The Liz Moody Podcast - Top Attention Researcher: Our Attention Spans Are Down To 47 Seconds! Here’s How To Fix It

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Are our attention spans really shrinking because of social media, or is that a myth? Psychologist and attention expert Dr. Gloria Mark discusses the newest research on our attention spans, how attention interacts with technology and stress, and ways we can begin to heal our attention spans. We learn exactly how our attention spans have shifted over the last two decades by understanding how attention works on a scientific level and the different types of attention. Dr. Mark gives her top tips on developing awareness and managing your focus to improve your productivity and mental wellbeing. 0:11 Have Attention Spans Decreased? 3:45 Media Multitasking 9:08 How Social Media Hijacks Our Attention 16:40 In-Person Vs Zoom Meetings 26:19 Why Does Everything Feel Boring? 30:55 Stress & Your Attention Span 36:20 The Multitasking Myth 45:12 Why Do We Check Our Emails Compulsively? 56:09 Developing Daily Awareness 1:04:30 Attention Spans Through The Week For more from Dr. Mark, find her online at www.gloriamark.com or on LinkedIn. Pick up a copy of her book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, where books are sold. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome. This episode is sponsored by: Pique: go to piquelife.com/LIZMOODY for up to 20% off plus a special gift. Wildgrain: go to Wildgrain.com/LIZMOODY for $30 off the first box - PLUS a free item in every box. Osmia Skincare: use code LIZMOODY2025 for 20% off at osmiaskincare.com. Great Lakes Wellness: use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first purchase at greatlakeswellness.com. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 311. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Mark, welcome to the podcast. Have our attention spans decreased in a researched way over the last 10 to 20 years, or is that something we're all just imagining and feeling? There is some neuroscience research that suggests that our brain structures are changing. We tend to think of there being two states of attention. You're focused and you're not focused. It's actually more nuanced than that. Two dimensions of attention that are really important are how engaged we are and how challenged we are. Why does tech feel so much more addicting than anything in my real life? Hello, friends, and welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where every week we're sharing real science, real stories, and realistic tools that actually level up every part of your life. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and longtime journalist. You guys have been asking me to do an episode on attention and focus forever, and it took me some time to find the perfect guest. But today, I am so excited to welcome.

I'm Dr. Gloria Mark to the podcast. Dr. Mark has a PhD from Columbia University. She is currently a professor at UC Irvine, where she researches all things attention. She's published over 200 articles, and she's the author of the best-selling book, Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance happiness and productivity. And today, she is going to teach us why our attention spans are so messed up, how technology is impacting our brains, and and exactly how we can fix it. There's a lot of information in this episode. So if you want some key takeaways when you're done listening,

head over to our sparkly new newsletter on lizmoody.substack.com. It's going to have action steps for every single episode, as well as bonus interviews, meal plans, workout plans, and more. Dr. Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having. I'm so excited to have you here. Attention span is something that we're all struggling with so much. So let's just kick it off.

have our attention spans decreased in a researched way over the last 10 to 20 years, or is that something we're all just imagining and feeling? No, there's real empirical evidence to show that they've decreased on screens. I've been measuring people's attention spans on screen since 2004. That's when our first paper was published. And at that time, we found people's attention on any application, any brown. browser window on any screen before switching to something else was two and a half minutes on average. Then we fast forward. We go to 2012 and we're finding it to average 75 seconds on any screen

before switching. In the years 2014 through 2020, right before the pandemic started, attention averaged 47 seconds. This was replicated by other studies. as well. And we use software that logs screen activity in the background. It's unobtrusive. People aren't aware that we're measuring their screen time. Of course, they consent to being in the study, but while they're going about their everyday work, they're just not aware of it. Based on six studies done between 2014-2020, we find that our attention spans on-screen's average 47 seconds. Now, If we look at what's called the midpoint, the midpoint is just the middle point of all the data, that's 40 seconds.

And that's not so much different than the average of 47 seconds. And what this 40-second midpoint tells us is that half of all of our measurements were less than 40 seconds, and half of them were longer. So, of course, you might read something and you spend more time. when you're reading it, but also a lot of time, you're just fast switching. You're switching between email and maybe social media, maybe texting, and you're just constantly switching your attention. It's so interesting. So that was measuring on a screen. Is there evidence that we can hold our attention longer to things that are off screen? Or can we hold our attention less long to things that are

off screen? You know, unfortunately, no one has ever measured that. We really can't say if I had to venture against. I would say that our attention spans off screen are shorter as well. But we can only say that as people were using screens in the digital age, as it became more widespread in use, we can say that people's attention spans shortened. You have to ask, when will that stop? Because it's declined and declined and decline. Are we going to have a goldfish attention span in five years? Well, you know, obviously there's going to have to be a low point, right? Because otherwise people wouldn't be able to comprehend anything. Have we reached that low point yet? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I imagine it might decline a little bit more. But I already think that 47 seconds is

quite short. It's quite short. And it's also there's the attention span. There's the amount of time you can focus on something. And then there's also the need to multitask, like the feeling that doing a single thing is really boring. And if I'm doing one thing, I need to have a TV show on. I need to what's the, I need to be watching my big screen while I'm scrolling on my little screen to like have it keep my attention. So there's two almost different ways we're robbing our own attention. Yeah. So you're talking about something that's called media multitasking. That's where we have one media that's going on that we're listening to or watching or, you know, somehow it's capturing our attention. Maybe not completely. And then there's a

another media that we're focusing on, which is our phones, our computer screens. It's very common for people to have two or more media going on at the same time. Do we know what's happening in our brains that's at the root of this that's being impacted by all of this diminishing attention? Yeah. So we have a part of our mind that's called executive function. And executive function, And it's like the controller of your brain. You can think of it as the CEO of your brain. And it does really important functions. It governs decision-making.

But it also helps us filter out distractions. So it helps keep us on track. It helps us focus. Now, if we're constantly switching our attention, executive function gets fatigued. And when it's fatigued, it just can't do its job properly. It's not as efficient in helping us filter out distractions. As a result, we end up switching our attention even more, right?

Because we don't have these guardrails in place to help keep us on track. We get into this kind of downward cycle. We get distracted. It gets us mentally fatigued. We get tired out for various reasons when we switch our attention. And then executive function gets weakened. And it makes us even more susceptible for getting distracted. So the part of your brain that your executive function is in, are there long-term effects we're

able to see? Like, is that part getting smaller? Because what happens is we're on our screens and we're distracted while we're on our screens, but then, you know, the next day, the next day, the next day, we're still distracted. It feels like there's longer-term changes happening in the wiring, in the structures of our brain. There is some neuroscience research that suggests that our brain structures are changing. We live in the digital age. It's early research, but there is more than one study that shows that there are real changes.

