Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - How to Improve Your Focus

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

It seems like paying attention should be easy. Yet for many of us, it has become one of the hardest things to do. We start reading an article and suddenly we're checking email. We pick up our phone to do one thing and, twenty minutes later, we've forgotten why we picked it up in the first place. We often blame ourselves for lacking discipline, but what if that's only part of the story? Is our ability to focus actually being stolen—and if so, by whom? Journalist and bestselling author Johann Hari set out to answer those questions by traveling the world and interviewing many of the leading scientists and experts studying attention, distraction, and the brain. What he discovered challenges many of the assumptions we have about why it's become so difficult to concentrate and why simply trying harder isn't enough. In this fascinating conversation, Johann explains what's really happening to our attention, why deep focus matters so much for creativity, productivity, happiness, and relationships, and what all of us can do to reclaim it. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by distractions or wondered why staying focused seems harder than it used to, you'll find this discussion both eye-opening and surprisingly hopeful. Johann Hari is the author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (https://amzn.to/3Mfsp12). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty, an $84 value, and AirDoctor’s 30-day money back guarantee WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less.  QUINCE: Elevate your everyday. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL: Built for those who want better. The Dell XPS, built for you! HEALTH MATTERS: If you enjoy learning new ways to live a healthier life, check out NewYork-Presbyterian's Health Matters. Listen now and follow NewYork-Presbyterian's Health Matters wherever you get podcasts. SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/realm⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors.

Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. If it feels harder than ever to concentrate, you're not imagining it. Distractions are everywhere, and many of us struggle to stay focused long enough to do our best work, or have a meaningful conversation, or even enjoy a good book. But what if the problem isn't just a lack of skill or ability or willpower? Today, you'll hear why our attention is under attack, and what's really stealing our focus,

and more importantly, what we can do to get it back. That's why today's SYSK trending topic is how to improve your focus. My guest is best-selling author Johann Hari, who has spent years investigating the science behind attention and how to reclaim it. It's an eye-opening conversation with practical ideas you can put to work right now and in the future, and we'll begin right after this. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs?

What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. Pay attention.

How many times have you been told that in your lifetime? Pay attention. Yet today, paying attention is hard because, well, there are so many distractions and other things to pay attention to. We try to multitask, and that doesn't work out too well. So instead of focusing deeply on the one thing we need to focus on, we focus a little bit on a lot of different things. And that's a problem. Johann Hari is a journalist and best-selling author who has explored this problem of lack of focus and the damage that it does and what we can do to fix it. Johan is author of a book called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.

Hey, Johan. Hey, Mike. Great to be with you. So I suspect most people have had that sense that, you know, you can't seem to pay attention to just one thing. we hear about attention deficit disorder. So what's going on here? What did you discover? Well, I would say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your

life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And when your focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to solve your problems breaks down. You actually become less competent. You start to feel worse about yourself. I could feel this happening to me.

With every year that passed, things that require deep focus that are really important to me, Mike, like reading a book, having deep, proper conversations, we're getting more and more like kind of running up a down escalator. You know what I mean? Like I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this is happening to a huge number of people around me. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred kids who've been identified with that problem. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes.

So I wanted to understand what's happening to us. And crucially, what do we do about it, right? So I went, I traveled all over the world from Moscow to Miami. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus, different aspects of this. And I learned that there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing in recent years.

So anyone, if you're listening and you're struggling to focus and pay attention, this is not your fault. Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces. But once you understand that, we can begin to reclaim it for ourselves and for our children. So what are some of the things that are sapping our attention? Give you an example of one that will be playing out in the lives of almost everyone listening. I went to interview a man named Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists

in the world. I went to see him at MIT where he's a professor. And he said to me, look, you've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years.

It's not going to change on any time scale. Any of us are going to see you can only think about one or two things at a time. But what's happened is we've fallen for a mass delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is Professor Miller and his colleagues, scientists like him. They get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time.

What you do is you juggle. You're switching very quickly. You're going, wait, what did Mike just ask me? What's that message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the TV about Ukraine? What's the message on Facebook? Wait, what did Mike just ask me? We're all doing that juggling a huge amount of the time.

