How to Talk to People - What It Takes to Reclaim Your Attention Span

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Of all the potential effects of using smartphones, the one that seems to inspire the most anxiety is what scrolling could be doing to people’s attention. On social media (ironically), many people express a desire to “heal” their attention spans from the damage they feel technology has done. They’re picking up on something real. In one 2025 study, researchers found that blocking the internet on people’s phones for two weeks led to improvements in sustained attention equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline. In this final episode of How to Touch Grass, host Julie Beck embarks on an experiment to see if she can heal her own attention span. Beck and co-host Natalie Brennan also hear from Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, about how Odell’s antagonism for her phone actually helped her make peace with it, and  how nature can teach us to pay deeper attention to the world around us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you can stream, game, and more on the go. Whether you're headed to a music festival or a cottage getaway, you can access hundreds of apps on Google Play right from your center display. Explore OnStar Tech today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Are you happy with your relationship with your friends? or are you not happy with it? I wish I could reduce some of the Instagram reeling,

particularly at night where it kind of go down the rabbit hole and it's like, oh my God, it's good night. Oh, yeah, I've been there. It's like lost time. You know, like, when the aliens come and they get you, and then, like, they put you back down, and it's just lost time. It has impacted my attention span.

I get bored after half a paragraph of reading. Do you have a sense in your mind of, like, when you notice that you feel like your attention spam is getting worse. Probably been, like, since the start of COVID, like, probably in the last five years. The thing that kills me sometimes is how much I want to look stuff up in conversations. I'm constantly, like, constantly have a few books that I'm trying to read through and trying to rebuild attention or something like that. I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

And I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at the Atlantic. This is How to Touch Grass. Julie, attention is one of the biggest things we've heard people talk about when they are renegotiating their relationship to their phone. Ironically, I feel like every time I go on social media these days, like, I see someone talking about how they're trying to heal their attention span from technology that they're currently using. Yes. And it's always that word, too, like, heal. It's like we're sick or we're injured and we must heal. Is it something that you've been worried about? I do worry about my attention sometimes.

Every time I go to the gym lately, I forget to lock the locker that they have in the locker room. I put my stuff in there, I shut the door. And you don't lock? Then I guess I simply walk away. And I don't realize until I get back that, I mean, no one has taken my stuff luckily. So it's all good Samaritans out there. But that has happened not once, not twice, more than twice. Yeah, I guess the way that the attention span thing comes up for me the most is when I think about the number of hours that I spend on my phone.

You're poor and your attention into that phone. Yeah, I see those as very interconnected. But I've also noticed that I very actively try not to think about it. Like, I rush to swipe away the screen time notification every Sunday. Obviously, that anxiety points to the fact that I want to have a different relationship with my phone, right? What do you think has stopped you from actively trying to get that screen time down? I think it's scary to sit with ourselves when we have grown really accustomed to all the stimuli. Love stimuli.

We talk a lot about, you know, looking at your phone as like a, it's a, it's a, negative thing. We talk about it in the negative, right? Like, I want to do less of this thing. There's this thing that I do a lot. I want to do less of it. And there's, like, not as much talk about what I want to do more of. That's Jenny O'Dell, the author of How to Do Nothing. When that book came out in 2019, I remember at the time, it was one of the first things I read that really raised a concern about what modern technology and social media were doing specifically to people's attention. So now it's seven years later. And I asked Jenny how her thinking has evolved, and how she's doing with her own screen time habits.

I mean, I'm, look, I'm doing great. I'm so happy to hear it. I can't say the same. I'm okay with my relationship with my phone and screen time. So can you walk me through a little bit? Yeah, I would say, like, part of the attention economy is the selling of quick fixes. And, you know, habits, they form over time. They're, like, grooves, right?

Like, they need to be sort of formed over time. And so... Like geologically. Yes, exactly. And I think, you know, if you try to say like cold turkey, it can be frustrating when you don't see immediate results. Yeah. Or even within a couple of months, right?

