The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Johann Hari on why you can't focus

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

On this guest episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna chats to Johann Hari about how your inability to focus is NOT your fault.Johann Hari is the author of 3 New York Times Bestselling books, the latest of which, Stolen Focus; Why You Can't Pay Attention is available here. Find out more about Johann here and follow him on Instagram at @johann.hari

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist's mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's guest episode of the Therapy Edit. I have with me today, Johann Harry. Is that how I say your name? Have I said it right there? I say Johann Hari, but I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in casualty because

they were calling for Joanna Harry to come forward. So anyone who says my name better than that is by me. Okay. Oh gosh. Ouch. Ouch. Right. I have with me today the amazing Johan Hari. He is a journalist and author. He has two brilliant TED Talks on addiction and depression. He is a three Times, New York Times bestselling author, we're chasing the scream, lost connections, which is about the real causes of depression and some unexpected solutions. And more recently, an absolute go-to book of mine that I will honestly say has changed the landscape of how I understand and try and use my attention. And this is stolen focus on why you can't pay attention. It's rich with research and it really touched me quite profoundly. I actually couldn't

stop myself from reading bits out to people around me, just desperately wanting them to grasp this insight. It was my husband at the time. I literally, you know those books and you remember where you were when you read them. I just kept reading bits out. And then I was like, you might as just reading itself. It's all, I just kind of wanting people to grasp this insight and the kind of severity of how much our attention is manipulated and given away and how precious it is. And it's changed the way I view how I consume information, how I scroll and where my mind is and how long for. However, I feel like I literally need to read it like every day just to remind me to stay conscious of this.

And you talk about that in the book, don't you, towards the end of how you're trying to kind of, yeah, how you're trying to stay conscious of that in this world that's constantly pulling us. It's so true that, you know, it's, I wrote the book because, you know, I could feel it happening to me. I could feel that with each year that passed, things that require deep focus that are so important to me, like having proper long conversations, reading books, watching films, they were getting more and more like kind of running up a down escalator. Do you know what I mean? I could still do it, but it felt like the escalator was getting faster and faster and I was getting fatter and fatter and I couldn't do it. And I noticed this was happening to huge numbers of people around me. You know, the average office worker now focuses on only one task,

but only three minutes for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old. There's now 100 children who had been identified with that problem. And I wanted to understand why it was happening, but to be honest, I was quite afraid of understanding because I kind of thought, well, the answer is obvious. I'm just lacking in willpower. I'm not strong enough

and someone invented the smartphone and that screwed me over so I thought what's the point looking into that is just depressing but actually I learned that those stories are not right this isn't happening just because we're somehow lacking willpower and what's going on is much more complicated

and in some ways more optimistic than just the invention of the smartphone but really the thing that made me realize I had to look into it was an experience with a young person that I love I've got a godson and when he was nine he developed this brief and incredibly cute obsession with Elvis Presley.

And the reason it was so cute is he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis had become a kind of cheesy cliché. So I think he was the last person in the history of the world to do a totally sincere version of Elvis doing jailhouse rock. And every night when I would tuck him into bed, he would get me to tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again. Obviously, I skipped over the bit at the end where he died on the toilet. And one night I mentioned that Elvis lives in a place called Graceland

and people go and visit it. And his whole face lit up and he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, sure, the way you do with nine-year-olds, knowing next week it'll be Legoland or whatever. And he said, no, do you swear, do you really swear one day you will take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise.

And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until so many things had gone wrong. He dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he spent, this will sound like an exaggeration, it's not. He spent literally almost all his waking hours alternating between his iPad, his iPhone and his laptop. And it was, it felt like he was almost like, like he was whirring at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could touch him. It was like his life was just this blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, pornography.

And one day we were sitting on my flat, sitting in my flat, on my sofa. And all day I was trying to get a conversation going with him. And he's a lovely, really intelligent person. And I just couldn't. It's like I couldn't get any traction with him. And to be totally honest with you, Anna, I wasn't that much better. I was staring at my own devices. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before.

And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he looked to me completely blankly. He's like, what you didn't know, what was talking about. And I reminded him. I said, let's break this numbing routine. This is no way to live. go on a big journey all over the south, but you've got to promise me one thing, which is that when we go, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day, because there's no point going

if you're just going to stare at your phone the whole time. And he took some time to really think about it, and he said to me, you know what, I want to do it, let's do it. And I think it was literally two weeks later, we took off from Heathrow to New Orleans, where we went first. And a couple of weeks after that, we got to the gates of Graceland. And when you arrive there now, this is even before COVID, there's no human being to show you around. What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds. And the iPad shows you around. It says, you know, go left, go right.

Every room you go in, it tells you a story about that room. And also an image of that room appears on the iPad in front of you. So what happens, I notice, as we're walking around, is everyone just walks around Graceland just staring at their iPad. And I'm getting kind of a bit pissed off about it. Why is no one really looking at it? And occasionally people do look away from the iPad. I'm like, oh, that's encouraging.