For example, in the white matter of the brain, and there are studies that show a relationship specifically with being online and changes in brain structure. So it's not just natural evolution, but of course, for any part of our bodies to naturally evolve, it takes a very long time. And we're seeing these changes in a matter of years, not in a matter of centuries. So we've talked about screens. We've talked about technology being the thing that's leading to this decrease of attention. Can you zero in on that as a problem? like what specifically has happened that has hijacked our attention in these ways?

Let's look at the timeline, right? 2004 average of two and a half minutes on a screen up to 2020, and we find it around 47 seconds. So what happened in those last 20 years? A lot has happened. So in 2007, the smartphone was launched, and it took a few years for the smartphone to get white. adopted. By 2010, it was very widely adopted in widespread use. The other thing was the rise of social media. Now, social media has been around for a long time. Now, we had internet relay channels back, you know, quite a long time ago. But Facebook started in 2003 and Twitter at the time,

now X in 2007, TikTok came about, Instagram, Snapchat. So there was just this whole search of social media sites that came about that also served to distract attention. And the other thing going on was e-commerce just exploded, right? In the 2000s, you know, we used to not buy so many things online, But now, buying something online, we don't give it a second thought. E-commerce, you know, browsing shopping sites happened. And of course, a lot of organizations moved online. So new sites moved online. If you can recall the time when we used to get our news from TV at certain times in the day,

usually, you know, there was the, what, 6 o'clock news. And now there's a 24-7 news cycle. And that's been around for some years. And so there is this notion that we need to keep checking because there's going to be an update on the news. We can't tear ourselves away. There are many things that happened in the last 20 years. And can you just highlight a few of the more insidious ways that these social media sites, these e-com sites, are utilizing science to high. jack our attention? Sure. So there are algorithms. Algorithms have become increasingly more sophisticated.

These are actually developed by tech companies. They're also developed by ad remarketing companies. What happens is that every time we go on the web, we leave digital traces. So I will go to a shopping site and I look at a pair of shoes, right? And I click on it and I'm browsing. And I'm browsing. And my path of going to that site and what I click on is captured and put into a profile. And then this tech company or these ad remarketing companies, they understand what I like, right? And they know I'm interested in these shoes. So whenever I go to a different site on the web, I'm seeing these shoes that are kind of throbbing in my line of sight. You know, it's hard to ignore that. And of course, when we're on social media, some sites, not all sites, like Blue Sky,

as I understand, does not do this. But they use algorithms to gear feats to our interests. So tech companies have a profile of me and you and all the listeners. And these tech companies have a pretty good understanding of what it is that will attract people's attention, what they like, and that it's going to gear content to what people like. And is that why all tech feels like it draws your attention more than kind of like all non-tech? Like it's harder to sit down and read a book these days. Even doing activities in real life, it feels harder to focus your attention on that than it feels to scroll on your phone.

Is that because of the energy stuff that we started to touch on? Is that because these things are just designed to be so, so addictive? Why does tech feel so much more addicting than anything in my real life? That's certainly a big factor. There are a number of other factors involved as well. When we're online, right, things can happen really fast, either driven by me. You know, I can click to different sites and different screens and change things. So it's about what we're accustomed to.

It's about habits that we've developed. It's not just the algorithms. There's also this notion that we're social beings. And we're very attracted to other people. We want to interact with other people. And there are various kinds of social forces that encourage us to interact with other people that shape the way. we interact with other people.

If you're face-to-face with someone, you respond to their facial expressions, to their eye contact, to their gestures. There are so many different signals that we give off. But when we're online, we don't see those signals. But there are still, nevertheless, are social forces that keep us glued to the screens. One of those, for example, is called social capital.

And I'm going to be alert to getting a text or getting an email because I want to respond to it to be in good graces with the person who sent it to me. Right. I don't want to piss them off by ignoring them. And so social capital drives us to interact with others online. And it's social media. Someone post you, you want to post back. You want to respond. It's so interesting, too, how much it hits different than real life, too. Like, I, obviously, social media is a really big part of my job. And I worry about how much of video going viral, like, feels good to me in a different way than something in real life going well feels good to me. And I can feel that difference.

And it freaks me out, you know? And then I have friends who don't do social media for a living and they're still, like, checking how many likes their photos. got and all that kind of stuff. And I do think it's so interesting how that social capital component, it feels stronger online than it does offline when somebody like, oh, I like your shoes. And you're like, oh, thank you. It doesn't hit in the same way. Well, that's right. Because first of all, our reach is broader. Right. Getting 100 likes or 1,000 likes is much more powerful than having a single person just nod and say, great job. I mean, that's important, right? And,

And we need to relearn how to pay attention to individuals who acknowledge us and encourage us. When we're online, it's a greater reach. And we realize, wow, we have this impact on 1,000 people or 10,000 people. That's a rush. That really is something that keeps us going back. So that brings up another social dynamic, and that's the idea of identity. and it's really important for us to maintain our identity and to construct our identity. Now, in real life, we construct our identities all the time.

So imagine you're invited to a party. We put a lot of care into how do we dress, how do we wear our hair? What impression do we want to make, right, when we go to this party? and the same thing happens online, but of course, in a different way. So we put a lot of attention into our profile picture. What impression do we want to get off? When we post something, we put a lot of attention into the use of words, right? What do I want to communicate?

What kind of feeling do I want to communicate? Identity is really important, and some people spend, and there's nothing wrong. with this, it's human nature. They spend a lot of time maintaining and constructing their online identities and sometimes at the expense of ignoring what's going on in the real world. Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting. Your example of the party makes me think about how much easier the social component of online can feel too. Like if you go to a party, you have to make conversation, you have to deal with those awkward pauses in conversation or like, if somebody's like, oh, should I be talking about it? You know what I mean? Like there's,

there's all these little awkward parts of real life human interaction and online, if it feels awkward out, you just like scroll it away. I do think there's, again, I keep coming back to energy. I think there's a real energy problem we're having on a societal level where we are draining our energy because we're on technology, which does drain our energy. And then we have no energy left. So then we go back to technology because it's a lower energy thing to engage with and real people. Absolutely. So when we're with real people, we have to be active. We have to pay attention to them. We look at their social cues, right? And we're responding. And we get into what's called synchrony. We synchronize our actions with the other person. And so much of what happens online,

except for Zoom, is done asynchronously. And that's a lot easier, right? You can be more passive. You can see what someone has posted or watching a short video and you can respond to that or you don't even have to respond. You can just watch it. It's a lot easier. It's less effort when we're spending all our time doing that. It can also at the same time be draining, right? because we're going through a lot of different kinds of communication snippets, I call it, short pieces of content. And we're constantly switching our attention between, you know, take TikTok, you watch a short video, makes you laugh.

