And how we can get them back.
I don’t know about you, but my attention span has suffered in recent years. I used to be able to read for hours uninterrupted, eat on my own in silence, or sit at a bus stop without a phone to occupy me. Now I find it difficult to get through more than a dozen pages of a book without stopping to pick up my phone, even if I don’t know what I’m picking it up for. Meals (when not being enjoyed with company) have become a time to watch an episode of my favorite show or a YouTube video. If I find myself sitting at a bus stop for more than 30 seconds, I find it almost impossible to wait without spending some time responding to texts or scrolling through Instagram reels. Even writing this article is taking more time than it should. Every time my phone buzzes, I reach for it on instinct. The moment I face the smallest bit of difficulty or pause while writing, I feel this intense desire to do something, anything, else.
The problem for most of us is that the phone is always there, right beside us. And it’s so easy! There is no learning curve, no moment of struggle where your brain has to strain to focus. It is designed to draw us in immediately and effortlessly. Of course, my brain would rather have the easy dopamine hit of half an hour spent scrolling through videos I won’t even remember than the more arduous-to-achieve dopamine hit of having finished something that took time and effort. It isn’t rocket science, but it is a trap.
I know I am not alone in this. It isn’t hard to see that many people are struggling with an overreliance on technology that is weakening their ability to focus. When sitting at a bus stop, standing in a long line, or waiting for a class to begin, I see almost everybody (including me) holding their phone as though it were a lifeline. When in a large lecture hall, half the computers I see are open to some sort of game, word puzzle or shopping site rather than a document for taking notes. Most of the excuses for this seem to be that people find their classes “boring” or “useless.” But how much of that is because we aren’t really taking the time to actually listen to anything or anyone? How much of that is because we no longer have the attention spans to sit through something that isn’t designed to be immediately riveting and easy to digest, like keys being dangled in front of a baby?
It isn’t a personal moral failure to be struggling with phone addiction or a weakened attention span. But it is our responsibility to attempt to fix it if we want to get the most out of not just college, but the rest of our lives. It is important to become used to being bored again, to the occasional struggle that comes before meaningful success. Replacing time spent on screens with community building and new hobbies is another way we can fight back against the attempted theft of our focus. By spending more time engaging with the real world around us, even if it is boring, difficult or inconvenient, we get so much more out of life and build back the attention spans we have lost, allowing us to concentrate on more important things.