But they look away from the iPad to take out their phone. take a selfie, put their phone back, and they go back to staring at the iPad. And we got to the jungle room that was Elvis's favorite room. It's full of fake plants. And I'll never forget them. There was a Canadian couple standing next to us, I guess about 50. And the man turned to his wife and said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left.

And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed like, you just did because I was like, oh, it's very funny. He's making a joke. And I turned and looked at him and his wife were just swiping back and forward. And I leaned forward and I said, but hey, sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head because you realize we're in the jungle room. You don't have to look at it on the internet. It's literally all around you.

And they looked at me like I was completely deranged and walked out the room. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat. because from the minute we landed, he just could not stop. He literally couldn't stop. And I went up to him. I did that thing that's never a good idea with teenagers.

I tried to grab the phone out of his hands. All the mum's listening to identify with this, I'm sure. And I said to him, look, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not showing up at your own life. You're not present at the events of your own existence. And he stormed off, understandably. And I wondered around Memphis on my own.

day. And I found him that night at the Heartbreak Hotel up the street where we were staying, and he was sitting by the huge guitar-shaped swimming pool. And I went up to him, and I apologise for getting so angry. And he didn't look up from Snapchat, but he said, I know something's really wrong, and I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, God, we came away in order to get away from this problem of distraction. But it was like there was nowhere to escape from, because it's the air we all breathe. And that was when I thought, okay, I need to find out why this is happening to us, especially why this is happening to our children and what we can do about it. And that was really where the book began. Wow. I mean, it's, you know,

I listened to that and I remember reading that and feeling sad, you know, desperately sad for the fact that he's missing out so much. But then I think it's sad because we see ourselves in that. You know, I see myself in the moment I'm on the sofa and I'm scrolling and scrolling and my kids are, you know, doing something there, living there, there, you know, and I think there's stuff that I've missed out on because my attention has just been consumed. And, you know, that endless scroll that you talk about in your book as well, that, you know, it's endless. There is an endless amount for us to be consumed by. And it takes a lot of time and just energy sometimes just to think, wait a minute, what's going on right now, right now? Just what matters to me? What matters to me is right

there a meter away in this room. Like, we don't know what happened tomorrow. And I think, you know, the sadness in hearing that story is that, that we see ourselves in that somehow, that life is going on. And actually, if we ask ourselves a question, that, the stuff that is really important to us is not in our hand, you know, but we have to avert our eyes. And sometimes, yeah, it takes discipline and it takes energy and yeah yeah it's interesting because i started in that well i started in that that feeling what you're feeling now right sadness confusion and also feeling a bit trapped like oh god how are we ever going to get out of this but actually i left with an incredible sense of optimism you know so what i then did after i came back from memphis is i went on a big

journey all over the world from moscow to miami to melbourne to interview over to 200 of the leading scientists who've studied attention in the world and use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to do a really deep dive into their research and what they've learned. And what I learned from them is 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. Anyone listening, if you are struggling to focus and pay attention, it's not your fault. If your kids, are struggling to focus and pay attention. It's not their fault. There's not something wrong with

them. This is happening to almost all of us. It's happening for quite big reasons. But once you understand those reasons, we can begin to deal with them at an individual level and at a collective level. And, you know, there were lots of moments where I felt this incredible optimism because I learned, okay, when you understand what's causing this. And it's a really big range of causes, including loads of things I had never thought about. What we eat, what we feed our kids is really affecting our attention. The way our kids' schools work is really affecting our attention of focus. There's a huge array of factors. But, you know, most of the things that are screwing up our attention are relatively recent changes. I never forget, there's this

brilliant philosopher of attention called Dr. James Williams, who said to me, you know, axes, the axe, existed for 1.4 million years before anyone said, guys, should we put a handle on this thing? The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days. right we can fix this stuff if we want to i went to places that have begun to do it from france to new zealand i saw it in practice i learned the science of what we can do at an individual on a collective level so i was left with this really profound sense of optimism because you know anyone listening i would just say 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 in it attention. And when your ability to focus and pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to solve your problems breaks down. You feel less competent because you are less competent. It's why we're so rightly so worried when our kids can't focus because you can see they're going to really struggle to achieve their full potential in life if they can't provide sustained attention to the things they want to do. But when you start to get your attention back in these very practical ways that I write about in style and focus, It's a feeling of becoming competent again and helping your children to become competent

for the first time. It's such a source of joy once you get into it. Yeah. And it's empowering. And I think you're right. I started off the book feeling this deep sense of sadness. Then I started feeling kind of enraged, like a good kind of rage when you start realizing what you might have been placing blame on yourself for which actually is not just about you. It's about a lot of things that happening around you and then at this kind of moving through then this sense of like oh my gosh there are things that I can do consciously and I would honestly say that you know just tweaking some things and just becoming aware and conscious of other things it has I say it's transformed is a work in progress and something I have to keep kind of circling back on myself but it's yeah