So you watch another one makes you laugh. And before you know it, you've spent an hour on TikTok and you're watching all these videos. But at the same time, we're doing a lot of switching in our minds and that can tire us. Something I hear people say all the time, and I've experienced this myself as well, is that like Zoom calls take way more energy than just having a real person-to-person interaction. And now so much of our workday is just like Zoom, call, Zoom, call, Zoom call. Is there truth to that type of thing? First of all, we're looking at a two-dimensional representation of a person, right? We're not looking at the entire being.

And we're just looking at a part of that person. We're not experiencing, you know, the full range of social information that we can get from someone. And social information can energize us, right? It gives us information to respond to. And it's interesting to look at. And Zoom, it's very restricted. And we're looking at this flat, two-dimensional person. And the other thing that can tire us is, you know, when we have an image of ourselves on that Zoom call, we can't help.

But look at that image of ourselves. And that's also tiring and switching between the image of ourselves and the person back and forth. The other thing that happens with Zoom calls, and this happened quite a bit during the pandemic, and still happens to a large extent of people who work remotely. is that Zoom calls are scheduled back to back. You know, 9 a.m. Zoom call, 10 a.m. another one, 11 a.m. There's no time in between, no time to transition. And we need time to transition.

After an hour on screen, we get tired, right? By your fourth or fifth Zoom call, you are exhausted, especially if you don't have time for a break. In real life, imagine being at the workplace. At least there's a transition to another meeting. You can walk five minutes. You can even stand up and move around. And it's really hard to do that.

And I remember during that pandemic, my university made a very quick pivot to online teaching. And my classes were back to back. And I had to like quickly switch into a completely different mode and completely different lecture. And I just had no transition in between. So would one action step there be if you're going to have Zoom calls, try to make them 50 minutes or 55 minutes? Absolutely. For Zoom calls, I would completely recommend having transition time between calls. But the other thing I would really strongly recommend is to spend the first few minutes doing a check-in.

And so much of that is not done. A check-in is where you go around and people, very quickly just tell you what's going on. Now, this was important during the pandemic, because people experienced, you know, a lot of different things. There was loneliness and, you know, some people were dealing with a lot of family issues and other kinds of stress. And so checking in is a way to replace the informal social interaction that we do in real face-to-face meanings. So before a face-to-face meeting starts, you come in and you say, hi, everybody, you can see who is happy. Oh, you know, you've got a new outfit.

We can see who's depressed. Oh, something going on. We get so much information from walking in and people can chit-chat. And it's a way to kind of ease into the meeting. And Zoom is a very formal structured use of time. and we usually don't all a lot time for that. It's so interesting because on one hand,

I like when we chit-chat in meetings because I feel connected to people. I work by myself for most of the day, all of those things. And the other hand, I'm like, I spend all day on these video meetings and I don't want to make them like take longer than they already need to take.

So I have this like push and pull of those chatier moments, you know? Yeah. So, you know, it's good to relax a bit when we're on Zoom, you know, relax and don't feel like we have to do this formal, structured meeting. We can take a break. You can do a check in in the middle of the meeting.

There's nothing wrong with that. Do you have any advice for breaking this sort of vicious cycle that we're talking about where we spend all day on technology? So then we have no energy left at the end of the day. So instead of engaging with real people, we go back to technology. how do we stop perpetuating that cycle? Yeah, at the end of the work day, just get off tech. And for sure, don't deal with any electronic communications that have to do with work.

Here's why. It's so important to psychologically detach from work at the end of the day. So when you leave your office or even if it's a home office, when you step away from your work, time, you need to psychologically detach from work. Why? Because it enables us to psychologically reattach to work the next day better. And when we can psychologically reattach, we have more motivation, we're more engaged in the work. We have more psychic energy to devote to work. But when you're just, you know, a little bit on. When you're on throughout the evening, it's draining, right? And we need time to refresh. Now, you know, I know a lot of people will just

go on social media. Well, that's okay for a little bit. And I do social media about 10 minutes a week, max, right? That's my limit. You know, I can probably do more. It's not bad, but you have to set a limit, right? You can't spend hours a day on social. social media. And social media, it's okay for a few minutes because it kind of helps declutter our mind. You're watching mindless content, right? And there's a benefit to them in a small dose? In a very small dose. Okay. That's interesting because I feel like we talk so much about the negative effects of social media over and over and over. And obviously they're huge and we'll get into those even more. But like in small doses, you actually think there's a benefit. Yeah. And I really want to emphasize

small doses. A few minutes of social media, it's not going to harm you, right? It's when we get addicted to it. Addiction is very strong work, but it's when we're just not able to pull ourselves away. Now, social media, you know, watching mindless or looking at mindless content, it's a way of what I call using route attention, which, you know, we're not like actively putting a lot of mental resources into it, but we're just kind of letting things flow by, letting our minds declutter, but there are things we can do offline that accomplish the same thing. Some people knit, right? That's a road activity. You're doing the same action over and over again, and it kind of helps your mind clear up. There's a lot of other activities that people do. One guy I talked to says,

he has a screen in his office and he takes this ball, he just bounces the ball on the screen, and that's a road activity. He's not really thinking very much. It's mindless. And it's just kind of allowing him to calm down, settle his mind. And of course, there are other things that are more beneficial to do for a few minutes. But it's not bad to spend a few minutes. And I mean, really just a few minutes.

on social media. And I don't mean looking at content that's harmful. But what about the fact that everything else, because our attention spans have been hijacked so much, feels boring compared to these quick bursts of dopamine flooding information we're getting online? Yeah, that's true. And there has been so much research put in to short form content. to keep us glued to the screen. And yeah, that, you know, we're fighting. And that's really hard. But it doesn't mean that we're prisoners of it.

I believe that people can have agency, right? We can have agency to pull away. And if you're a person who feels, oh, my God, if I'm going to spend five minutes on social media, I can't pull away. Then don't do it. Don't go online. if you're a person like that.

