Difficulty focusing? External forces are making it harder to pay attention

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Author Johann Hari shares how difficult it is for people to focus and pay attention now, how we got here and what can be done about it. He talks with host James Brown about the crisis hitting not just individuals, but collectively, making it harder for us to make decisions and solve problems as a society.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

James Brown:

Hello and welcome to USA Today's Five Things. I'm James Brown. Thanks for listening. Johann Hari, he's a British journalist who has spent most of the last decade writing books about big problems like the war on drugs, anxiety, and depression. And in his latest work, the agents of distraction and how they've stolen our ability to focus, we begin by defining our terms. Johann Hari, welcome to Five Things

Johann Hari:

Oh, I'm so happy to be with you. Thanks.

James Brown:

How do you define focus?

Johann Hari:

Attention is your ability to selectively attend to things in your environment. So I'm talking to you now, but if I turn my head very slightly, I can see outside the window. There's loads of people walking on the street. If I zoom out a little bit, I can hear my air conditioning. I'm surrounded by loads of stuff, my TV, my phone, which I've locked away, which I'll tell you about in a minute, loads of different stuff. But I'm zoning all of that out and I'm homing in on you, and I'm like, what did he just ask me? Oh, right. He asked me to define focus, and we are living in a really big crisis of attention. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for less than a minute. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem. So we are really struggling to do that thing that we are talking about.

James Brown:

So the average office worker keeps attention for under a minute. How do we know this?

Johann Hari:

Professor Gloria Mark, she monitors people as they're working and they're switching tasks extremely rapidly. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne. I did a really deep dive into what they've discovered and what I learned is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse, and loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing in recent years. So if you are struggling to focus and pay attention, if your kids are struggling to focus and pay attention, it's not your fault. It's not their fault. It's not something wrong with you or something wrong with them. We are all being subjected to pretty big forces. Some of them are things I never even thought about. The way we eat is profoundly affecting our focus and attention. The air pollution is profoundly affecting our focus and attention. The way our kids' schools work, the way our offices work, there's a huge array of factors.

James Brown:

All right, let's pull some of those threads apart. You made the claim that the way we eat affects our focus. Please explain.

Johann Hari:

So let's imagine you have the standard American breakfast, right? What I had this morning. You wake up, you have either sugary cereal or you have buttered white bread that's been toasted, right? What that does is that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain, right? It releases a lot of glucose and it feels great. You're like, whoa, I'm awake. I'm ready for the day. But what happens is you've released so much energy so fast into your brain that you'll get to your desk a couple of hours later, or your kid will get to the school desk and you'll have a huge energy slump. Your energy will just crash. And when your brain energy crashes, you experience what's called brain fog. You just can't think very clearly until you have another sugary carb treat, right?

As Dale Pinnock, one of the leading nutritionists in Europe put it to me. The way we eat puts us on a rollercoaster of energy spikes and energy crashes, energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day that give us these long patches of unnecessary brain fog. Whereas if you eat food that releases energy more steadily, let's say you have for breakfast oatmeal with blueberries in it, that releases energy much more steadily. You won't have that energy spike and energy crash from it, and you'll be able to pay attention much more deeply. Now, obviously that's not your fault or my fault. The food industry has completely changed. So we've got to understand both changing individual behavior and the wider context in which it's happening, there are loads of things that we can do as individuals to defend ourselves and our kids against these factors that are harming us. One is in relation to food, but I'll give you an example of another one.

Over there, I can show it to you if you want. I've got something called a K Safe. It's very simple. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top, and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day, right? I won't sit down and watch a film with my partner, unless we all put our phones in the phone jail. I won't have my friends around for dinner unless we were all imprison our phones. It's difficult at first, but I explained to them, 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 are proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention.

And when your ability to focus and pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals is diminished. Your ability to solve your problems is diminished. You feel worse about yourself because you actually are more incompetent. And when you start to get your attention back in the very targeted ways that I write about, you begin to feel competent again. So I go through loads of things that are defense that we can all do, but I want to be really honest with people because I don't feel most books about attention are leveling with people. I'm passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will really help. On their own, they're not going to entirely solve the problem because at the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day. There's been these huge changes, and then they're leaning forward and going, "Hey buddy, you should learn to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch all the time."