And then in that meantime, there's all this uphill struggle of like, your friends are still doing it. You know, you need to be on Instagram to see this and that. And there's just muscle memory things. Like things you're used to. You get up in the morning. You look at your phone. Like, these are just, that's hard, you know?

Like, those things are really ingrained, especially I think if you're younger. I'm good now, but I just want to stress that, you know, it took some time. And in that time, there's a little bit of a leap of faith. Yeah, I mean, I deleted TikTok off my phone for the third or fourth time who's counting. But, like, you're saying the muscle memory of, like, the thumb going up and down, like, has just transferred to Instagram, unfortunately. So we got to work on that. Yeah. I would say there's, like, honestly, you know, I'm almost 40 actually standing, like, with your very,

heavy head, you know, like on your neck. When you get older, you start to notice the problems from that. And it's like, that is another kind of physical limit. I can't sit at a computer for that long without injuring myself. And then I think, you know, I really had to think about my relationship to the news was a really big one that I hadn't quite figured out when you're kind of scrolling, you're scrolling through it. You're not like really deeply engaging with any one particular issue. You're just seeing a list of bad things. And they're bad in all different kinds of ways. and they're terrible, like even just sitting with one of those things. It produces this paralysis.

It's like in order to do something, you need an orientation toward the future and a situation in which you feel that you have some agency. There are certain things that I have started to do in the last couple years. One of them is volunteering at a native plant restoration project every week. I've also been going to a lot of kind of repair fares, also kind of volunteering type things that are in person. Were you bringing with like a broken like toaster or something

and learn how to fix it? Something like that? Yeah, totally. When I'm there. There is no desire to look at my phone. Like it just like it's just so far from my mind. And it like has this weird lasting effect throughout the week actually

because I had this experience that was so direct that was so meaningful. And tell me what like what the what is the good thing about the repair cafe about the, you know, weeding the native plants. Like, what is the good thing? I think, you know, some of it is just recognition. I think we as humans, you know, we want to be socially recognized, right? Like, we want to feel seen. We want to feel heard. We want to feel welcomed. You know, it's like cheers or whatever. Like, you want to walk into a room and have people, you know, like, hey, it's you. I know you.

Like, I'm happy to see you. Right. Like, this is just kind of like a really basic thing that we want. And I kind of think that social media, especially early on, like it's sort of the evil genius of it was that it was hijacking that. And so I feel like these are in-person events. I feel incredibly recognized and acknowledged. And then it's like when you feel, you're like, this is the real thing. It becomes very obvious what is not the real thing. That's a big part of it. And I think you're there, you have a shared project.

You're getting some traction with something. Right. instead of just this, like, sort of constantly being washed over with information and not really having anything to grasp on to. For most people in this day and age, like totally going without a smartphone just isn't possible or at least not practical. Like the infrastructure of society, you know, they've got the QR code menu at the restaurant. The stores are all accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay and so many websites like require you to receive a text. and then put the code in to even get in there. So trying to resist getting sucked into your phone

just feels like resisting the inevitable sometimes. Have you found a way to resolve this tension for yourself? I live in the same society you're describing. I just use my phone to pay for lunch before this. But then I put it away. I use the phrase standing apart as a way of kind of, like, a not leaving or believing in the fantasy of escape from something and just sort of being like I kind of I'm standing in a position from which I can see the thing.

You're not running away from it. But I have critical distance. And I think about something like food, you know, you go to the grocery store. And I mean, depending on the grocery store you're in, you kind of understand that 80% of the food in it is bad for you. Like we're all, you kind of know. know that, right? Like, we're a, it's been that way long enough. It can stop me from getting the flaming hot Cheetos, but yes, I do know. But it's just this understanding that that space is just not set up for me to thrive. And I think that it's helpful to maybe transpose that to your phone.