For me, I actually get bored after a few minutes. You know, I might go on Facebook. I find it interesting. Oh, I didn't realize this person was living here now or changed their job. I can do that for a few minutes. But after that, I just start getting bored. For myself, I don't worry about it. But for a person who is not able to pull themselves away, I would say don't even start.

don't do it. But then what do they do when they're like, they're tired? It's been a long workday. They've been on their Zoom calls all day, even if they've had their five-minute breaks. And everything else just feels like this big hurdle to engage with. And so they're like, I don't want to get on social media because that's going to suck my attention span even more. But honestly, that is the only thing like I have the energy for right now. I don't mean to press on this too much, but I think that is a huge part of the problem is everything else feels like a bigger hurdle.

And all of our resources are depleted at the end. end of our work days. And so overcoming these bigger hurdles and taking the willpower to draw yourself away from something that has been designed to hook your attention feels really, really difficult when we are that depleted. Go outside and look at nature, spend time in nature. There is a lot of research that shows just 20 minutes in nature can completely restores and de-stress us. And there's a theory. It's called attention restoration theory. And it's this idea that there's so much stimulation in nature.

We hear things, we see things, we feel, might feel the wind. That kind of resets us. That can reset our thinking and remove that stress. You can do meditation. Or listen to a tape that's a visualization tape that creates imagery, relaxing imagery, is a wonderful way to replenish. Having a conversation with another person, yes, there are some people that, where it requires a lot of energy to be with them, to talk to them. And so maybe if you're really exhausted, it's not such a good idea to speak with a person

like that, but there are other people who can be calming. You know, they have a calming influence. and, you know, you feel like, wow, I can just hang with this person and just be myself. And that can be very rewarding. Pick up a book, right? If you're really, really drained, pick up a book or a magazine and engage in long form content, right? And it should be something that's interesting for you. So find a really good book, and we've all had books. You know, we love them so much.

hard to put them down, right? Find a book like that and spend some time at the end of the day or, you know, after dinner and get into that book and get so involved in it that, wow, this is really interesting. And that can also help us reset. I like that you say a really good book because I think one of my best tips for when I'm having a hard time reading is to just really decrease the prestige of the material I'm trying to consume. So instead of being like, oh, I'm to read this beautiful literary fiction. I'm like, what's the easiest, most fun, just like bouncy book I can read right now and I'll let myself read that. And it gets me back into reading. And I think there's really interesting research around reading that reading can decrease our stress levels by something

like 68% and six minutes, I want to say, which gets me to all of your points around decreasing stress. And your work was the first time I had it highlighted this relationship between stress and attention that I think I knew in the back of my mind, but it had never been articulated for me before. So can you explain that to us? In my book, I talk about different kinds of attention. We tend to think of there being two states of attention. You're focused and you're not focused. But it's actually more nuanced than that. As I was studying attention over the years, I realized that some things we pay attention to require effort. Now, if you're reading some difficult material, that requires some effort. Or if you're doing some calculation, that requires effort,

or you're trying to do analysis at work, requires effort. And there's other things that we do where we're engaged with it and requires very little effort, like watching a YouTube video. And I don't mean a YouTube video where you're trying to learn something mechanical. You're just watching something for fun, you're watching reels, or, you know, just something very lightweight. So two dimensions of attention that are really important are how engaged we are and how challenged we are. I came up with this framework to think about attention. And I think it's really important for people to consider that when we do different things, we're using different kinds of attention. So if you're both engaged and challenged at doing something, like reading a hard book, I call that focused attention.

But when you're really engaged and there's just no challenge, I call that rote attention. And that's like looking at tick-tuck. Or even gardening could be rote attention. I mean, you're paying a little bit of attention, but it's easy, right? if you're not challenged and you're not engaged, I call that bored, boredom. And if you're challenged and not engaged, I call that frustration. And an example is when I have a tech problem, I'm so frustrated. I have to force myself to be engaged, to figure it out, and it's really challenging.

So going back to your initial question, the relationship of stress, and attention. When we're doing something where we're engaged and that requires effort, where we're challenged, that can create stress. And when we're doing something, we're engaged and we're not challenged like watching TikTok, that's easy, right? It's effortless. And that's why people can spend hours.

And it actually turns out we found in our research that people are happiest. when they use wrote attention. And that's not surprising because it's easy, right? And if you anticipate a reward, and dopamine comes when you anticipate, not after you experience the reward, the anticipation of reward. We get this dopamine rush.

Of course, people want to keep doing that activity, right? It creates this reward cycle. People are stressed when they're using focused attention, especially for extended periods of time. In our day and age, people tend to not take the breaks that they should, and we need to take mental breaks. There's a lot of reasons we don't, but it's really important to take breaks so that we don't get ourselves stressed. The other way that we experience stress is through attention shifting, switching our attention. And that's multitasking. Multitasking is not doing two things at the same time unless one of those things is automatic.

By automatic, I mean walking. We don't put attention into walking. We just do it. And you can walk in text because walking is automatic. You can maybe stir a pot while you're cooking and do texting at the same time. But you can't do two effortful things at the same time. We're just now wired that way. So what we do is we switch our attention.

And every time we switch our attention, we have to reorient our minds. It's a change in context. We have to kind of reframe what is it that I'm looking at now. And that accumulates and that builds up and that creates stress. And so doing that every 47 seconds on average, sometimes longer, a lot of times shorter, it builds up and stress accumulates in our minds. When it comes to wellness, you're going to get the best results by focusing on the big needle movers. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize that last 1%, which creates a ton of stress and it actually doesn't help our health that much. At the top of the needle mover list, sleep.

And one of the best ways to optimize your sleep is to optimize your mattress, which is why I love avocado green mattress so much. First of all, this mattress is so comfortable. I have the one with the pillow top, which is medium firm, and it's just a dream. I miss it when I travel. It's better than even the fanciest hotel beds. Having a mattress that supports your joints and your body and feels good is going to help you get more sleep and better quality sleep.

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Would it make sense to, in general, be focusing in our lives with swapping one rote form of attention for another? Like, would that be a really low-hanging fruit to hit that happy, easy place that you mentioned from your research? But we're not sapping our attention in the way of social media. So you're talking about switching out social media for gardening. Or folding laundry or knitting or crocheting, I don't know, road tasks. Sure. That could work. I actually have a friend who's a professor at MIT, and one of his favorite activities is folding socks for his kids and a family.

