions.
4:19 Speaker 02 Despite her job, she's not immune to the distractions of modern life. And a few years ago, she noticed her distraction levels increasing.
4:28 Speaker 04 I was finding I was getting very distracted because I do have a lot of time where I'm just sort of at the computer and writing reports and that sort of thing. And I noticed particularly when work starts getting hard, I get distracted and want to go and look at, you know, do something that my brain finds easy.
4:47 Speaker 04 It's easy to go to social media. It's also easy to go to news websites.
4:52 Speaker 02 Yep.
4:52 Speaker 04 They're probably the two main things, I'd say.
4:55 Speaker 02 What's your social media of choice?
4:56 Speaker 04 Well, because of my age, probably Facebook.
4:59 Speaker 02 Right, okay.
4:59 Speaker 04 I'm not into the newer ones.
5:01 Speaker 02 No TikTok, right?
5:02 Speaker 04 No, no, no, no, no TikTok. And I do have Instagram, but I don't tend to go to that one quite so much.
5:10 Speaker 02 The thing that really started to bother Emma was how hard she was finding it to all of a sudden read a book.
5:17 Speaker 04 I love literature and I've always studied literature all throughout my life, really, and like to read hard books. But I was finding that I was taking months rather than a couple of weeks to finish a book. And I didn't like that because I like to be able to talk books with my friends. I like to, you know, that's a part of my life. So I was finding that was not very satisfactory.
5:40 Speaker 02 This feels like such a contemporary problem. Emma could be any one of us, struggling to read or sit through a show or movie without looking at our phones. But a few decades before, Emma, Gloria Mark was also noticing herself becoming increasingly distracted.
5:56 Speaker 03 My name is Gloria Mark. I am Chancellor's Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine. I have been studying people's use with their digital devices for well over two decades.
6:14 Speaker 02 So what got you interested in looking at focus and attention 20 years ago initially?
6:19 Speaker 03 Well, it was my own experience. So I had moved back to the US. I was living in Germany. So it was a very different culture and I also had a different job. And then all of a sudden I was in academia and I found myself multitasking like crazy. And I couldn't say no to all these great projects that I could be part of. And before I knew it, I was completely stressed and I found it really difficult to focus on any single task. I felt like I was inside of a pinball machine. And I started talking to other people around me and I said, are you experiencing the same thing? And they said, yes.
7:01 Speaker 03 So being a psychologist and a scientist, I realized I could study this empirically. And so just had a basic question, how widespread is this?
7:12 Speaker 02 It feels almost surprising that people were feeling like this 20 years ago, when the digital landscape was so much simpler than it is now.
7:19 Speaker 03 It was, but you know, it started back then.
7:22 Speaker 02 And so your research has found that our attention spans have decreased over that 20-year period. But before we talk about how much they've decreased, can you explain how you actually went about tracking people's focus? Because there was a time where you were physically sitting behind people in offices, right?
7:38 Speaker 03 That's right. So 20 years ago, you know, we didn't have the software technology that we have today. So we used to shadow people. We would follow them with stopwatches. And every single time they switched their screen, switched their attention, we would, you know, record it with a stopwatch, note it down, and you know, we would follow them around. It was very labor-intensive. In fact, one time I was shadowing this guy and he turned around to me and he said, "It's like watching paint dry, isn't it?" And I said, "No, no, it's quite fascinating for me." But then software technology was introduced
8:21 Speaker 03 that enabled us to capture screen switching automatically.
8:26 Speaker 02 Now she could know precisely how much time people spent on any one window or browser tab or application without having to sit there for hours watching.
8:36 Speaker 03 So we could see exactly, you know, how frequently they were switching.
8:42 Speaker 02 Going back to sitting with them in the office, though, two questions come to my mind. One, that must have required a lot of focus on your part to be, you know, always keeping your eye on their screen and logging exactly what they're doing. You can't look away, otherwise you'd miss what was happening.
