How to Unf*ck Your Attention Span

Our attention spans are pretty f*cked. Even my neurotypical friends are talking about how hard it is to focus for longer than 30 seconds.

I first noticed this back in 2018, when Instagram stories came out. I was working a stressful office job, and it felt so much better to lose myself in Instagram for a few minutes than answer what felt like an endless stream of customer service emails. I also felt incredibly guilty for looking at my phone so often, so I started leaving my phone in the glove-compartment box of my car most mornings — just so I could concentrate. I now look at this as the beginning of the end for our collective attention spans.

Some of us have always struggled to focus, but I’m guessing that unrestrained access to the beautiful little slot machine in the palm of your hand has not exactly helped the situation.

In 2022, I began building technology boundaries into my life because I was feeling addicted (and anxious and depressed and unmotivated). If you want to hear more about that, listen to this episode of our podcast.

I’ve made a lot of changes in my relationship with technology over the last few years. Here are some of the most important ones that have helped me unf*ck my attention span. I missed my old brain, and these things have all helped:

✌️ Making peace with my ADHD (and generally attention spans in the 21st century)

It’s really easy to ping-pong between feeling great about your productivity and being completely in a shame spiral about it. I tried to resign myself to it, be self-deprecating about it, fight against it, but in the end these extreme highs and lows wore me down. I decided to try making peace with it instead.

This means, accepting what happens, no matter how much I wish it was different. It means looking out for my future self as often as I can. Mostly, making peace with it means understanding that things like focus, motivation, and follow through are going to feel like work for me, so I might as well enjoy the process as much as I can by being more neutral about it.

📱 Putting a screen time widget on my home screen

Okay, first of all, if your notifications are still going gangbusters, that’s where you should start. Turn that sh*t off — as much as you can, anyway.

Second— put a screen time widget on your home screen. It is horrifying and shocking to see your screen time if you have no idea what it is, but it’s something to slowly chip away at (and give yourself grace if you don’t like what you see). At the end of the day, you can’t change something you refuse to look at.

Here’s a Youtube video if you want to learn how to do that

🌿 Tech Rest

I’ve written this blog and published this podcast about Tech Rest. If you’re new to the idea, this is the big one that turned my relationship with screens around. It’s an integrative practice where you lower technology stimulation for a defined period of time — an hour, a day, a whole week; you get to decide. Tech Rest helps you reconnect with how you spend your time and redefines how you experience it. On my last one, this is what I ended up texting MJ:

🥾 Getting off-screen hobbies

I know this seems kind of obvious, but it must be said. You’re going to have to replace your screen time with off-screen hobbies. Here are some of mine right now:

• reading

• hiking

• running

• singing and playing my ukulele

• lifting weights

• writing/doodling in my journal

• putting on a podcast/audiobook and literally just staring into space

👀 Sit + Stare time

Okay, speaking of staring into space — let’s talk about sit + stare time. I started doing this when I wasn’t in the mood for meditation, but I was trying to kick the habit where I would wake up and scroll my phone for a few hours. I was just casually filling my brain with everyone’s nonsense before I even got out of bed. That made me feel so hectic, and I knew it could’t be good for my mental health or my ADHD.

So, one day I woke up, made coffee, got cozy on the couch and just sat and stared out the window for 10 minutes with my phone in another room. Life changed!

I go through phases of loving meditation, or taking walks with no headphones (raw-dogging my walks, as the kids say) — and both of those are awesome to help me regulate my body and have better focus throughout the day. But the one I’m always in the mood for is sit + stare time.

Sit + Stare helps me stay present when I’d otherwise be disassociating and distracting myself. It feels like it cleanses my brain. It’s a pocket of nothingness in a sea of noise. On top of that, it’s really helped my ADHD, because the ADHD brain needs practice slowing down and staying with things — this one just happens to be cozy and chill and only takes about 10 minutes a day.

If you’ve started implementing tech boundaries or done anything to help get your old brain back, I’d love to hear what works for you! If something on this list inspires you, what do you want to try? Let me know in the comments.