And he loves matching socks. That's his road activity. It's a way to just kind of de-stress and get away. So yes, that can work. But, you know, you can think about doing something that makes you happy, too, not just doing a road task for this. sake of doing it. There's a lot of road things I do that I don't enjoy, like chopping onions. I don't enjoy that. Things like gardening, yes, I enjoy doing that. I don't do it enough. But there are things that we can swap out. And then the second thing is it goes back to kind of when I was like, how do we break this vicious cycle? We're on tech all day and then we're too tired at night. And you suggested essentially a number of stress relieving activities, which is why I asked about the relationship between stress and attention, would that suggest that a really concrete action step that we could all

use to get our attention back, either in the long term or in the moment, is increasing our stress-reducing activities? Like, if we need attention in the moment, we can add in something that reduces our stress, which will get our attention back. And in the long term, if we're trying to work on our attention, we can add in, like, a stress-relieving practice on a daily basis. Sure. Let me also emphasize that one of the best things that you are in the first things.

to swap out is to exercise. And, you know, maybe this falls into what you're thinking of as a stress-relieving practice. But really going outside and exercising does wonders, even taking a walk. And I am very religious in doing exercise every single day. I spend 45 minutes, and I scheduled that into my life. I mean, it's as important to me as any kind of meeting. I have to to do that exercise. And that's such a great way to relieve stress and to reset. Yeah, I mean, the research around the mental health effects of exercise are incredible. But I think the connection that I, again, didn't make until your work was connecting the stress relief to the attention. I think when I think about attention restoration, it's like take a break from the social media,

take a break from the emails, whatever, maybe go to sleep and that'll reset me or something like that, but I don't think about, oh, if I am having a hard time paying attention, I need to do something in this moment to, like, reduce my stress, which was really interesting. Yes, absolutely. Is there research on the technology or tasks that increase our stress levels the most? Is email different than social media, different than Zoom calls? There is a lot of research on email. Quite a bit of that is my own research, because I have studied email for many years.

And it's a very robust finding that email gets us stressed. And it's not surprising. Everybody imagines that, but we can show that empirically. So we've had people wear heart rate monitors in the workplace. And we also log their computer activity. Of course, with their full consent, they know they're in this study. And what we can do is we look at the exact time that they're on. email and we look at what's happening with their stress as measured by the heart rate monitors.

And it's just uncanny, right? They go on email and you see their stress going up. They go off email and you see the stress going down. There are a lot of qualities in email that cause us to increase our stress. It's a very robust result. We've done multiple studies. And the other study that goes along with this, is that people have negative affect when they go on email. Negative affect means negative emotions. Email puts people in a bad mood. Why is that the case? Well, email represents work, right? And if you're receiving emails, it's usually asking you to do something or pay attention to this. or give me this information.

So there's this imbalance in costs, psychological costs, between the email sender and the email receiver. So the person who sends email gets the benefits. And the person who's receiving the email has to do the work. Yeah, if you're sending the email, you're like, oh, I'm taking something off my plate. I'm checking something off my to-do list. But somebody receiving the email is getting something added to their to-do list. That's it, exactly. And you're forced to make a decision or I have to provide this information or fill out these forms.

That's trustful. And the other thing is that email is continuous. It just keeps coming in. A long time ago, I wrote about this as emails are the zombies. They keep coming and you keep deleting that and they keep coming. So email, it's never ending. It doesn't stop. And going back to what we talked about as.

social capital. It's hard if you don't respond to an email because it's sending a message to someone that, oh, you're not important or I don't care about you. And sometimes deliberately we don't want to respond or sometimes it just slips by because of the hundreds of emails that we get in our inbox. So how can we action that research to feel better to get our attention back? It's a tough one with email. And I have seen various proposals for this. Let's start at the organizational level. So organizations can send out email, let's say two or three times a day. That's called batching email. And that's going to be a hard sell because people feel that they need information right away in a dream world. If you are only

getting email at 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. You're only going to check your email. three times a day. And that's going to reduce stress. And in our research, we find that people average checking their emails in a workplace 77 times a day. This is what we measured by logging people's computer activity. That's a lot of switching just for email alone. Okay, so that's what organizations can do. People can use different strategies. So people have smart, inboxes, of course, the dangers you may not ever go into that smart inbox to check the email. And I know many times I have neglected to do that and have not answered emails when I should have. As a society, we have to think very carefully about, you know, what are we asking of another person to do?

Is this fair? Can I do this on my own? Can we all be good citizens? And instead of just putting the work onto another person and shifting the burden on them, is there something I as a good citizen can do myself? I get a lot of emails that ask me to send information or do work. When I know, it's like really easy to look up that information. Oh, my gosh. My DMs are literally, I get hundreds of DMs a day from something that I literally will go then and I'll Google it. and then I'll send it back to them. And I'm like, you definitely could have Googled this.

It is so frustrating. It is, right? Which I'm probably perpetuating because then I go Google it and send it to them. So I'm reinforcing the behavior. Yeah. There's that. And then another thing we can do as individuals is just reduce the amount of time we're checking email. I wanted to talk about that because I definitely check my email 77 times or whatever a day.

And I feel this compulsive need to check it. and I don't even know what I'm looking for. Like, I don't know why I'm checking it. I own my company. So I'm not even, like, waiting for a boss or something to tell me I need to do something. And I feel this compulsive need to check it. So I'm sure there's some sense of people are checking their email all the time because they're trying to be good employees.

They don't want to let their bosses down. But what else is this compulsive need to check email coming from? It's a habit. We have developed a habit. And it goes back to old psychological theory that we are. reinforced on a random schedule. So not every single time that we check email do we find something rewarding. But every so often I might get, oh, an invitation to give a talk, right? It's like when you play the Las Vegas slot machine. Not every time do you win, but you keep at it. You keep at it

because at some point you believe you're going to win. Well, and it's interesting. I've thought of social media being designed in that way, and I've talked about that and stuff, but I've never thought about email having that same intermittent reinforcement system. Yes, yes, it does. Random reinforcement schedules, this kind of conditioning is the hardest to extinguish, the hardest to get rid of. We have to put in a little bit of extra work to just not check email that often. So put yourself on a schedule where, you know, you check out once in the morning, and if you can wait to the end of the day, wait to the end of the day. So we did a study where we had an organization, people in the organization, cut off email for one work week. And it actually took me six years to find an organization willing to do that.

But I found one. So these people went for a week without email. we had them wear heart rate monitors so we could look at their stress. And in the first day or two, their stress actually went up because they were very worried about what they were missing.