8:57 Speaker 03 That's right. It was very tiring, but it was also very interesting. You know, when you're really absorbed in something, you can focus. And so I was just filled with questions, like, "Why did this person suddenly stop what they were doing and switch to email?" You know, "What is this person thinking?"
9:15 Speaker 02 And the second question I have is, when you're sitting behind these people, are they not modifying their behavior because they know they're being watched?
9:22 Speaker 03 They could be, right? And that's always a concern anytime you do any kind of observational study. However, you know, these are people in real work environments and they can pose only so long. And so we would throw out the first half day of observation, just in case people might be posing. But if the phone rings or if people have emailed, you know, after a while, they have to respond to the demands of their work environment.
9:53 Speaker 02 And so what did you find about their attention spans 20 years ago? How often were they switching tasks?
9:59 Speaker 03 20 years ago, we found that they averaged about two and a half minutes on a task, which could be a project they're working on, could be email, could be whatever. This was actually before most social media.
10:13 Speaker 02 That sounds like a great stretch, two and a half minutes.
10:16 Speaker 03 Well, I was actually quite surprised at the time. That seemed very short to me because I thought, you know, what can you get done in two and a half minutes? You can't get very much done.
10:28 Speaker 02 And so how bad is our focus now compared to 20 years ago?
10:33 Speaker 03 So from the years 2016 through 2020, we found that attention on a screen averaged 47 seconds. And it was replicated by others as well, using similar kinds of software.
10:52 Speaker 02 And so if your question 20 years ago was, how is anyone getting anything done in two and a half minutes? Literally, how is anyone getting anything done in 40-odd seconds?
11:00 Speaker 03 Well, remember, it's an average, right? It's an average. Although, let me, let me tell you another statistic. If you look at the midpoint of our data, it's called the median, that's 40 seconds. So that means half of all of our observations were 40 seconds or less.
11:19 Speaker 02 And so, yeah, what impact does that have on a person if they're, every 40 seconds or so, switching screens or doing something else?
11:27 Speaker 03 Well, the, the impact is on our stress. People get stressed. So we also had people wear heart rate monitors in the workplace.
11:37 Speaker 03 And we had timestamps on all of our data. So we could actually look at the correlations between what they were doing and the stress they were experiencing. So we found that the more frequent that people's attention was switching, we found that the heart rate variability reflected that they had higher stress.
12:01 Speaker 02 So is it, does it mean that we are all just more stressed than we ever have been because of this constant switching?
12:07 Speaker 03 Well, yes, we are stressed more now than ever before, but it's hard to place causality. We, we can't say that switching our attention causes us to be stressed because we're looking at correlations. It could be when we're stressed, it's really hard to pay attention. And we also know that from research. So it's hard to tease apart. The, the only thing that we do know is that when people are switching their attention fast, they're stressed.
12:38 Speaker 02 And so I guess I'm wondering about like kids growing up now with this level of distraction compared to those of us who had a somewhat offline childhood and now, you know, live in this world. But people who grow up with this, will their brains wired differently because of this?
12:54 Speaker 03 I'm not sure we can say their brains are wired differently, but certainly their behaviors have changed and their expectations have changed. And so, you know, I, I do believe that we've developed a culture of impatience. Whereas, you know, when you and I had experiences pre-internet, we can wait in an elevator, we could wait at a bus stop. We didn't pull out our phones.
13:24 Speaker 02 What have you noticed about your kids' level of distraction?
13:28 Speaker 04 So there are always phones present when, you know, homework and working on computers and that sort of thing.
13:36 Speaker 02 This is neuropsychologist Dr. Emma Fitzgerald again.
13:39 Speaker 04 And I often say, how can you do that or put your phone away? But the kids seem to manage themselves and. Say that it works and it's fine.
13:48 Speaker 02 Right.
13:48 Speaker 04 And I talk to other friends and they say the same with their children. That, you know, there might be a laptop with YouTube going, plus checking Snapchat, plus doing homework.
