How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Stolen Focus: Johann Hari

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Like so many of us, author Johann Hari noticed that the more time he spent looking at screens and switching from device to device, the harder it became for him to concentrate and achieve his goals. After talking to more than 200 doctors, researchers, and neuroscientists around the world, Johann came to a sobering conclusion: the human race is in the middle of an attention crisis. He examines this societal challenge in his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.This week on How I Built This Lab, Johann and Guy discuss the factors chipping away at our ability to focus, and what we can do to reclaim our attention. They also talk about flow states – how we get into them, and why everyone in the business world should be working to achieve them. Check out Johann’s book here: https://amzn.to/3L3wsMCSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we break format and experiment with ideas and stories that you might not hear on our Monday episode. So have you ever sat in front of a book for 10 or 20 minutes only to discover that you haven't paid attention to the meaning of the words that you've just read them but not really paid attention? And when that happens, do you, like me, feel really bad? Like you've failed, that you've allowed yourself to get distracted by thoughts.

Well, you are not alone. And according to my guest today, Johann Hari, our species is in the middle of an attention crisis. And it has everything to do with powerful forces all around us. Your attention is a commodity, and everyone and everything around you is vying for it. But if you're building a business or trying to change something inside of your company, that requires focus. And so for many of us, that's become really, really hard to maintain. Johan Hari is a longtime journalist and best-selling author. His two previous books tackled depression and addiction.

This new one is called Stolen Focus, Why You're a lot. you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again. Johan, it's great to have you on. Welcome to the show. Guy, it's always a joy to talk to you. So I can remember in college, when I was in college, I would sit in libraries, right? And I would concentrate and focus on a book for hours. And today, in order for me to get through a book, I have to totally isolate myself from, like, from my phone, my family, the internet.

And even then it's hard. And I've just kind of chalked it up to getting older, that, you know, your attention declines over time. And that's just kind of been my conclusion. But that's not entirely true. It's largely not true. The reason that I wrote the book is because of exactly that feeling that you were having. So I noticed that with each year that passed, things that require deep focus that are really deep to my sense of self, like reading a book, having deep conversations, watching movies. We're getting more and more like running up a down escalator.

Do you know what I mean? Like, I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this seemed to be happening to everyone around me. I was particularly worried about the young people in my life. You often seem to be kind of whirring at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could touch them. So I want to figure out, you know, is this just a kind of anecdotal sense? Is it just aging?

Or is something else going on here? So I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to really dig into this. And quite early on, when you look at the, the evidence. It's quite shocking. You know, the average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. Three minutes. I read that in the book. It's staggering. I can't believe it. Three minutes. It's funny. People have different shocked reactions. Some people say, I can't believe it's as short as three minutes. And then other people go, I can't believe

there are some people who get through a whole three minutes without being interrupted, right? So I wanted to get to the bottom of this. So I went on a really big journey all over the world from Miami to Moscow, to Melbourne, to Montreal, not just to cities that begin with the letter M. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world on attention and focus and really dug deeply into their research over three years. And what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. They range really widely. They include some aspects of our tech, but they go much further from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we overwork, to the hours we don't sleep. And, and, and, and, and, you know,

And what I learned crucially is that your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces. And once you understand that, it opens up a very different set of solutions. So, all right. So let's kind of go back to your own experience because you describe yourself in the book as somebody who was just immersed in stimulus, right? Stimuli. Like you would listen to podcasts when you'd walk and you'd look while you were scrolling on Twitter

and, you know, waiting in line at the grocery store. And this is familiar to all of us. Like I don't remember now a time when I used to wait in line for an airplane or on the grocery store without my phone. Like I don't remember what that was like anymore. And we're all doing that. I mean, I shouldn't say all of us, but I think most people listening, when did you first kind of come to the realization that you were this person too? What essentially is this is sort of crept up on us. And what you end up with is this feeling.