What is a phone? A phone is a communication device. What I want from this is communication. The apps, you know, social media in particular are not designed for you to thrive. They are designed for the opposite. These are actively bad for me, and I won't feel good. Like for me, it's sort of a level of acceptance of like antagonism has been helpful. It's like I'm never going to have a peaceful relationship with that universe. And I'm just going to kind of like accept that and take what I need and leave. You know, recently I hear so many people both online and in real life talking about healing their attention spans from the damage that they feel like technology is done. And I'm curious why, of all the things, you think people are worried about their attention specifically?

One would hope that what you pay attention to is what is important to you. That's an ideal situation. Not always the case. Right, exactly. So if you're not paying attention to things that are important to you, there's something, I think, deeply unsettling about that on the level. full of identity because it's like, am I even who I am, right? Like, am I who I want to be if I'm paying my attention to something that I don't feel I ever chose. I think it really deeply affects people kind of like on the level of like self-control and their sort of understanding of their identity. Yeah. Well, it seems like the solution that many people have landed on for healing their attention span is just trying to be online less however they can. So do you think

that logging off is the answer or no? I think that the best approach personally is to just treat it as an experiment. Honestly, it makes it interesting. Like, I'm a curious person, you know, and I'm curious about myself and my own reactions to things, kind of being like, okay, I'm going to try this. I'm going to see what happens when I try this. Natalie, immediately after this interview, I really felt the it to do what Jenny said, to try an experiment. Uh-huh. And when I was thinking about how to do that, I remembered this study I had seen from 2025, where researchers blocked the internet on people's smartphones for two weeks. Okay. And just doing that, they found that the improvement to people's sustained attention was equivalent to reversing

10 years of cognitive decline. After two weeks? After two weeks. That discrepancy feels huge. It's huge. So I tried the experiment on myself for two weeks. Now, I didn't perfectly replicate the conditions of the 2025 study, to be clear. They blocked mobile internet using an app called Freedom. I used instead this device called a brick. Huge among my friends. Oh, your friends are all into it. Okay, so you know.

So I used this device. I picked all the apps I was going to block, and you have to physically touch your phone to the device to unlock it. Right. I tried to, you know, keep all of the things that would allow me to communicate with other people. And so I blocked all games. I blocked all social media, email, Slack, internet browsers, and most internet-connected apps. Okay. So I blocked all of that for 23 hours a day.

I was allowed one hour of non-bricked time if I needed it or wanted it. And I could do whatever I wanted on a computer, same as in the study. It was only the phone that was restricted. And how were you going to test this? So I got in touch with someone from that 2025 study, and they shared an attention pre-test with me and a self-report questionnaire. So I took those for a baseline. How long was the test?

It felt like 1,000 hours. Totally. I think he told me it's actually like eight minutes. I did both of those things before I started the experiment, and then I took them again at the end of the experiment. And I agreed to record a little audio diary along the way. Captain's Log, day one. My phone has been bricked pretty much all day.

I've definitely been kind of low energy. I don't know if that's like dopamine withdrawal. I've definitely been like carrying my phone around with me everywhere, even though there's not really that much for me to look at. Morning, it's day two. My husband is out of town right now, so it is daunting to have two of my biggest sources of entertainment. My husband and my phone,

unavailable to me at this time, but we persevere. It is Saturday. It's my first, like, full weekend day. I ordered a big order of yarn, so I have a lot of knitting and crochet stuff to work on. Good morning, it's day five. I'm knitting right now. Joe and I went birding.

The one thing that I am noticing mood-wise is that I do feel pretty calm, like maybe more, home than usual. Okay, Julie, first check in, what off the bat did you think you were going to do more of with your time that you didn't wind up doing? Using the phone as a phone as a communication device, right? Actually, like, calling my loved ones to catch up, you know, what the phone was invented for. Shout out Alexander Graham Bell. But I think because I had blocked so much and I was getting more used to just not having my phone on me and in my hand at all times. I was just thinking about my phone less overall, which was the goal. But I kind of come to think that as much as the distraction of the

phone like has a cost, there's also a cost to putting more distance there because the phone is where the people are. It's interesting how much our relationship to our phones is intertwined with our relationship to others. Yeah. When we overuse our phones, that isn't good for our relationships. Mm-hmm. And the way we use our phones is definitely influenced by other people. I think we don't realize how much of our habits are kind of live in other people.