13:57 Speaker 02 And so you're like, how are you managing to do homework with all of that going?
14:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because I know that, you know, when we multitask, our brains actually fatigue more quickly. You know, it's a bit like a battery, our attention span, and the more we switch, the more fatigued, you know, we get. And, and obviously then we make more mistakes or we aren't as efficient.
14:16 Speaker 02 I wanted to ask what it felt like for Emma's kids to be working like this with multiple screens going from such a young age. Because I know for me, doing it now as an adult is annoying and exhausting enough, even though I can't seem to stop. But I can't imagine growing up working like this.
14:34 Speaker 05 Hey, I'm Seb. Uh, my mom is Emma and I'm a high schooler in Adelaide.
14:39 Speaker 02 Tell me, how do you manage to do homework while you're checking Snapchat or whatever else, plus YouTube, plus whatever else?
14:46 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, well, it takes me a lot longer than probably necessary.
14:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, most of the time I am like going backwards and forth. I write a little bit and then like as soon as I think I did a good job on it. I treat myself with some social media.
15:01 Speaker 02 It's funny. It is like a little treat, right? Like, it's like a little brain chocolate that you're like.
15:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. What's your social media of choice? Where do you head to to, yeah, have that brain set?
15:11 Speaker 05 Um, TikTok or Snapchat.
15:13 Speaker 02 Okay, so Snapchat is actually still a thing?
15:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:16 Speaker 02 Okay, all right. And so do you feel distracted when you're trying to do your homework? Do you feel like it's actually annoying or dragging you down, or is it just your normal?
15:25 Speaker 05 I guess it's my normal because it's just always something that I've had. But, yeah, I do notice it takes me a lot longer to do stuff at home than, say, at school.
15:36 Speaker 02 Last year, Seb's school implemented a strict no phones in class policy, and at first he hated the idea.
15:43 Speaker 05 Everyone was completely against it. Yeah, no one was excited to hear the idea of that. But, yeah, my thoughts about now is I don't mind it too much. I feel like it has been helpful not having that distraction there. When I did have my phone, I would just pull it out to use whenever. But I still obviously think about it during the day, but I would barely use it as much.
16:03 Speaker 02 Right.
16:03 Speaker 05 Like, think about it as much.
16:04 Speaker 02 Right. So you're getting over the hump of like wanting to.
16:07 Speaker 04 Habit.
16:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, okay. Has that translated to changing your habits at home at all or not really?
16:13 Speaker 05 Uh, not really, because as soon as you get home after not using it all day, you finally get to go on whatever.
16:20 Speaker 04 Catch up.
16:21 Speaker 02 Yeah. Baby steps. In terms of the multiple screens while doing homework, though, yes, that can lead to fatigue and inefficiency and mistakes.
16:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's called video multitasking, and that's quite common with kids.
16:36 Speaker 02 But there's some good news. Gloria Mark says it's not always bad.
16:41 Speaker 03 Some kids are better at it than others. Now, if someone is listening to music, unless it's music with lyrics, music is probably not going to interfere too much with their math homework, because it's being processed in a different channel in the brain. And if television is going on in the background as well, yes, you probably will be distracted by the visual nature of the TV, but a lot of kids have acclimated.
17:10 Speaker 02 I just want to extrapolate to the future for a moment, though. I'm sure it's hard to say what the long-term impacts of a lot of this kind of stuff will be, but I'm curious about your thoughts, because given the fact that we now have 40-second attention spans, the fact that I have read the SAT, the American Standardized College Entrance Exam, has been shortened by 45 minutes to accommodate shorter attention spans, and the fact that the OECD recently reported a huge 10-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among 15-year-olds, and a lot of them cited digital distraction as an issue. Given all of that, what do you worry the effect of this will be in, say, 20 years' time,
17:55 Speaker 02 when, you know, most of the working population will have grown up with this level of digital distraction? Are we going to struggle to find, like, surgeons and pilots and people who really need to concentrate as part of their work?