But then the stress went down. And it went down because the burden of email was lifted from them. And at the end of the week, they went through their emails to see, like, what was pressing, what was urgent,

what did I miss? And it turns out, that email ages very fast. And if you don't answer an email, somehow a lot of it gets taken care of. And if people really want to get after you, they will keep sending you an email. Hey, you know, you forgot those. I just want to remind you. And so consider that email ages. And if you check it once the morning, once at the end of the day, a lot of the e-mail. you're dealing with at the end of the day just won't be relevant anymore. Maybe the person found their own solution to it, or maybe they lost interest or whatever. But it doesn't hurt to

reduce the amount of time that you're checking. And we find this relationship, not surprisingly, between the number of times you're checking email and the amount of stress, a person. So if you're listening, like, if you're a boss, you are increasing your employee's stress levels, which is making them less able to pay attention and less able to perform productively at their job. So if you're a boss listening to this or send this to your boss and say, hey, like the barrage of incoming emails, and I imagine this would apply to like slacks and stuff like that too. Slack is worse. Slack is worse because what I'm used to is every time a new research project is set up.

The words that I don't want to hear, I grimace when I hear them, are great, let's set up a new Slack channel. And I have 62 Slack channels and there's always messaging coming in. And for the nature of Slack, it's expected to be more synchronous than email. Email is asynchronous. So we can buy ourselves a little bit of time before we respond to an email. But Slack, it's expected that you'll answer very quickly. And we have all these channels open and we're always responding. So I feel that Slack puts extra pressure on people.

So if you're a boss or if you can send this to your boss, if you can set maybe times for email, times for Slack, be available on Slack at this time. I think Cal Newport suggested that when I had him on like have moments in the day where people are expected to be available to chit chat on Slack. If you're a boss, maybe do that. And if your employee, try as much as you can. It's so hard because you don't want to be the employee who's not answering the slacks. Is there any research that shows that our brains will sort of restructure if we practice not doing these things?

Like if we only check our emails three times a day, will we, after some duration of time, not feel the poll to check our emails 77 times a day? We do know that people can conquer conditioning. For example, by just not engaging in that habit, you can stop doing it. But, you know, our brains have a lot of neuroplasticity. There's a lot of neuroplasticity that goes on until the age of 25. So young people are really susceptible for these kinds of changes. But there still can be neuroplasticity after the age of 25. So yes, we can form new connections in our brains.

it takes some work, but we can certainly change habits. Is there any research on how long it takes? Like, if I was going to check my email three times a day for a week, would I not feel the need to check it all the time if I was going to stay off social media for two weeks, three weeks? Like, is there evidence to show the duration that we need to begin to not have it feel so hard? Like, it just feels so hard.

And I feel like I'm sitting here and I'm asking a bunch of people who already are like, I'm stressed, I'm tired, this is hard to do a really hard thing. There is research, and I don't recall the amount of time that it takes to break a habit. It also depends on how strong the habit is and how often a day we're doing the habit. There is some research that shows the length of time it takes. Are you a fan of techniques like the Pomodora method where we're doing 25 minutes on and then taking like a five-minute break? No. The reason I'm not is because the Pomodora method,

assumes that everyone is alike. And it's more important to listen to your own signals of when you're fatigued. And if you follow the strict Pomodora method, you're probably going to get interrupted in the middle of doing something. And maybe you're just really into writing and you're just getting into the flow of writing and then the bell goes off and you have to take a five-minute break. Well, that's not good. So it's better to finish what you're doing. doing. And you take a break at what's called the break point in a task. And a break point is a logical place where you can take a pause. And so if you're writing something, maybe you finish writing the thought or you finish the chapter. If you're reading something, you read to the end of the

section. If you're responding to an email, you know, you finish doing the email. Whatever that task is, Right? You come to a break point and you can pause and take a break. But the Pomodora method, it assumes one size fits all and that just doesn't work. What it's trying to do, though, I believe is when you sit down and you can't focus for those like first five or ten minutes, it's like, just make it to 25. It kind of makes that feel a little bit easier. Do you have any advice if we're not doing something like that of how to get our focus zeroed in when we're just sitting down to begin a task? So first of all, it's not unnatural to not sit down and be focused right away. And we have measured focused attention in the workplace. And remember, I'm defining focused attention as being engaged in something and also being challenged by it. And we find people don't come into the workplace and they're focused immediately from the get-go.

No, it takes some time to ease into a state of focus. And what do people do? They get tasks out of the way, smaller things, easy things to do. It's like they're clearing their plate, and then they can really start on doing the important work. What I would suggest is clearing your plate, you know, get simple things out of the way. But, of course, if you have something important to do, you don't want to spend two hours clearing your plate. But you want to get simple, quick things out of the way. while you're letting your focus kind of ramp up.

Exactly. And would you say it's sort of an expectation setting thing? So instead of sitting down and being like, it's been five minutes, it's been 10 minutes, I can't focus, something must be wrong with me. And then you go and procrastinate, you go scroll on social, you go check your email, whatever, saying like this is part of the process. It's going to take me five or 10 minutes to get into this focus state. Yeah.

In my book, I suggest that we practice something that's called meta-awareness. And meta-awareness refers to being. aware of what you're doing as it's unfolding. And the problem when we're on our devices is that we lose a sense of awareness of what we're doing. When you're scrolling through social media, we lack awareness. We're just kind of lost in the social media. But if you can step back, it's like you're looking at yourself from the outside. What am I doing? And learn to probe yourself and to recognize, you know, do I have an urge to go on social media? And if so, reflect and question, why am I doing that? It's probably bored or procrastination. Or if you're on social media,

learn to pause and probe yourself and say, okay, have I had enough? Am I still getting stimulated? And, well, you're probably getting a kind of superficial stimulation. But am I getting deeply stimulate? No, probably not. And so then you can step away. So the idea is to bring to your conscious mind, these unconscious actions. And when we become conscious of it, we can be intentional. And when we're intentional, we can form a plan. And the plan could be, okay, I'm going to work for 20 more minutes. And then my plan is to step away and take a break. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from?

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For a limited time, get 15% off with code Liz at oneskin.c.c.o slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.c.c.o with code Liz. Okay, so if we're doing this meta-awareness thing and we're like, oh, I am bored, oh, I am procrastinating, but we don't feel like we have the willpower to not go do the funner, easier thing, not procrastinate? What do we do with that information? It's a start, and it's a really important start.