I would say to anyone listening, just think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, learning to play the guitar, being a good parent, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of requires a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And when focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, and your ability to solve your problems breaks down. And I think in a sense what happened is more that there was a lag where I realized I was getting less. good at achieving my goals and I was getting less good at solving my problems. And when you can't pay attention in the same way that you used to, it's almost like you become a kind

of stump of yourself. You can sense what you would have been had you been able to apply yourself, but you feel like you can't get there. And I think it was more that sort of slight sense of being lost in my own life, of not quite being able to get at the things I used to get at. And of course seeing that happen to almost everyone around me to some degree, particularly young people, that I then sort of tried to infer backwards. Okay, I've noticed I've got that feeling and I've noticed that I'm not very good at paying attention at the moment. Could there be some connection? And many experts help me to understand this. But one of the most insightful is a man named Dr James Williams, who used to be at the heart of Google, a senior strategist,

became very uncomfortable with what they were doing, quit and became, I would argue, the leading philosopher of attention in the world right now. And he had this, he's developed this more complex way of thinking about attention, I think really gets at that sense of being lost in your own life. So there's one form of attention. When most people think about attention, they think about one kind, which is generally known as your spotlight. So I'm sitting here in my apartment. If I walked over to the fridge to get another Diet Coke, and on the way I got a text, and I forgot why I went to the fridge and I wandered back into this room, that would be a loss of my spotlight. Your spotlight is your ability to filter out all the kind of noise.

and stimuli around you, narrow down to one short-term goal and achieve it, right? Right. And we can all see, I think, and give plenty of evidence if you want, but I think we could all see that that kind of attention is really being disrupted. But above that, there's another level of attention, which Dr. Williams calls your starlight. And that's not how you achieve your short-term goals. That's how you achieve more medium or long-term goals.

It's not, I want to go to the fridge and get a Diet Coke. It's more like, well, I want to set up a business or, you know, I want to, I want to be a good parent or whatever it might be. And if your spotlight gets disrupted enough, then this higher level, your starlight also gets disrupted. It's called your starlight because when you're walking through the desert at night, you're trying to figure out what direction you go in, you look to the stars and you follow that direction. But there's another level of attention even beyond that, which Dr. Williams calls your daylight. And that is how you even know what your long-term goals are in the first place. How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent?

How do you know you want to learn to play the guitar, right? To even have a sense of what your goals are, you have to have periods of deep focus, you have to have rest, you have to have periods when you let your mind wander and stumble upon things creatively. We've lost that whole layer. And then I would argue, and I know Dr. Williams would agree with this, there's another level. By the way, it's called daylight because you can see a room best when it's flooded with clear daylight. But I would argue there's even a level above that, which I would call our stadium lights,

which is not just your ability to formulate and achieve your longer term goals, but our ability as a society to formulate and achieve collective goals. We can't see each other right now. All we do is scream at each other. We can't understand each other because those are crucial forms of attention. And so I would argue all of these four layers of attention are being profoundly disrupted. And you can see how when that happens, that really screws with your ability to be the best person that you could be. We're going to take a quick break, Johan.

We'll be right back. Please stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back. We're here with Johan Hari, author of Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. Johann, so, all right, the elephant in the room here is, of course, tax. I know there are, your book argues that there are huge powerful forces that are responsible for our diminishing attention spans and ability to focus. But it seems, I mean, we've all been talking about tech for a long time, right?

I mean, in the book, you point out that on average, people touch their phones like 2,500 times a day, right? I have found myself deleting Twitter and Instagram for my phone for a few weeks, only to just put them back on, you know, and get right back into it. But I mean, if you're looking at, you know, all of these different factors and forces, is tech the biggest factor here? Is it the devices we carry, the social media platforms that have us addicted and their ability to pull us in? Is that the thing that is most responsible for where we are today? No. Of the 12 factors that I write about, one of the interesting things is these things all interact. So if you think about the technology as it currently exists, it's really important to stress as it currently exists because it doesn't have to work this way, we can have all the tech we currently have and it can work differently. But you think about the technology we have right now, it is designed to hack and invade your attention, right, as the people who designed it admit. So that would have been powerful at any point in human history. But it arrived at a moment. when our kind of collective immune system was already down. So if you think about that technology as a virus,

it arrives in a depleted immune system because we were already doing a huge range of things that are profoundly undermining our ability to focus and pay attention. Give you a couple of examples, we sleep 20% less than we did a century ago. Dr. Charles Seisler at Harvard Medical School, arguably the leading expert on sleep in the world, said to me, even if nothing else had changed,

except that we sleep so much less, that alone would be causing a huge attention crisis. Because when you're sleeping, your brain is repairing. It's healing itself. Only 15% of us now wake up feeling refreshed. We are chronically underslept. Our brains are physically clogged up because they don't get the chance to repair.