18:07 Speaker 03 Well, I'm less worried about surgeons and pilots, although, you know, maybe we should be worried about them. But I, I think that, first of all, I would hope that as kids mature and as they realize the, the reality of the competitive workplace, that they maybe slow down their use of other devices. That, that may not be though. I think overall, we're developing a culture of impatience. And it's not just our digital devices. Shot lengths on film and TV have decreased. Now editors and directors make the average shot length about four seconds.
18:49 Speaker 02 Hmm.
18:49 Speaker 03 The other trend is that people are using faster playback speeds.
18:54 Speaker 02 Yes, on podcasts.
18:56 Speaker 03 On podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube actually measured this and YouTube found the average playback speed was about double speed, right? Two times the speed. So, you know, young people are used to it. So what I worry about is that our overall culture is just becoming more and more impatient.
19:17 Speaker 02 Hmm. This might sound like a very obvious or stupid question, but can you tell me more about why that impatience worries you? Like, why is that impatience bad? When you take it to society as a whole, all becoming impatient, what worries you about what that impatience will do?
19:32 Speaker 03 The main worry I have is the stress that we're creating, not just an impatient society, but a stressful society. I also worry about what it's doing to our relationships. So there is research that shows that when people have smartphones while they're interacting with other people, they have less enjoyment in the interaction. So they're being interrupted more. They're making less eye contact. There's less facial expression.
20:03 Speaker 02 And Gloria is most worried, not so much about Gen Z, but about Generation Alpha. Those are the kids born between 2010 and 2024.
20:13 Speaker 03 One of the main things that I worry about is the relationship of parents and children and how technology is interfering with bonding because they're looking at smartphones instead of looking at their kids.
20:28 Speaker 02 Gloria cites a 2021 study by researchers in Switzerland that found the more time parents spend on their phones while around their young children, the less sensitive and responsive they are to their children's emotional needs.
20:42 Speaker 03 Things like giving feedback, talking with your child, and using appropriate facial expressions. They're just being less sensitive to that because there's more time on smartphones. So I worry about the generation growing up now. They won't have the attention and the affection that they need.
21:06 Speaker 02 So all the signals point in a pretty depressing direction when it comes to our attention spans and distractibility and the downstream effects that might have. But Gloria says there are also a few myths related to focus that she's keen to bust. Myth one: The goal is to always be focused.
21:28 Speaker 03 Well, it's wrong because we can get ourselves exhausted. And so if you Google this, you'll see all kinds of solutions and consultants that say focus as long as possible. Here's how to focus for 10 hours straight. And it's a myth that people are able to do it because we have a limited set of cognitive resources. And these resources drain when we're focused. And exhaustion can turn into burnout. And so it's really important that people take breaks.
22:04 Speaker 02 More on breaks in a moment. How to take them, when to take them. For now, myth number two: The flow state is ideal.
22:13 Speaker 03 When a person is so deeply immersed in doing something, they're just unaware of the passage of time. Now, flow is great, and it happens if you're an artist. I used to be an artist. I would experience flow regularly. If you're an athlete, if you're doing a hobby. But here's the thing. When we look at information workers, the nature of their work that they do is not conducive for getting into a flow state. And so flow is relatively rare in the knowledge workplace. And so it doesn't mean it's bad.
22:53 Speaker 02 Myth three. We're primarily distracted because of the notifications on our phone and our lack of discipline. This feels like it applies to me. I feel like it's my phone pinging and bonging that's keeping me distracted, but maybe that's not correct. Why is that a myth?
23:06 Speaker 03 Well, because there are so many other forces at play here. Here's a good experiment. You can turn off notifications and chances are you will still have a short attention span because people are just as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted from something external to them. You know, we've seen this by observing people in the workplace. It's about half the time people self-interrupt. It's our habits. It's our urges to look up information. There is social pressure for us to check our email or social media and respond to it. There are so many other reasons.
23:49 Speaker 02 Okay, let's talk solutions and techniques for managing distraction in more detail now. Do you have a recommendation for when it's best to take a break?