And it turns out it comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. What it shows is 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. You'll make more mistakes. You'll remember less of what you do. You'll be less created. The evidence shows this is having a huge effect on us. I'll give you an example of a small study that's backed by a wider body of evidence that really helped me to understand this. Hewlett-Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to study their workers. And what he did

is he split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but at the same time, you're going to have to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. And then at the end of the experiment, he tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had. And I think that message of you can't do more than one thing at a time effectively has been getting through. So what else?

What are some of the other things that are preventing people from focusing deeply? Our lack of sleep. There has been an enormous decline in it. We sleep 20% less than people did a century ago. Children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago. So I traveled all over the US and indeed the world interviewing the leading experts on sleep. And it was really kind of chilling. You know, Dr. Charles Seisler, who's the leading, arguably the leading sleep expert in the world,

he's at Harvard Medical School, did this experiment. that really brought it home to me. It's kind of simple experiment. They get tired people. They're not even that tired. And it puts them into a machinery that both tracks their eyes to see what they're looking at and scans their brains at the same time. And what he discovered is when you're tired, you can appear to be awake. You can be looking around you. You can appear to be as awake as you and me are now. But whole parts of your brain can have literally gone to sleep, right? So when we say we're half asleep, it turns out that's not a metaphor. A lot of us are half asleep. A lot of us are half asleep. lot of the time. And when you sleep, all sorts of processes take place that are essential for focus

and attention. The whole time you're awake, your brain is creating something called metabolic waste. It's what Professor Roxanne Prischard told me we should think of as like brain cell poop, right? It's building up the whole time in your brain when you're awake. And when you go to sleep, your brain is washed with a kind of a watery fluid and your spinal fluid channels open up. And this brain cell poop is carried down out of your brain. and eventually out of your body. When you don't get at least seven hours sleep a night, your brain doesn't get to clean itself.

It becomes literally clogged up. This is why people who sleep less are much more likely to get dementia later in life, but also really screws your attention. You know, if you stay awake for 19 hours, which doesn't sound like very much, your attention suffers as much as if you had got legally drunk. If you stay awake for six hours a night for a week, your attention becomes as bad as if you got legally drunk.

So a lot of us are just profoundly impaired because we're not getting enough sleep. But this idea that I think everyone's heard that multitasking is problematic, that you can't really do it very well, flies in the face of the old adage of, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person because busy people are more productive. So let's reconcile that. you know, we've got to really challenge the story about productivity that we have in our culture, right? So we think the good worker is the worker who works themselves to the point of exhaustion, who's constantly available on their phone and works themselves to the point of exhaustion. You know, and I feel that, right? Today I'm doing known interviews. I'm going to go to sleep and I'm going to be completely exhausted. And there'll be a little bit of me, a little Puritan bit of me.

It'll be good job, Johann, you work yourself to the point of exhaustion. But in fact, the evidence is really clear that that just wrecks you. Tomorrow I'll be useless, right? And my attention will be short and I won't be able to think as clearly. In order to be able to think clearly, you've got to have space for mind wandering. You've got to have space for rest. You've got to have space to do other stuff. Those are actually the people who come up with creative ideas, who work best. For example, I went to New Zealand and spent time with companies that moved from a five-day working week to a four-day working week for the same money. And they found that productivity massively increased. They achieve more in four days than they had in five. And this has been found in companies all over the

world, Microsoft in Japan, Toyota in Sweden. But it really fell into place to me when I went to interview a guy called Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. He's one of the leading experts on organizational behavior in the world. He's at Stanford. And he said to me, it's not rocket science. Just ask any sports fan. Do you want your team to walk onto the pitch, exhausted, you know, having worked 10-hour days for the last week? No, of course not. You want them to go onto the pitch well-rested. and up for the game. Well, why would the rest of us be any different? So somewhere in the conversation about focus and paying attention, you have to talk about being in that state of flow, you know, that state where you're so focused, you're so,

you're so paying attention, when things are going so well, because that's kind of the opposite of what we've been talking about so far. Flow states are really important for understanding the debate about attention, because a flow state is both the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide. And once you get into it, the easiest form of attention to provide. It's not like, I don't know, memorizing facts for an exam where you're like, oh, what year did President Lincoln get killed? It's not like that. It just comes very easily. So obviously, I want to think about this, right? If this is a gusher of focus that exists within us, it's pleasurable. Most people experience it at least once in their life, where do we drill to

get this gusha? So I went to interview Professor Mahaliyah Leachie sent me highee in Claremont California, who's the man who first identified flow states in the 1960s and spent 50 years studying them, a completely amazing, one of the most important psychologists of the last 100 years. And he discovered a huge number of things, but I think for everyone listening, there's three things in particular that he found that can really maximize your chances of getting into flow. There's no guarantee, but they can hugely increase your odds, three things you can do. So the first thing is you have to narrow down to one goal. I want to paint this canvas.

