My Focus Was Stolen — Here’s How I Fought Back

If you feel like it is becoming more difficult to focus, then you are not alone.

I realised my technology usage was at an all-time high, and I was feeling the consequences. I noticed that I was less creative, more reliant on tools like AI, drawn into scrolling and searching, but worst of all, that I was now no longer using my technology deliberately.

Thankfully, I found the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and I found the tools to regain my concentration and focus for longer.

Today, I want to go through why our focus has been impacted, the larger action that will be required to fix this for good, and the individual steps we can all take to regain our focus.

🧘What Has Happened to Our Focus?

In Stolen Focus, Hari outlines 12 causes of an ongoing attention crisis which affects us all. If you want to see all of these causes, then check out my book notes here on this subject.

Many of us will assume that technology is the primary cause of our loss of focus. However, there are far more wide-ranging areas of our lives which impact our ability to focus.

For example, the following causes surprised me at first, but make more sense after reading Hari’s work:

1. Our Deteriorating Diets: The more processed food and drink you consume, the harder it will be for you to achieve focus.
2. A Surge in Stress: When you are stressed, not only is it harder to focus, but you also struggle to sleep due to an inability to wind down.
3. Confinement of our Children: Evidence shows that restricting children from their desire to move around impacts their attention and overall health negatively.

🖼️The Bigger Picture

It can be framed in popular media that our loss of focus is due to our inability to activate self-control.

What Hari’s book shows us is that there are huge companies with enormous amounts of power working to keep you on their platforms. The more we use their apps and software, the more money they are set to make.

This is known as surveillance capitalism, and it is hard to see this ending without a change to the legislation these companies work against.

It would be easy if the answer were all on us as individuals to change our behaviours; however, the reality is that a collective effort will be required to make the necessary changes.

🪜The Individual Changes We Can Make

Despite an end to surveillance capitalism being the ultimate way to regain our focus, there are individual changes that will help:

1. Slow down to think more deeply: avoid multitasking and instead turn to monotasking, focusing on one task for a period of time. Start with 15 minutes and try to increase this number over time.
2. Find our flow state: flow is the ultimate form of work, so remove distractions from your environment and find a task that pushes you just outside your comfort zone.
3. Be kinder to ourselves; knowing that there are thousands of engineers and marketers working against you, remember that it’s not completely down to your self-control.

💭Closing Thoughts

Our ability to focus is constantly under pressure in a modern world, which sees information coming at us faster than ever.

It helped me to understand that this isn’t just about my ability to exercise self-control, but is influenced by larger factors. Combining large-scale collective action and individual change will be the best way forward to regain our focus.

If you are someone who has noticed their own loss of focus, I’d love to hear from you. So please drop me a message.

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