23:58 Speaker 03 There's what's called a breakpoint in a task. And this is at the end of some logical separation in the task. So if I'm writing, this could be at the end of a chapter. And the idea is that when we resume the work, we want to reduce the amount of time that it takes to reorient. So if you stop in the middle of a paragraph and then you go off and do something else and then you try to resume work, it's going to require some effort to figure out, you know, what were you doing? And you'll end up doing redundant work. So look for breakpoints.
24:37 Speaker 02 Another time management or focus strategy you might have heard of is called the Pomodoro technique. What you do is you break a task into 25-minute chunks and you set a timer and you work for 25 minutes, then you take a five-minute break, and then you work for another 25 minutes and take another five-minute break. After doing this four times over, you take a longer break of about 15 to 30 minutes. This technique might work for a lot of people, but both Gloria and Emma aren't fans.
25:07 Speaker 03 Because it's a pretty rigid structure, right? And that may not be the schedule that works for most people.
25:15 Speaker 04 For me, that's probably not enough time, once you get in the swing of things, to then have to stop. So I like 45 minutes. It seems to work for me.
25:22 Speaker 03 What's better is to be aware of your own personal rhythm of attention. So we find that people have two attentional peaks, on average, one mid-morning, one mid-afternoon. So people's attention waxes and wanes over the day. And you can find out what your attentional rhythm is. You can keep a diary. I've had my students, as an exercise, keep a diary, where every 15 minutes or so, they write down how much attention they have, how much mental energy they have, and so on. It also is related to a person's circadian rhythm,
26:02 Speaker 03 if you're an early type or a late type. So plan to design your day, not just schedule your day, plan to do those tasks that require the hardest work at your peak attentional rhythm.
26:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, by mid-afternoon, my brain is definitely shutting down. That is not the time to start a new script for me. So, okay, if you had to distill down your recommendations on what people can do, whether they have good self-regulation or not, if you had to say your top three tips for what people can do to try and stay on task, what would that be?
26:35 Speaker 03 So the first thing I would do is get to know yourself and to develop meta-awareness, which is an awareness of what you're doing as it's unfolding. And when you're intentional, you can form a plan. Number two, I would recommend that people imagine their future selves. Usually when we think of future self, we think of something five years in the future. But you can imagine yourself at the end of the day. And consider how your current actions are going to affect your end of the day. And so what I recommend is when you have an urge to go on social media, and if you know you're someone that has a hard time pulling out.
27:20 Speaker 02 Me.
27:21 Speaker 03 Visualize yourself in the evening. What do you want to be doing? How do you want to feel? And so you have this concrete visualization. That's going to affect your current actions.
27:34 Speaker 02 Okay, and final tip?
27:36 Speaker 03 Well, I would recommend taking very significant and serious breaks. The Japanese have this expression, which I love. It's called "yo haku no pi," which means "the beauty of empty space." And when we think of work, we think of packing as much as we can into our day. And we don't think of leaving empty space around these different activities that we're doing. I started out as an artist. And what we learned in art is that the figure that you're painting, it's really important, but what's also important is the space around the figure.
28:18 Speaker 03 Because that really helps frame it and really helps set it off. And so when we think about our days, think about designing in intentionally this kind of empty space so that our minds can refresh.
28:32 Speaker 02 That is the most beautiful explanation for why we should, you know, schedule downtime into our day that I've ever heard. That is a stunning way of putting it.
28:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, I love this idea of "yo haku no pi." I'm not sure if the Japanese meant it to be that. So I think I probably took their idea and I'm using it in a very different way.
28:55 Speaker 02 It works.
28:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:56 Speaker 02 So thank you.
28:59 Speaker 02 That is Gloria Mark, author of the book Attention Span and Chancellor's Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine. You also heard from neuropsychologist Dr. Emma Fitzgerald and her teenage son, Seb. That is it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Isabella Tropiano. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next week.
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