I want to write this chapter. I want to climb this rock. You've got to choose one goal and stick at it. If you're trying to do two, three, four, five, six things, you won't get into flow. Secondly, you've got to choose a goal that's meaningful to you. So for you, painting a canvas might be meaningful. For me, if I draw anything, it just looks like a child threw up on the canvas. It doesn't work, right?

So it's got to be something that's meaningful to you. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. And the thirdly, and this felt counterintuitive to me at first, it will help if you choose something that's quite challenging for you. There's something that's at the edge of your abilities. So let's say that you're a medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just climb over your garden wall. You won't get into flow doing.

That's too easy. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Everest. It's too hard. You'll just freak out. you want to climb a slightly higher and a harder rock face than the one you did last time. So flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone. If you do these three things, you narrow down to one goal, you choose a meaningful goal, you push yourself to the edge of your abilities, you're much more likely to get,

you maximize your odds of getting into flow. Now, I think even those people you're talking about who would say, oh, I don't have a problem here, you know, I just like being constantly addled and switching every couple of minutes. when they get into a flow state feel much better, right? So I think, and would almost certainly at some point of experience a flow state, and if you remind them of that and go, well, was that better than switching every couple of minutes?

It probably almost certainly was for them. And the evidence on this is really clear. Everyone likes flow states once they get into them, and it's really one of the deepest and most pleasurable experiences. And people get into it doing different things. For some people, it's making bagels. For some people, it's brain surgery. It can be anything that's meaningful to someone.

But yeah, so, I think it's rare that you find someone where if you don't bring up different aspects of what I learned from these experts, they kind of recognize nothing good about deeper focus, like mind wandering or reading books. You might get some people, but I think it would be quite rare. I want to try brain surgery and see if I get into flow. My guest is Johann Hari. He is author of the book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, and How to Think Deeply Again. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs?

What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details, terms of place.

Trade ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square for ice cubes in your umbrella drink. Let Porter Airlines fly you from Toronto Pearson nonstop to 10 top sun destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Costa Rica. Enjoy award-winning Porter service. Toronto has love for 20 years and start your vacation as soon as you're on the plane. Book your sunny getaway today at flyporter.com. and actually enjoy economy. So, Johann, what you talked about, though, what I think a lot of people have trouble with is, as you said, you know, focus on one thing,

write that chapter, climb that rock. But if you've got five things to do and you pick one, you've still got those other four things in the back of your mind that you've got to get done. It's very hard to stay focused when you know there's other things to focus on. This is one of the reasons why you've got to deal with some of the collective elements. So give you an example.

In France, in 2018, they had a huge crisis of what they called Le Burnout. I don't think I need to translate that. And so the French government was put under a lot of pressure by Labour unions to figure out, well, what's going on, why our work is getting so burned out. So they set up a government inquiry, and the government inquiry discovered one of the key reasons, which is that 30% of French workers felt they could never, when they were awake, stop checking their phones or emails, because at any moment their boss could message them in if they didn't reply quickly,

they'd be in trouble, right? So I remember when we were kids, the only people who were on call were the president and doctors, and even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? So we went from almost nobody being on call to almost half the economy being on call. And I can give those people all the lovely self-help advice in the world, about all the dozens of things I recommend people do in the book, they can't do them, right? Like you're saying, if your job depends on you being constantly plugged in, you can't do it,

right? So the French government, and a stress they only did this because ordinary French people pressured them, introduced a solution. It's a very simple solution that's worked incredibly well. By law, every French worker now has what's called the right to disconnect. It's very simple law. It just says your work hours have to be defined in your contract. And when your work hours are over, you have the legal right to not check your phone or email. So when I went to Paris to research this, while I was there, Rent-A-Kill, the pest control company just before I went there, was fined 70,000 euros for getting one worker to check his,

complaining that one of their workers hadn't checked his email an hour after he finished his legally defined workhouse. Now, you can see how the right to disconnect is a, you know, big collective. thing. You can't demand that on your own, right? I mean, maybe if you're very powerful in your workplace, you can, but most people can't. But together we can fight for it, right? We can demand it. In the corner of my room over here, I have 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 won't sit down to watch a film with my partner unless we both in prison our phones. I want have my friends. I will have my friends.

