Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Fix Your Focus to Achieve Your Goals in 2023 | Johann Hari #323

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 228 of the podcast with the brilliant Johan Hari, author of the book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention. Now, our ability to focus and pay attention is at the heart of living a happy and meaningful life. In this clip, Johan explains how our attention is being stolen and shares some steps that we can take to start getting it back.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Our ability to focus and put our attention where we want it to be, I think it's literally what underpins our experience of being human our relationships our passions our hobbies you know our interactions with others our ability to know who we are we need focus to be able to do that yet focus is something that very few of us have in the way that we would ideally want i think that's so important the more i at this, the more I realized this is the foundational issue. If we don't deal with this, we can't deal with anything else. If you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals in life. If anyone thinks about a time you've achieved a goal, right, whether it was being a good parent, setting up a business, writing a book, whatever it might be, that goal required a lot of sustained focus,

Starting point is 00:02:45 right? If your focus breaks down, and I think there's good evidence our focus is breaking down, you're less able to achieve your goals for yourself, right? Which obviously is a very painful thing for a person to experience. Also, you're less able to form connections with other people. Sustained connections require lots of attention. To have a good relationship, you have to be able to pay attention, whether it's a friendship, a romantic relationship, whatever it is. You have to be able to pay attention to the other person. I think most people can feel the truth of what's happening to us. You know, there's, for example, one small study found that the average college student

Starting point is 00:03:21 now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds. In fact, the median amount of time they focus is 19 seconds. The average worker sits at their desk for eight hours a day, but is only actually focused on their work for three hours a day. So it's like we're living in a culture that is pouring itching powder over us all the time. We can feel this dissolution happen. With each year that passes, things that require deep focus, like reading a book, become more and more like running up and down an escalator. And I wanted to figure out, well, why is this happening to us? And most importantly, how do we get our minds back? How do we restore our attention and focus? There's an amazing guy named Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists

Starting point is 00:04:04 in the world. I went to interview him at Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. I went to interview him at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one thing at a time. That's it, right? This is a fundamental fact about the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years.

Starting point is 00:04:24 It's not going to change on any timeframe we're going to see, you could only think about one thing at once, but we have fallen from mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. But what happens when Professor Miller's colleagues get people into labs and test this? They look at, well, what happens when people think they're doing lots of things at once? And what they discover is in fact, you're not doing lots of things at once. You're juggling between them. Your consciousness papers over it. It gives a seamless impression of consciousness, but actually you're juggling very rapidly between them. So let's say, for example, I've left it in your kitchen, but I've got my phone over there, right? Let's imagine when you

Starting point is 00:04:59 were talking, I just glanced at my text, right? My text. I take out my phone and glanced at my text. It feels like I can still listen to Rangan. It's one second to glance at my text, right? My text. I take out my phone and glanced at my text. It feels like I can still listen to Ron. It's one second to glance at my text. But what happens is I'm focused on you. I glance at my text and my brain refocuses. Oh, my friend Rob's texted me. Oh, his mom's got out of hospital. Right.

Starting point is 00:05:15 And then I have to refocus on you, right? And it turns out this refocusing takes a significant amount of your mental bandwidth. And that's just one switch, right? And it comes with a whole series of costs that have been shown in labs. So one is, it just takes a certain amount of your brain power to do switching. Imagine I switch the text and then I'm like, oh, what was on Facebook? And what's on the TV in the corner over there? And you can see how that begins to jam up my mental bandwidth.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Another way is when you're switching a lot, you start to make mistakes. And then you have to go back and correct your mistakes. That takes a certain amount of your time. Another effect that you get when you switch tasks a lot is an effect on your memory. To convert your experiences into memories takes a certain amount of mental power. And if that power is instead being deployed on constantly switching between things, actually you just remember less of what you experience. The fourth effect is that you become much less creative because creativity requires the space to let your mind wander. When you let your mind wander, you think back over things without even feeling effortful. You think back over the experiences you've had, you know, you connect different things

Starting point is 00:06:19 together. That's how new ideas pop together. That's where creativity comes from. If your mind is jammed up with switching, you significantly less creative when your brain is wandering in fact it's doing lots of crucial things most important is it's making sense of what you've experienced right it's going back over what you've experienced it's filtering it it's thinking what what what did that mean right when you've got space to mind wander you think about what the experiences you've had mean you begin to anticipate the future it It begins to say, oh, what will happen next? Right? It begins to make connections between the different things you've learned. And mind wandering is an absolutely crucial form of thought. And we are living in a huge crisis of

Starting point is 00:06:58 mind wandering because at the moment we're in this awful combination where we are neither spotlight focused a lot of the time, nor are we wandering we're jammed up with switching which is the the worst combination of all right we're operating so many of us as a kind of low-grade version of who we could be exactly that's a brilliant way of putting it that's exactly right you know we've we're downgrading who we are and we're so used to it that we think it's normal, right? But it's not normal. I think many of us probably don't realise what the over unintentional use of technology is doing to our brains and who we are as people. I spend a lot of time talking to people in Silicon Valley who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live,

Starting point is 00:07:49 in which our kids now spend so much of their time, the key aspects of social media apps and other aspects of the internet. And I remember certain moments with them, it was fascinating to realize, oh, even though they designed these things, they're not immune to these problems themselves. There's a wonderful man named Dr. James Williams, who was a Google engineer, who as subsequently was so horrified by what they were doing, has quit and become, I think probably the most important philosopher of attention in the world at the moment. And when I went to go and see James in Moscow, he told me about this moment that was really important for him. He spoke at a tech conference and he's speaking to exactly the people who are designing our world, right? And he said to them, is there anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're designing?