Like, think about it. Like, when do you pick up your phone? It's when the person you're talking to picks up their phone, right? Like, that person makes up their phone. Where are you going to do? Like sit there, stare at a space, like, that habit, like, lives between people. It's so true because my friends will, you know, text me TikTok still, even though I am trying to get off TikTok. And then if I'm like, okay, I'll just watch the, like, Lord of the Rings meme that they sent me. Of course, my phone prompts me, like, don't you want to download TikTok again?

And so it is, like, sort of driven by, like, the relationship of wanting to see this meme. But I guess my bigger question is, is logging off to pay attention to some. something else in the real world actually better? Or is it just different? I always think about, like, if you saw someone hiking and looking at their phone, you could be like, that's so depressing. But then it's like, what if they're looking at inatrolist? And they're, like, identifying a plant.

There are good things on the phone. There are bad things on the phone. There are good things IRL. There are bad things IRL. Like, one thing that you can say is that the sort of quality of attention that one often experiences on the phone, things like social media is pretty narrow versus things

off the phone there are so many different kinds of experience so many different scales of time so many different scales of space I love seeing movies in a movie theater and like a movie theater junkie I love to see horror movies in a theater

so there's things like that but then there's things like looking at a very small bird in your neighborhood or being at a table with a group of people and sort of and like being part of a conversation. Like these are all just so different. Like even if you think about your body in those spaces, it's so different. And I think it's good to have a variety of different contexts for your attention. Like I think that's probably healthy. We're going to take a quick break.

But when we come back, how the way we think about our phones affects the way we use them. I think about it more as like, When I look at it as an object, it looks like a tool. And it did not look like a tool to me before. It looked like a black hole. Like a portal to the underworld or something. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Plus, did Julie fix her attention span?

The results of her experiment coming up. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, joined thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worsell onto the David From show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations

of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch. It's day six, and one should frickin' know it.

I did the exact same thing at the gym again. Sure enough, I forgot to lock it again. I'm legitimately concerned. But anyway, my attention is not fixed yet. Good morning. It's day seven of the experiment. My average screen time is down 74% from last week. I certainly haven't been like,

you know, a perfect, like, screen abstinent person this week. I've watched plenty of TV. I have been able to, I think, focus a bit better. I read 200 pages of my book yesterday. I wonder how much of this could be achieved without such a draconian approach. I've been pretty surprised by how quickly I kind of, like, submitted. But yeah, just like the, how quickly the cravings to like check my phone all the time really receded. Julie, day seven was midway through your experiment. What started to shift for you

by that point? Did the way you think about your phone start to change? I think what you learn, or at least what I learned when you block access to almost everything on your phone, is that the phone is not just one thing. There's a lot of different stuff in there. Like, you know, I think in our frustration with our attention span sometimes, people, myself included, will demonize the phone as a device. Like, smartphones are evil. Smartphones are sucking our life force and they're making us stupid. And that kind of flattens the problem, I think. What kept coming up for me is there's a lot of different things I turn to my phone for. And some of them are more problematic than others. Like, Checking the weather is very helpful.

You made a mistake in blocking that one. I did. Like, I realized that actually the first day. But I suppose that is the point of the experiment, right? To figure out which parts of my phone are actually adding to my life and which are taking away from it. Jenny, have you heard of these devices that block certain apps on your phone? There's, like, the Freedom app, the unplug, the brick device.