Or think about the food we eat. The food we eat at the moment is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention. Say you have the standard American breakfast while I grew up eating as well, kind of sugary cereal or white bread, bread with butter. What that does is that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain, which feels great. You're like, ah, I'm awake. The day has begun. But you'll get to your

desk, an hour or two later, or your kids will get to their school desk, and you'll have a huge energy crash, because the energy has just been released far too quickly. And when the energy crashes, you get what's called brain fog, where you just can't focus or pay attention. The way Dale Pinick, one of the leading nutritionists in the world, put it to me, is the diet we eat at the moment, puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day that gives us these long patches of brain fog. He said, it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini, right? It'll go really fast for five minutes, then it'll just stop. And if you eat food that releases energy more steadily throughout the day, as our ancestors did, you won't get these patches of brain fog in the

same way. So just obviously I go through 12 causes in the book, but those are just two that we can go into more detail if you want. So you can see how just those two changes, just for the purpose of the conversation lead to lower our immune system. Think about if you've had a day when you haven't slept properly and you've eaten really badly, that's going to be a day when you spend much more time scrolling through TikTok and mindlessly through Twitter than a day when you rested well, you ate well. So we've got to deal with all of these causes. And the book is very solutions oriented. But that isn't to neglect the tech part. A lot of my book is about the tech. And it's really important to understand the way the tech industry want us to think about this.

is are you pro-tech or are you anti-tech? Right? And that just induces a sense of fatalism. Because you're like, well, I'm not going to join the Amish. I'm not going to give up my laptop on my phone. I guess I must be pro-tech. Sometimes I wish I could. Well, you don't have to, guy, because...

And I think there's a historical analogy that can really help us to think about this. For all of the 12 causes that I write about in Stalin and focus that are degrading our attention, there are two levels at which we've got to respond. I think of them as defense and offense, right? There are dozens of things I write about

that we need to do right now as individuals to defend ourselves and our children and a lot of the book is about our kids from these forces that are invading our attention. I'll give you an example because we just talked about switching. So I have in the corner something called a K-safe. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone,

you put on the lid, you turn the dial and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I use that four hours a day. I will not sit down and watch a film with my partner unless we both imprison our phones. When my friends come around for dinner, everyone's got to put their phone in the phone jail, right?

So that's one example of an individual thing we can do. Obviously, I give many more. But I want to level with people. I'm passionately in favour of these individual changes, but they will only get you so far because at the moment, it's like somebody is pouring itching powder into our heads to hold Hein, and then leaning over and going,

hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. then you wouldn't scratch so much. You want to go, yeah, I'll learn to meditate. That's hugely valuable, but you need to stop pouring itching powder on me. And that's why we need to have this element that's about going on offense against the forces that are doing this to us. Johan, in the book, and throughout the book, you describe an experience you had. You decided for a period of three months to get rid of your phone, get rid of any access to the internet. And you moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod, a beautiful.

place. You lived in an apartment there with no phone, no, I mean, just a telephone, but no smartphone, no internet. And you describe the different waves you went through. You know, there were periods of deep anxiety and depression. But after that three-month period, and I should mention you did this because you were hoping to write a novel. But you write that after that three-month period of time, it did have a huge impact on you, that it did restore some, many of the abilities. that you had lost. You know, it comes right back to what you said at the start guy. I was nearly 40.

I thought, oh, maybe I can't pay attention just because I got old, right? Exactly. I thought, yeah, maybe this is just, you know, it's very easy to mistake your own decline for the decline of civilization, right? Yeah. And so I went away, of course,

I'm not basing any scientific conclusions on my individual experience. I'm basing my scientific conclusions on the science gathered by some of the leading scientists in the world. But what blew my mind, there were certainly ups and downs that we can talk about.

But when I went to Provincetown and I had no smartphone and no laptop that could get online, what stunned me was how much my attention came back. My attention was as good as it had been when I was 17. I could sit and read books for eight hours a day. I could have really deep conversations. My mind profoundly healed. I actually later realized when I interviewed lots of other scientists,

it wasn't just the absence of the tech that had done that to me. Actually, it was, I slept much more, I was eating much better. So when I was without all these devices, initially I felt like a haze of decompression. And then I had a real crash, but I really missed. You know, I'd spent so many years of my life throughout the day receiving the kind of thin, insistent signals of the web. And when they were gone, it was like the world had gone silent, right?

No stranger you meet is going to flood you with hearts. That would be a very weird interaction, right? Yeah. And I realized that when you leave some of these distractions behind, even if you do it in a less drastic way than I did, you create a vacuum, and you've got to fill that vacuum with something or you'll just slide back.

And one of the things I filled it with was I had actually already learned about the science of flow states, and I really returned to it in my mind and later, after I left Provincetown, investigated the science in a lot of detail. So everyone listening will have experienced a flow state in their life.