So awareness is the first step to develop any kind of agency over our actions. It's to be aware of when we're doing a habit that may be not beneficial for us. So that's the first step. Another technique that I like to do and that other people have told me was very beneficial is to practice forethought, which means imagining your future self. Now, we tend to think of future selves five years. What do we want to be when we graduate from college or what do I want to do five years from now? Think of your future self at the end of the day and think about where you want to be.

how you want to feel and create a visualization. And if I am tempted to go on social media, I will have a visualization of where I want to be at 7 p.m. I want to be sitting on the couch. I want to be doing something fun or I want to be with friends. And how do I want to feel? I want to feel rewarded and fulfilled. And I do not want to see myself at 10 o'clock at night working on that deadline. And I have done that too many times in my life. I look back and I see myself working straight through, putting the kids to bed and then going back to work on that deadline. That is not healthy. To be more efficient, we can practice this kind of visualization and see that as a goal of what we want to achieve by the end of the day.

and it helps keep us on track. I love that. I think that's a great technique. I also find it funny that probably the thing that helps my focus most, though, like you mentioned, is like having no time to do something. If I procrastinate long enough, I suddenly discover this incredible ability to be so, so focused. If I procrastinate all day long and then I have like 10 minutes to do a task, I can focus so lasered in on that task.

Is there research to why we can focus so much better when we have not enough time kind of to do a task? that we could harness when we have a lot of time and we don't want to be procrastinating? Yeah, sure. We're putting stress on ourselves. But the stress is supposed to make it harder for us to pay attention. So what's that? We're putting stress on the short term because we know there's a deadline. And we have this incredible pressure that we've put on herself that pushes us forward.

It's not healthy. It's not good kind of stress. Now, there is something in psychology that's called the Yerkees-Dotson Curve, which shows that we need a little bit of stress to do things. We can't be in a Zen state of calmness the entire day. We wouldn't get anything done. But you need a little bit of stress. It's called arousal to be able to do anything. But there's a threshold. And if you exceed that threshold, we can't perform very well because we're too stressed. We're procrastinating the whole day. and then we save the last, you know, hour of the day or the last 30 minutes to do the work we should have been doing throughout the day.

We've pushed ourselves over that threshold, and that's just too much stress. And so it's better think about distributing that stress throughout the day and keeping that arousal level at a healthy state just enough so that we can perform and perform well and be alert because we need to be alert. and you take breaks so that we can replenish our resources and then go back to work, do a little bit. And the thing to remember is that we have a limited amount of cognitive resources. Think of it as attentional capacity. You want to think, what do I do with this attentional capacity? I don't want to use it up. Think about what's the best way, the most efficient way to distribute it over the course

of the day. Well, you don't want to overdo it, so you want to use it. And then when you start to feel fatigued, you want to pull back, do something else, take a break, then you come back, use a little bit more, pull back, replenish that attention to capacity a little bit. But, you know, the end of the day, if you're constantly switching, even if you're doing social media, you're still switching your attention. And the last half hour or even 10 minutes of the day, you're you just don't have the attentional capacity to be able to perform compared to if you were to have spread out your attentional capacity in a more reasonable way throughout the day. Does it start high though generally and then kind of decrease throughout the day?

You were like when your focus is ramping up, it's okay to do these like smaller tasks. There's this productivity method called Eat the Frog. Have you heard of that? No. It's the idea that you should do your biggest, most challenging task first because that is going to give you that huge rush of reward and you're going to have the most attentional capacity at the beginning of the day. What are your thoughts on that versus other people will say go through your smaller tasks, give yourself some wins, and then you will build up to being able to eat the frog.

Yeah. It depends on what a person's individual attentional rhythm is. So we haven't talked about this, but everyone has their own attentional rhythm. There's times in the day when their attention is at its peak, there's times when they're in a valley. It's individual. It depends on our chronotype. If you're an early type, your attentional peak is earlier. If you're a late type, it's later. It depends on the things we're doing. If we're doing easy things, then we're not using up our attentional capacity as much. It depends on also what you want to accomplish. If it's something really important, okay, find out when your attentional peak is. and do that task during your attentional peak.

So we have found for most people, the peak is mid-morning. That's when they're at their best. But of course, there are individual differences. For some people it's earlier, some people it's later. You can discover when your attentional peak is by keeping a diary. And I've had my students do this. And then plan your day so that your peak, attentional time is devoted to doing that task. You don't want to use that time for social media

or for doing email or for doing slack. You want to do it to accomplish what's really important for you because you've got the attentional capacity at that time. I am not someone who can dive in right away and start doing heavy work. It does take me a bit of time to ramp up and I do easy things to get them off my plate. There is a psychological idea that's called the Zygarnic effect. Bluma Zygarnic was a psychologist, and a hundred years ago, she discovered that what we have tasks that are unfinished, we tend to remember them more. And when they remember them more, they clog up our minds. And if you're trying to do hard work, but your mind is clogged up with these tasks that are unfinished, that's not good.

If it's easy to do, like answering an email, do that. Get rid of that task. Erase it from your mind, right? It's out of the way. So that would be an example of things we can do to help clear the mind to prepare us for doing the hard task during that time when our attention is at its peak. And then just as you said that we have different attention abilities throughout the day. You've also done research on us having different

attentional abilities throughout the week, right? Yes. Can you share that? We found that on Mondays people are the most focused, which we might expect because people have had the weekend to replenish. So they start Mondays with their full tank of cognitive resources, attentional capacity. Tuesday is the least focused. And maybe that's because, because they've spent their attentional resources on Monday. And then we find on Thursdays that people tend to do the most broke kind of work. That's that easy, engaging kinds of work that doesn't require a lot of stress. Maybe they do it because it's getting close to the end of the week.

Maybe somehow they're preparing for the end of the week. And then Fridays, we see a burst of focus again. And that's because, you know, it's the last day at the end of the week. And they want to make sure they get things done before the week closes. Would it behoove us to match our schedules to that? Like, would it behoove us to do high focus activities on Monday and Friday and maybe more rote activities on a Thursday? I would say that each individual should experiment with themselves.

So this is what we find on average when we've looked at information workers, you know, cross a range of roles. But I would say it's really important to experiment with yourself. Keep a diary. Find out when you're the most focused. And if you see a pattern in your work week, then yes, you can use that information to schedule when you're doing different tasks. Do you have any other hacks or tips for in the moment when we're trying to focus our attention on something, whether we're trying to study, whether we're trying to finish a work task, whether we're trying to enjoy a book and our attention keeps wandering away? Are there little tricks that we can employ? Well, if your attention is wandering, it's probably because you're mentally fatigued. At that point, step away, take a quick break, move, walk around, focus in the distance, look around, Do something else. Use a different part of your brain, right? Instead of using the part of your brain that focuses on reading or writing, do something completely different. Do something visual or play music. If you play an instrument, for example, cut flowers, whatever it is. You know, do something very different. And this can help reset you so that you come back and you can be a bit fresher.