Yeah. What do you think of the recent popularity of these things? Honestly, I'm all for it. I don't use any. I'm not trying to brag. I don't need them. I think they're great. There's one in particular that I think is called social focus,

and it lets you kind of change the appearance of websites. Like you could go to YouTube and not see the auto suggestions, for example. Or maybe not see comments, like it kind of allows you to change what you see. And I think there was a Chrome extension that came out called News Feed Eradicator. And guess what happened? I stopped going to Facebook. And it's, I didn't decide to do that. It was because the newsfeed is there to keep you on Facebook.

So if you eradicate it, replace it with some sort of like mindfulness quote. You go to the site, it's inert. It can't grab you in that way. And so I just simply stopped going. It was like a totally unremarkable thing. I didn't even tell anyone, oh, I'm quitting Facebook. I just stopped going to it. And I think that's really powerful.

So that's why I'm like I'm a big fan of anything that can give someone sort of granular control over what it's sort of reintroduced choice in areas where people have never experienced choice because that in and of itself will cause someone to reflect upon what it is that they want. All of this reminds me of a study I've been thinking about a lot lately that found using an app that was similar to the brink. for two weeks had such a big effect on people's attention span that it amounted to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline. Oh my God. Which seems really huge. Wow. That's incredible.

I am surprised and not surprised. Actually, honestly, this reminds me of like ecological restoration. Because when you restore a site, there's some things come back quickly and some things don't, right? Like you restore a wetland. Some species are going to come back almost immediately. the nutrient cycling of the entire site might take 100 years. Maybe our attention is similar in that, or our behavior, let's say, like it takes a long time to totally overhaul something.

But at the same time, I think you might be surprised at how quickly certain things change. Like in times when I was a little bit more like embroiled online and using my phone a lot, and then I would, you know, maybe go somewhere, put it away for a while or whatever. I found that after a couple of days, I would notice that my attention felt different. And by attention felt different, I mean, like, I would notice details or, like, small differences and things. It's almost like having a higher resolution image or something. Are there other, like, seemingly small changes to your routine that you feel like might have that kind of big cognitive benefit? You know, I think trying to, like, replace habits with other habits, I meditate in the morning only.

for like 10 minutes, I kind of like calm down to a level where then it's not going to as easily occur to me to then pick up my phone, or at least I'll be a little bit more reflective about it. Yeah. My thing so far, my recent thing, has been taking up knitting and crochet, and this seems like so small. But it's like now while I'm watching TV instead of looking at my phone, I'm like, my hands are in hand jail, right? I'm doing knitting. And it doesn't seem like, so virtuous when I'm like, now I'm only looking at one screen, but I feel like, you know, it's an improvement. I think that's great. Maybe I'll get down to zero screens, TBD. The other like layer to that that I was just thinking about when it comes to phones and social media and stuff is like a lot

of times where I'm going to like learn how to do this new stitch or whatever is YouTube. So I, it's not, you know, one is totally replacing the other. But like, you know, like, you know, you're there is sort of a relationship, like now I am using that tool kind of like for this other thing. Yeah, right. And I think that points to an important distinction, which is maybe a bit more nuanced than just like just say screen time as a statistic. You know, you were asking earlier about my like change relationship to my phone. I think about it more as like when I look at it as an object, it looks like a tool. And it did not look like a tool to me before. It looked like a black hole.

Like a portal to the underworld or something. Yeah. Or frankly, like I wasn't even looking at it. I'm already picking it up. Like I'm already in there. I'm already in that world. There wasn't even a point where I perceived the phone as an object. Yeah, you just skipped right ahead.

And now I feel like, you know, the things that I use it for the Merlin app, it's like Shazam for bird songs. I use that. I use I naturalists. I use the constellation app. voice memos for, you know, like recording birds, that relationship to me feels really different because the intention and the purpose, I feel like I'm in control of that. I mean, on my phone, the first home screen is all what I would call observational apps.