around for dinner unless we both put our phones in the phone jail. The pleasures of getting back your focus is really difficult at first. But the pleasures of getting back your focus are so much greater than whatever TikTok or Instagram or whatever. When you can think deeply, your life is so much better. It does just seem that the pace of life today with all of the distractions and the gadgets and the gizmos, that it's very easy to get to. distracted and it's just, you know, it's fundamental. It's like just a different way of life than it used to be. One of the heroes of my book is a woman called Lenore Skunerzi. Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s and from when she was five years old, she left her home

on her own every morning and walked to school. It was 15 minutes away. And she would generally bump into all the other kids because everyone walked to school in the 1960s. And when school ended at three o'clock, Lenore would leave and she'd wonder around the neighborhood with all her friends and do whatever they wanted. There were no adults watching over them, part of many adults who happened to pass by, and they went home when they were hungry, right? So kids spent enormous amount of their time outside their house playing freely with other children. By the time Lenore was a mother in the 90s in Queens, that was over. In fact, by 2003, only 10% of American children ever played outside without an adult. And it turns out that childhood we've

lost contains a huge number of things that are really important for attention and focus. One of them is exercise. Kids develop more brain connections and can pay attention better when they get to run around. But there's even saying even more important, when children play freely with other children, without adults standing over and enforcing the rules, they learn how to pay attention. They learn what matters to them, which is important for attention. They learn how to persuade other kids to pay attention to what they care about. They learn how to take turns.

They learn how to take risks, which is really important because if you don't learn how to take risks, you'll be anxious and that ruins your attention. So Lenore was looking at all this evidence. And she's like, look, this is really bad for our kids. And at first she thought, okay, the solution's kind of obvious. I just need to persuade parents to let their kids play outside, right? And it's just persuade them as individuals. But she quickly discovered, if you're the only parent who lets your kid go out,

they get scared, you look nuts. In fact, people often call the cops. So Lenore began to build a much bigger solution. She runs a group called Let Grow. It's letgrow.org. I really recommend parents, grandparents, listening. go to this site. So what let Grow do is they go to whole schools and a whole neighbourhoods and they persuade everyone to give their kids increasing levels of freedom building up to playing

outdoors. And I think of all the conversations I have for Stolen Focus, probably the most moving, was with a 14-year-old boy in Long Island. And until this program had begun nine months before I met him, he had never been allowed out of his house on his own. This was a big, strong 14-year-old boy. It was taller than me. Never been allowed out of his house on his own. I asked him why and he said, my parents are scared of all these kidnappings.

He said, this is a town in Long Island where the olive oil stores across the street from the French bakery. But then this program began. And all the kids in his neighbourhood started to play outside. I said to him, what did you do? He said, well, we played ball games. But then he said, we went into the woods. and he leaned forward and he said very confidentially.

Our phones don't have signal in the woods and we still went there. He thought that was like a miracle. And I said, what did you do in the woods? He said, we built a fort. And now me and my friends, we go and sit in the fort and we build other things. It was like watching a child come to life. And I thought about how many kids I know who never get to explore anything except on Fortnite and World of Warcraft, we can hardly be surprised they've become so obsessed.

I would argue every school in the United States should have a let-gross. program. This is the lowest hanging fruit, right? It costs nothing. We can restore human childhood. Well, given the fact that I suspect everybody has had that experience of having trouble concentrating, focusing, paying attention, I think this is an important discussion because as you point out, there are solutions to these things if we make it a priority. I've been talking to Johann Hari. He's a journalist and bestselling author. The name of the book is stolen focus, why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Johan. Thanks, Mike. Really enjoyed it. Me too. And that's it for this

SYSK trending episode. I'm Mike Hurruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know.