You want to go, all right, I'll learn to meditate. That's very valuable, but you need to stop pouring this itching powder on me. So we also need to have a component of this where we go on offense against the forces that are doing this to us.

James Brown:

You called multitasking a mass delusion. I'd like to focus on that.

Johann Hari:

Well, the term multitasking comes from computers. Computers have more than one processor. They can multitask. That's where the term was invented for. We are not computers. We can't live by the logic of machines. We cannot multitask. Part of the problem is we've created an environment that does not work for us in many ways. There's lots of good things about our environment, of course. The whole array of these forces will continue to hack and invade us, but we can take on those forces. They're not that powerful. They're not that popular. Our ancestors have taken on bigger fights than this.

James Brown:

Social media is quite popular as is, and their business models are, as you described very well, they're designed to distract us. If I'm Mark Zuckerberg, if I'm Elon Musk, if I'm the folks over at Bite Dance who own TikTok, we have made a mint. These are not altruistic institutions. Why would they change their model? Isn't the choice ours not theirs?

Johann Hari:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. They will only stop through government regulation, and you'll notice it's very interesting. We are in very much better than me, we are in very polarized times, and this is about the only thing that Tucker Carson, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all agree on is that we need to regulate big tech. So of course, social media is popular. I'm in favor of social media.

What we are seeing is unregulated social media. That is not popular, right? Because it's having disastrous effects on all sorts of aspects of our lives. So if I was saying, let's abolish social media, absolutely that would be unpopular. But I'm not saying that that would be foolish and wrong. I'm saying we need to regulate to give us models. Look, at the moment, we are using technologies that work against us in the interest of a tiny number of very wealthy owners. Now, I want technology that works for us in our interests to make our lives better. That's entirely achievable. That technology exists. We could redesign Facebook to do that. We could redesign TikTok or these apps could be redesigned to do that very easily, right? But you're absolutely right. They're not going to do it of their own accord, they're going to do it if we make them do it, and we can make them do it

James Brown:

Through regulation.

Johann Hari:

Of course, yeah.

James Brown:

They're not going to do it spontaneously, are they?

Johann Hari:

Yeah, of course. Through regulation, and this has already begun.

James Brown:

Where has it begun?

Johann Hari:

In France, 2011, huge crisis of what they called low burnout, which I don't think going to need to translate. So the French government set up a inquiry. One of the key factors was that 40% of French workers felt they could never stopped checking their phone or email while they were awake because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night. And if they didn't answer, they'd be in trouble, right? Now, that's a very recent change. I don't know about you. I don't remember my parents when I was a kid ever getting contacted at home by their boss. Literally, it never happened, right? When we were kids, the only people who were on call were doctors and the president and even doctors were on call all the time. So we've gone from almost no one being-

James Brown:

That's true, isn't it?

Johann Hari:

So we've gone from almost no one being on call to almost half the economy being on call, right?

All the time. An extraordinary change, which of course screws up your attention. If you never get time to relax, you're always... You're with your kids, but you're half worried about your email. You're having a bath, but you're half worried about your email. You're reading a book, but you're half worried about your email. Of course, that screws up your attention. So the French government under pressure from labor unions, they would never have done it if labor unions hadn't pressured them, introduce something that went a long way towards solving that problem. Just said, every French worker, your work hours need to be laid out in your contract. They need to be written down. And when your work hours are over, unless they're paying you overtime, you don't have to look at your email and you don't have to check your phone. So when I was in Paris, Renter Kill, the pest control company, got fined 70,000 euros for complaining that one of their workers didn't check his email an hour after he left work.

But when everyone does it together and they pressure the government to do it by law, then it becomes possible, right? So that's an example. There's many other examples. Lots of governments over the world is starting to take on big tech. In Australia, a conservative government, not my politics, but a conservative government led by a guy called Scott Morrison, took on Facebook, said to regulate them. Facebook went crazy, threatened to cut the whole of Australia off, and then what happened? Quietly they back down because we are much more powerful than them, but we are more powerful than them when we stand together and make them alter their technology so they work for us, not against us.

James Brown:

Johann, hurry, thanks for joining me.

Johann Hari:

Oh, well, a pleasure. Thank you so much.

James Brown:

Thanks to Shannon and Ray Green for editing this episode. For all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown. And as always, be well.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Difficulty focusing? External forces are making it harder to pay attention