So like camera, voice memo, eye naturalist, Merlin. I'm kind of trying to remind myself of how I want to use the phone. phone. Like, I now associate my phone with those activities. You write a lot about nature. Yeah. Being inspired by nature, how being in nature helps you, you know, pay attention. A common piece of advice for those who have been brain-rodded by the internet is to go touch grass. So are you also telling us to touch grass? Yeah, pretty much. And I mean, the weeds that I weed at my weekly project are grass. So actually, I'm saying kill grass. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But the reason I think it became such a, that phrase caught on was because, like, it's just so obviously true.

The obvious truth of it is, like, why it's funny and annoying at the same time. Yeah. What is it that you think the natural world has to teach us about attention? Complexity, basically. Like, I think it's like the, it's a master class in complexity. It is kind of an antidote to the idea of the easy answer, which I think, I really, I really, really, I really blame Instagram for the oversimplification of political issues. Like, personally, that it's just my axe to grind. And, uh, and the idea that you could sort of

absolve yourself by reposting something is just like, yeah, I just like it's upsetting to me. But I think there's no easy answers to anything. Like, if you are a birder and you like birds, like, guess what? You're going to have to learn about trees, you know? And then, then I don't have to learn about like seasons and then I don't know there's just all like everything is so tied to everything else and there are so many things that are sort of like neither good nor bad or sort of arguable we need lessons in that right now like we need lessons in the sort of like let me pick a point in space to look at and then like and then let me look at the context around that okay now let me look at the context around that and now you've like sort of widened to this whole ecosystem like that I think the opposite of that is what happens online So, Jenny, if someone is just starting to rethink the relationship they have with their devices, what advice would you give them? Try to take an outsider's perspective on yourself. I'm a big journaler, so, like, I kept journals since I was a kid. So that would work for me.

Like, I would look at my phone. I would look at some stuff on my phone. And then I would just write down, like, kind of what it was. and then how I felt about it, you know? And I would be, like, brutally honest. Oh, man. Just, yeah, just pretend like you're a scientist and just talk to a friend about it.

You could write it down, like, whatever. But, like, you know, I think there needs to be that, like, every so often you step to the side and you go, okay, what did I just do? Like, why did I do that? How did that make me feel? It could be super brief about it. Just do it for a week, you know?

Like, just see what it tells you. Yeah. before you try to make any changes because the danger is that a person feels shame, they feel that it's bad, they're like, okay, I need to change this, and then they try really hard to change it, and then it doesn't go the way they wanted, and then they feel more shame. And now it's just like, it's like a spiral. Yeah, I think especially with attention for whatever reason, it's just like, it does feel very shameful. This like, oh, I can't focus. Like, I can't pay attention. I can't even like read a book without having the desire to pick up my phone. Yeah. People think it means that they're a bad person. And it doesn't. You just got to be patient and try a bunch of different things. And like, you know, maybe it'll be more interesting than you think. Guys, huge news. Huge news. I locked my gym locker today.

Nature is healing. I am the virus. For once in my goddamn life, I locked my gym locker. It is day 13. I was on the computer all day for work because computer is where the money comes from. And still screen fatigue yourself. The old fashioned way. Captain's Log, the final full day of the experiment. Over the past two weeks, I read one full novel. I started two other books.

I finished an audiobook. I crocheted a little hat. I watched all of the first season. of the traders. It's not like I, you know, found myself with a magical abundance of time. I think it's more like I just paid more attention and spent more time doing the things that I already like to do. That was time mostly well spent. So attention mostly well spent.

Julie, when you set out to go on this experiment, you got in touch with one of the researchers from the 2020. study, Kostadine Kushlev from Georgetown University, who agreed to go over the results of your post-experiment attention test with us. Yes. And before we call him up, are you nervous about your results? Not so nervous about these results? Will it mean less to you if your attention span didn't change on paper? I mean, I guess I'm a little nervous.