The other thing that happens is that, you know, we set goals for ourselves. Goals are slippery, right? They're so easy to lose track of. It's really important to keep those goals in mind. We actually did an experiment where we had people state what their goals were the night before for the next day. And we did two kinds of goals, task goals and emotional goals. And emotional goals are so important. and people neglect to think about emotional goals.

And so we would ask, how do you want to feel tomorrow? I want to feel positive. I want to feel happy. I want to feel fulfilled. And what task do you want to accomplish? Well, I want to finish, you know, working on this book chapter or finish this report. Then the next morning, we had people answer the same questions. And then we found that it was helpful.

but what we learned is that it was only helpful for a short period while goals were in mind. And what we learned from that is that people have to keep reminding themselves of their goals. If you're reminded of your goals, then you can stick to them better. Take a little post-it note and put it in your field of view to remind yourself, hey, I want to feel positive today. or, you know, I want to finish this report today. And every time we see that, it can help keep us on track. I also wonder if you could even connect the two. Like, I want to finish this report so I feel whatever way today.

And then that would motivate you to actually finish the report. Absolutely, yes. Are there any practices that you think have outsized benefits in combating this effect that all this technology is having on our attention? Like, should we all be meditating? Should we all be listening to certain? music that calms our brain. Should we all be visualizing? Like, what can we do on a daily basis or weekly basis to combat the fact that we live in this technology-filled world? So first of all, I want to say that I'm not a fan of digital detox in the same way that I'm not

a fan of crash diets because a digital detox will work fine. It takes a while for you to get, you know, detoxed from technology. But then we go back to our typical lives. and we go right back to our old practices. And it's the same with a crash diet. You know, you starve yourself for a short period of time, then you go back and you go back to the same eating habits. So what we need to do is completely change our tech habits, right? Not to go off tech completely.

And one of my favorite practices that I think really helps comes from the Japanese, what they call Yohaku Nob. It means the beauty of empty space. And I started off my career as an artist. And we learned about what's called the beauty of negative space. Negative space is the space around a figure. And we tend to not think of this empty space. We think of the figure.

We think of what we're painting, right? And we can apply this metaphor to our work during the day. And we tend to think of the work we have to do and the importance we place on doing that work. And let's push ourselves to be as productive as possible. And we don't think about the importance of the empty space, which is the times that we need to pull away to replenish our cognitive resources. That's the beauty of the empty space, and we need to give importance to that. We should not regard it as something that takes away from our work,

but it's something that we should give as much importance to as our work. And we're in this uber productive culture where let's push ourselves to be as productive as possible. But there is a technology paradox, right? we've introduced technology for decades, and yet we're not really much more productive as a society. But, you know, let's think about what we can do for our mental well-being to achieve positive well-being and still be productive. And if we can put an emphasis on positive well-being, then productivity will follow. And there's a psychological theory. You know, I love psychological theories. It's called the broaden and build theory. And it shows, and it's been proven, that when people feel

positive, they can accomplish more. And we all know that. We've all experienced times when we, if you're stressed and fatigued, we just can't accomplish very much. But when we feel positive, we have all this internal psychic energy that we can apply to being productive. So let's put this emphasis on this beautiful empty space, that by empty space, what I mean is the time when we could be taking a walk, we could be meditating, contemplating, doing creative writing, or playing an instrument, or painting, or, you know, doing something in that space to help us replenish. That's what I mean by the empty space. I always ask guests to give us one homework assignment, one thing that we can all do to restore

our attention in this case as soon as we finish listening to this episode. I love that as one. So I would say there are two homework assignments. So the first one is the empty space, is to set aside time each day for your empty space and make it beautiful, right? Do something that will really make you feel positive. The other homework assignment is to find out when your attentional peak is and when your valley is. Find out your chronotype, keep a diary to find out when are you at your peak and use that to design your day. You know, we tend to do to make schedules for ourselves in terms of time. 9 a.m. I'm going to do this. 10 a.m. I'm going to do this. By 1 p.m. I'm going to finish this. But instead of doing that, let's be more active in designing our day around our

attentional schedules, around our own personal rhythms. And we will all be a lot more productive and have more positive well-being if we can match our work to our individual nature. I love that. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your beautiful book? Yes, the book, Attention Span. It's about the research that I've been doing over the past 20 years, 20 plus years, about how we have changed with the rise of the digital age. So how has our attention changed when we started using computers and then smartphones and tablets and with social media, it's a deep dive into, the psychology of how our attention has been changing. I draw from my research over these years. And then I also talk about the reasons for why our attention spans have diminished. It's not just algorithms.

There's a lot of other reasons. We talked about some of them today, such as social pressures. And then the last part of the book is about the path forward. What steps we can take and what is the future of attention? Knowing all that you know, are you optimistic about our brains in the future? Or are you like it's all, it's wrecked, it's all over for us? I am optimistic. So I am by nature an optimist.

And I do believe that we can change things. And I think that people can have agency, individuals can have agency to change. But we have to think of this also in terms of organizations participating and society participating. We need regulations. We need laws that can also help us developing new kinds of practices. For example, banning cell phones in schools. I'm a big proponent of that. So, you know, that can help support our individual efforts. Another example, of how we can make change is that parents need to think of themselves as role models for their children. Children are, you know, they look around themselves. Their children are so clever. And they see what's

around them and they see when they see their parents on smartphones or other adults on smartphones. It's sending a signal that is just fine to be on your cell phone at any time in front of other people. And so parents also can do something to help reset society. And, you know, I'm a parent myself. So, you know, I've raised two kids. And so I understand it's not easy. Love that. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Mark. I love this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. Unfortunately, that is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, I would so appreciate if you would share it with somebody that you think would love it to, somebody in your life who you think would benefit from this information, which is, I think,

all of us because all of our attention spans are so messed up these days. Make sure that you are following the Liz Moody podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or on YouTube. Then we have another episode with an NYU professor and an absolute genius. I am obsessed with this woman about how to figure out your best career and then actually get that career. Following the podcast means that the episodes will show up right in your feed. You will never have to worry about missing out on one. And also, friendly reminder that you can now watch full video episodes on YouTube and on Spotify as well. Remember to head over to lizmoody.substack.com to sign up for our newsletter, the takeaway. You're going to get key action steps for each episode plus tons of bonus content.

You can also come hang out on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody. I share tons of inspiring and always very real content. content and exactly how I am using everything that we learn on the podcast, all the tips that Dr. Mark shared today in my real life. Okay, I love you and I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.