A flow state is when you're doing something that's meaningful to you, and you just totally get into it. And your sense of time falls away, your sense of ego falls away, the way one rock climber put it is, in flow, it's like you are the rock you're climbing. And flow states are really important for thinking about attention. And different people get them in different ways, right?

For you, it might be making bagels, doing brain surgery, whatever it is. For me, it would be writing. But understanding flow states is really important for the science of attention. Because flow states are simultaneously the deepest form of attention that a human being can provide. And once you get into it, they're the least difficult. form of attention. It's not like memorizing facts for an exam, like, oh God, what year did the Civil War begin? It's not like that. When you're in flow, it's like, flow is like a gusher of attention that exists in all of us. But yeah, it was more, that was the form of flow that I

found. And it was deliberately writing fiction because that was at the edge of my comfort zone, right? I'm a non-fiction writer. So that was my way of accessing flow. And it got, it worked. And if you have just a few hours of flow a day, you feel so much better for the rest of the day, right? right? You feel much more competent. This is one of the, and competence is really important, because this is one of the things that a lack of attention does, is it makes you less competent. And when you're less competent, you feel less good about yourself, you feel less confident. And that was one of the things that really came back, my sense of my own capacities that really helped me. Yeah. All right, we're going to take another quick break. I'm here with Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus,

why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply. Stay with us. All right, we're back with Johann Harri. I'm curious about this idea. There's another researcher you quote who talks about this fire hose of information that we confront every day. I think everyone knows what we're talking about,

just like social media and emails and regular media, just tells us everything that comes to us every day. And the amount of information is unprecedented compared to the course of human history. But there are reasons. reasonable people who argue that, you know, human evolution is already making it so our brains can adapt to that, that in fact our brains are not fixed and they're not incapable of managing

so much information. And it's an interesting argument. But I guess you spoke with neuroscientists and others who said, that's nonsense, that our brains can actually only absorb and process a certain amount of data and that will never change. Well, we can process more, but it comes with a cost, right? When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. But you're juggling. Your consciousness kind of papers over it. You'll make more mistakes. You'll remember much less of what you do. You'll be significantly less creative. In the book, you mentioned Professor Earl Miller of MIT and this idea that multitasking is actually not possible. But we can't just like upgrade our brains to a Pentium Infinity processor.

Right, right? Like, well, think about the. Just even think about the phrase multitasking. That is a term that we took from computing. Computers can multitask. They've got more than one processor. We are not machines. We cannot live by the logic of machines. We're actually much smarter than machines.

But you think about we just have to understand that we live within certain limitations. Human beings are staggeringly adaptable. But we have certain limitations, right? Think about Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon discovered if you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. Wow.

So what you lose, I mean, you lose a huge number of things when this happens. You lose creativity. You lose the capacity for reflection. And that's where almost all innovation comes from. That's where almost all new thinking comes from. So when you lose attention, you lose the most fertile and rich layer of soil in which ideas grow. You've talked about some things that you've done. you know, you got this lock box where you lock your phone away.

I think I would just break it open myself. You engage in, try to engage in states of flow, and I can relate to that because when I interview people, I get in that state of mind, and I'm interviewing people for, you know, three, four hours a day in the studio sometimes. So just if it's okay, guys, to talk about flow for a second because I think it will really, a lot of people listening,

this will really help them. So anyone listening, if you want to get into a flow state, these will increase your odds. There's no guarantee, but they'll increase your odds. Firstly, you have to choose one of your goals and for a while exclude all of your other goals. I want to paint this canvas. I want to read this chapter, whatever it might be. If you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you won't get into flow. Secondly, you have to make sure that the goal you choose is meaningful to you.

Attention evolved to attach to meaning, right? A frog will stare longer at a fly than it will at a stone because the fly is meaningful to the frog and the stone is not, right? So you have to choose a meaningful goal. If it's not meaningful to you, you won't be able to get into flow. And thirdly, and this might seem counterintuitive, but I think it will be less to an entrepreneurial and business audience than it is to some people. It will really help if you choose something at the edge of your abilities,

at the edge of your comfort zone. So let's say you're a medium-talent rock climber. You don't just want to try and climb over your garden wall. It's too easy. You won't get into flow. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Kilimanjaro. It's going to be too overwhelming. You won't get into flow.