I mean, look, like, I am a nerd, and I always. always want to get an A-plus on my projects. But I really do feel better. And if it's just a placebo effect, well, a placebo effect is still an effect, right? Like, I'll take it. Okay, I'm going to dial Costa up. Hello. Hi, I'm Natalie. I'm Julie's producer. I'm also going to be sitting in on this call. Hi, Natalie. Hey, Costa. It's Julie. How are you? Pretty good. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. So can we just dive right in and tell me, before I started the experiment, how was my baseline attention span? So your core was about 3.3.02. Is that good? Good for average 35-year-old? Good bad? That's pretty good. I mean, essentially, you did about how our participants did. It's a little

closer to the level. You might see young adulthood or somebody in their 60s. Okay, humbling, humbling. Yes, yes. But, you know, but once we get to your post score... Yes, let's do it, the big reveal. Yes. So your post score was actually hugely better. So it was 3.8.

That is much bigger improvements than we saw an average now study. So your improvement is about four to five times bigger than what the average participant in study gains. Go Choli. Write it down, Natalie. Write it down. I'm taking notes. Yeah, so you did really well on that. Amazing, I think. Is 3.1 to 3.8 good? Have I reversed my cognitive decline or how would you characterize that? You're basically off the chart. But it might take a while to reap the benefits of this improved attention. Right. And it'll probably go away if I just start scrolling Instagram again. Right. Yeah.

Certainly not a permanent increase. But I do like to point out that, you know, just taking a two-week break and not even a complete break from your phone, just sort of like reducing your use, can actually improve that ability to sustain attention because, you know, our lives are just like so tied to these devices. So sometimes the question might be like, you know, have we like essentially permanently damaged our, you know, brain? like we changed our neurobiology and so forth. And so this seems to suggest that, no, there is a way out.

So it might be worth doing some of those digital detox interventions. Thank you so much, Costa. It was great chatting with you. All right. Thank you. Bye-bye. Julie, how do you feel about that? Unbearably smug.

No, no, no. I'm just kidding. No, I feel relieved, honestly. Like, even if the true effect size isn't as big as it seemed because I am just one person, it's not, you know, a full scientific study, it still feels really good to know that it's possible to improve so quickly. Right. So it's actually kind of wild that you can do something as simple as this and, like, bounce back so quickly. Are you going to keep using the brick? Like, how are you feeling about where's your relationship at between you and your phone right now?

Um, my relationship with my phone is cordial. We're not, it's not warm, but it's not cool. We're cordial. We're friendly acquaintances. That sounds like how, like people describe their exes. Yeah. Well, we haven't broken up. It's really, it's a situation ship that is ongoing forever. No, I'm definitely going to continue using the brick. And I have been still 23 hours a day, you know, maybe not. Yeah. I have been bricking my phone at a minimum, like, before bed. so I can't doomscroll right before I sleep, and I can't look through my emails or Instagram the second that I regain consciousness. Yeah. So that does help. But I would say that throughout this, I kept thinking about my favorite poet, Mary Oliver. And one thing that she wrote was, to pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. That's beautiful.

So this season, I think, what I've learned is your attention is your life. Yeah. And I think on some level I knew that already, but after this experiment, I've really been feeling it. Yeah, we started this season because we wanted to understand why so many people were feeling the pull to log off, right? We've explored a lot of the ways in which the internet can pull you into thoughtless patterns, whether it's the way Instagram makes us feel bad about our bodies or the way that AI chatbots can send us into an anxious spiral. But it seems like what we're maybe actually looking for right now is ways to be more thoughtful. Yeah, I wanted to feel more thoughtful about my life. I wanted to not feel as much like I'm literally giving my life away to things I don't even care about.

I wanted to stop nickel and dimeing the moments of my life away. Being intentional about where you give your attention. That's all for this season of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Hezella Salim Pire. Our engineers are Rob Smerciac and Miguel Carascal.

Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez. How To will be back with the new season soon. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research.

Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.