Lately, I’ve been wondering if something is wrong with my brain.
It feels a little silly to admit, especially given the fact that my evidence is flimsy at best. The worry comes when I compare myself now to my younger self, who could spend hours laser focused on writing stories, creating art, or even just watching TV without pulling out a mobile game or using social media to keep myself occupied. Nowadays, I use an app to lock myself out of the apps that cause the most distractions because I don’t have the restraint to not pick it up on impulse. I’ve created systems in my life to keep myself in check, like color-coding my closet so that I’m more likely to hang up my clothes after taking them off since I know exactly where they go, but a change in my routine or environment can leave me spiraling. Oftentimes, I’ll start a task, and then next thing I know, three other tasks have appeared in its wake, none of them completed, even though I can’t remember abandoning one in favor of the others.
I am far from a certified mental health professional, and I’m not sure any of these things indicate an actual problem with my brain. Still, the fact that it feels like I could approach my interests with more focus and discipline in elementary school than I can now bothers me intensely, yet I feel almost powerless to combat it. My systems help for sure, but they feel more like a bandaid when what I really need is antiseptic and a suture kit.
As a senior studying secondary education, I have been student-teaching at a local high school for the past semester, and one thing that has astounded me is how attached students are to their phones. I graduated high school four years ago, and as much as I relied on my phone as a crutch in an awkward social situation or to keep myself entertained when I was a teen, I personally couldn’t imagine blatantly using it to play games, scroll through Instagram, and text my friends in the middle of class and in full view of my teachers without any attempt to conceal it. Though I know I had peers who had their phones taken for being caught using them in class on more than one occasion, the issue feels more widespread and pervasive than it was during my own high school years, and it’s hard not to pass judgment when I ask a student to put it away and it’s back out as soon as my back is turned or when I’m in the middle of a lesson and instead of faces, I see heads pointed down towards their phones, meaning I’m going to have to endlessly repeat instructions and borderline beg for even five minutes of focus.
When I stop to think about it further, I realize that during the pandemic, when these students were in the seventh and eighth grade, there was probably very little they could do, both due to lockdown restrictions and due to the stress of watching the familiar world that they already had such a limited understanding of fall to pieces in front of their eyes, so they turned to their phones for comfort, distraction, and to pass the time. Who can really blame them for that? The trouble is that, with this all occurring at such a pivotal time in their development, it’s hard not to worry that this will have lifelong implications, resulting in consequences that I don’t think anyone can fully anticipate.
Last year, I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (or rather, I listened to it, as audiobooks have become my go-to method of consuming books both because of the constraints of my schedule and, of course, my attention span). Part of the book is written in the style of a memoir, where the author recounts the three months he spent living in isolation without a smartphone or internet access in an attempt to repair his ability to focus. It worked—until he returned to his normal life and his newfound way of living was quickly overtaken by technology’s ubiquitous integration into our society, and he found himself right back where he started. If you, like me and the vast majority of people, don’t have the resources to drop everything, move somewhere new, and force your brain to ease off its dependence on the Internet, this may seem disheartening. But Hari reiterates that there are things that we, as individuals, can do to ease the strain while existing in this world designed to keep us plugged in. There are apps like the one I mentioned earlier that prevent me from using my phone when I’m not meant to, as well as screen time monitoring and developing offline hobbies that promote intrinsic motivation and have more appeal than mindless scrolling. Still, I yearn for the time, all those years ago, when my attention span wasn’t a worry at all.