What you want to choose is a rock face that is slightly higher and harder than the last rock face you climbed. So if you do these three things, narrow down to one goal, make sure it's a meaningful goal, and push it to the edge of your comfort zone, but not beyond it. Flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone. You will hugely increase your chances of tapping in

to this very deep source of flow that we have within us. But even as I say that guy, you can see how the environment we live in militates against it could just step one, just narrow down to one goal. If you're being constantly texted, pinged, WhatsApp, Facebook, you're not going to be able to do that, right? So you can see how our current environment undermines it. But it can, to me, feel disempowering to think that forces beyond our control have taken our attention and that there's a limit to what we can do about it.

because, of course, we want to feel like we can contribute to changing it, at least in ourselves. And so are there things that you do beyond those things that you describe that you're trying to sort of, you know, trying to retake control despite these massive forces around you and around all of us that are trying to steal it away? It's interesting the way you've put that guy because, and I often have that thought. And the first thing I would say to people is know where your power lies because you have power. because you have power at more than one level. You have power over yourself as an individual and over your children, but you also have power as a citizen, right?

And your power as a citizen is tremendous. Think about the example of the lead in lead paint, right? There was nothing that an individual could do about that, an isolated individual. But when individuals banded together and fought together, they actually dealt with that problem. But you're absolutely right. It is really important to also take individual responsibility

and to act an individual. level. So I'll give you, and I go through dozens of ways in which I changed my own life as a result. I'll give you an example. I sleep much more than I used to. Now that sounds easy to say, but there's something I learned that really helped me to do that more. And I learned it from Dr. Charles Seisler at Harvard Medical School, who's advised everyone from the Boston Red Sox to the US Secret Service on sleep. And Dr. Seisler explained to me one of the factors, it's not the only one, there's many, but one of the factors that's so profoundly damaging our ability to sleep and how we can deal with it. Something in particular is happening with light at the moment that everyone listening can deal with.

So human beings evolved so that when it gets dark, we receive a surge of energy into our bodies. And if you think about where we evolved, that was really helpful. That was very good for our ancestors as well. You know, it starts to get dark. You get a surge of energy to get you back to the tribe, to get you back to the cave, to get you back to safety. But what's happened is now we control the light. So say you're lying in bed and you're staring at a glowing screen before you go to sleep. And then you turn that screen off and close your eyes.

What happens is the signal your body gets is, oh, it just got dark. We need to give Guy a load of energy to get back to the cave, right? Yeah. He doesn't know. Guy's already in the cave, right? He's in his bed. The body doesn't know that. So you get this surge of energy, which means it's very hard to sleep.

when you do get to sleep, your sleep will be less good quality than it would have been. You promise yourself you're not going to do that the next night, but you're doing the same thing. You're triggering. It's like we're all taking a drug that wakes us up immediately before we go to sleep. So what Dr. Seisler said is don't, you've got to not look at any glowing screens or devices for two hours before you go to sleep. And I really struggled with that. But what I do now is two hours before I'm going to go to sleep, I put the phone. in the K-safe and I set the K-safe to be locked for six hours so that even if I wake up,

and I also have an app on my laptop called Freedom, which cuts me off on the internet, so that even if I wake up, or before I'm about to go to sleep, I'm like, oh, there is just that one email I had to send. It's like, tough. You can't do it. Your phone's locked away. Your laptop can't get online. You just have to go to sleep. Now, I know that when people hear that, it sounds like, well, that is an impossible cost. I just can't do that. But I would just say to everyone, and it was very hard for me. I don't do it every night. But what you are, you have to weigh what you're losing against what you can gain, right? So okay, you lose the ability to send an email an hour before you go to sleep, 90 minutes before you go to sleep. But if you get a good night's sleep,

your brain repairs, it heals itself. The next day, your attention will be radically better. So you can see, now that's one of, again, dozens of things I talk about in the book that that I changed in my own life. But this requires a real shift in psychology, I think, because we need to realize that this is not just a kind of personal failing, right? These, in the same way that the obesity epidemic is not, it's not just that every, half of the Americans just failed one day, right? This is a big systemic problem. You can deal with some of the systemic elements as an individual and you can protect kids, and obviously a lot of the book is about childhood and what we can do there.

But we've also got to realize, you know, we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention, right? We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds, and we can take them back if we want to. Johan Hari is the author of the new book called Stolen Focus. You can find a link to it in the podcast description. Johann, as always, so great having you on. Thanks for coming on.

Guy, it's always a joy to talk to you. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy. ros. If you want to contact the team,

our email address is hibt at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla, Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumtine Arablui. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Carrie Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.