Starting point is 00:08:30 And nobody put up their hand. There's another moment with Tristan Harris, an amazing Google engineer who's become a dissident. He said to me, he had this moment when he was working on Gmail. And they wanted to increase the number of users, but they particularly wanted to increase the number of times a day a user opened the app and one of his colleagues had an idea he said why don't we make it so that whenever you receive an email your phone vibrates a little bit and everyone said that's a good idea and a week later Tristan was walking around San Francisco and he just starts hearing these vibrations like the chirping of birds all around him these vibrations, like the chirping of birds all around him. And he suddenly realizes we did that.

Starting point is 00:09:11 And that was happening all over the world as a result of one colleague's decision. In fact, he calculated about a year later that they were responsible. That one decision was responsible for 11 billion interruptions every day to people's day. But at the moment, we live in a gap between what many of us want to do and what many of us feel we can do and together we can close that gap so some of that is about empowering people in their everyday life to know more about these factors that are invading our attention and empower them to fight back at a personal level and there's all sorts of techniques i'm gonna give you a very simple example i have in my office and in my flat what's called a K-safe. It's very simple.

Starting point is 00:09:46 It's a little plastic safe. You take the lid off. You put your phone in it. You put the lid on. You turn a dial at the top, and it'll lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a week, right? Every day, I lock my phone away for four hours a day. Every day, just so I can get clear headings. Every day without fail.

Starting point is 00:10:00 I find that idea of a K- case safe interesting because on one level, it's kind of like we want our smartphones. And again, there's so many benefits of them. But one, there's so much that we're not going to downgrade and get a dumb phone or be more intentional with our use, which I know is very, very difficult.

Starting point is 00:10:20 We're physically going to buy something to put it in a bank. But we can't, do you know what I mean? It's kind of something, I think it says something about where we've got to as a society, doesn't it? It reminds me a lot of what Tristan Harris said when he testified before the Senate. He said, look, you can try having self-control,

Starting point is 00:10:36 but every time you open these apps, there are 10,000 engineers at the other side of the screen trying to break your self-control. I think most people, if you ask them, is your phone hijacking your attention, taking you away from some of the things that you would probably rather be doing in your life? I think a lot of people would say, yeah, yeah, I can sort of see that, right? I can see that, but I can't resist. And just to share what I started doing a couple of summers ago, I won't say well, I decided, right, this August, kids are off school. I want to be present with them. I want

Starting point is 00:11:14 to spend time with them. I don't want to get sucked in to the vortex of social media and see what's going on. And so I decided, right, this August, I'm going off. I deleted the apps from my phone. I think at the time, I don't know what was on it, but Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever I was on my phone at the time, I deleted them. And I remember like the first few days, and you just keep picking it up and almost reflexively, oh, there's no app there. Okay, put it away. I think it took maybe five days until that had stopped. And then it was just this gorgeous calm and relaxation and an enhanced ability to focus and be present. No sort of distraction when you want to be with your wife or your kids. And it was incredible. Now, I also will acknowledge, because sometimes you do this,

Starting point is 00:12:11 people go, well, that's not a solution, right? And you obviously in the book talk about, we can't just put it all on personal responsibility. But is there anything in that you would resonate with? We've all become accustomed to all throughout the day receiving the thin, insistent signals of the internet hearts likes especially people in the public eye in the way that you and i are you know hearts and likes and when you're withdrawn when those are gone it's like the world has fallen silent for a while right and it feels rather eerie it's like it's hard to be with ordinary life if you become accustomed to these signals

Starting point is 00:12:45 i was really struck by i had the similar thing to you which is when i stopped i had these after the initial relief i had these enormous cravings but then once i kind of got through that withdrawal i was a mess because i had honestly thought maybe my brain is just a bit broken. And I was amazed by how rapidly my full mental capacities came back. I could read like I did when I was in my early twenties, but basically all day if I wanted to. When you go off these platforms and you drastically reduce your consumption of tech for a few weeks, you start to feel different. You start to see how you could live an alternate reality. And you wrote in the book that you're a better person when you're not on Twitter. And it just made me think, you know, it's a useful exercise,

Starting point is 00:13:40 isn't it, for all of us to do? What kind of activities are we doing when we're the best version of ourselves hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip i hope you have a wonderful weekend and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next friday next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Fix Your Focus to Achieve Your Goals in 2023 | Johann Hari #323

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