it's really changing it's really changed things for me actually and as a mom is a as a kind of busy juggling fast-brained person and I know that um what the one thing that you was you know this is kind of almost like leading into that one thing isn't it that you wanted to share with the with the moms listening it's it's the one thing you're going to share that actually has been amazing for me um so what was that what's that one thing it's not your fault right if you're struggling to focus and pay attention and your kids are struggling to focus to pay attention it's not your fault, right? This is happening to us for big reasons,

but we can deal with those reasons. I give you an example of one of them, so I go through lots in the book, and then I'll talk about some solutions to it. So I went to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller, who's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 a fundamental limitation of the human brain, brain. Human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It ain't going to change on any time scale. We're going to see, you can only think about one or two things at a time. But what's happened is we've been encouraged to fall for a kind of mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time, and the rest of us

are not that far behind. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller and his colleagues, they get people into labs, and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time and they study them, monitor them. And what they discover is always the same. You're not doing more than one thing at a time. What you're doing is you're juggling very quickly between tasks. You're like, wait, what did Anna just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp?

What does it say on the TV just happened? What's this message on Facebook? Wait, Anna, what did you ask me again? So we're constantly juggling. And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The kind of fancy term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, it turns out you do all the things you're trying to do,

much less competently. You make more mistakes. You remember much less of what you do. You're much less creative. And I remember when I first heard that thinking, all right, I get it, but that's a small effect, right? You can feel that it's like a niggling irritation. The scientific evidence shows it's a really big effect. I give you an example of a small study that's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to study their workers and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is,

and you're not going to be interrupted. Just do what you've got to do. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but at the same time, you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls, so pretty much how most of us live. And at the end of it,

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 to give you a sense of how big that is. If you and me sat down together and smoked a fat spliff and got stone now, Anna, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points.

So in the short term, being chronically interrupted in the way most of us are most of the time is twice as bad for your intelligence and attention as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time, than you would sit at your desk, not getting stoned and being constantly interrupted.

Now, don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Obviously, you'd be better off, neither getting stoned nor being interrupted, but you can see what a big effect this is. This is why Professor Miller says we're living in, what he calls a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. Yes, you're right. We are getting absolutely exhausted by this constant shift in attention when we're believing that we're multitasking. And I often, a good idea, a metaphor of this is when

I brush my teeth and I'm walking around the house doing stuff. And then I look down and I've got, you know, I think, well, this is really clever. Like I'm brushing my teeth and I'm also using those two minutes to get jobs done. And then I look down and I'm covered in toothpaste. actually it hasn't served me you know i think it's good it's a good idea but actually i've just done everything kind of badly and created you know more effort for myself so i think i really really like that image because it exactly encapsulates like what we're doing at a wide level right absolutely absolutely so i think you know that that that one thing to take away is just really thinking about when when can you actually just say to yourself right now I am doing this right now

I'm going to do this email right now I'm going to wash this up right now I am going to get my kid bathed and this is what I am doing I don't need to be checking my email because I don't need to be adding stuff to the shop because actually I'll probably you know the quality of all of those things together is just going to drop dramatically and actually what is important to me in this moment is bathing my child or doing this email well. And yeah, just that awareness and that mindfulness. One of the heroes of my book is a woman called Lenore Scunazi. And Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. And from when she was six years old, Lenore left home on her own every morning and walked to school on her own. And she would generally bump into all the other kids

walking to school because in the 1960s, everywhere in the world, all children walk to school. right? By the time Lenore was a mum in the 90s, that was over, right? You were meant to be waiting at the gate, drop them off at the gate, be waiting at the gate at the end of the day. In fact, when Lenore finished school at 3 o'clock, she used to just wander around the neighbourhood with her friends and they would go home when they were hungry at 5 o'clock, right? Now, that was my childhood and that's not that long ago, right? But that completely ended in the last 15 years, right? And obviously it completely ended under COVID. There were a few last holdouts until COVID, and then it completely,

ended. And it turns out that childhood we've lost contains so many things that are so important for children to be able to focus and pay attention. One is exercise. When children get to run around, the evidence is overwhelming. They can pay attention more when they come back, right? So we've taken that away from our kids. It's obviously causing a huge obesity crisis, but it's also contributing to an attention crisis. Another thing is when kids play freely with other children, without an adult standing over them, they learn how to take risks and manage anxiety, right? You climb a tree, you go a bit too high, you're really anxious, but you find your way down, you didn't die. That's how you learn to deal with anxiety. You face

small challenge after small challenge after small challenge. We've taken that away from our children. We stand over them all the time. We're monitoring. They come to us when they have an anxiety. And of course, when you're anxious, you can't pay attention, right? There's lots of other reasons as well I go through in the book. But Lenore is the hero of my book, not because you know, she talks about a problem. It's easy in life to talk about problems. Lenore's the hero because she came up with this solution, right? So at first she thought the solution when she was learning the science of this is really obvious. Well, I'll just let my kid play outside. But she quickly discovered if you're the only parent who does that, the kid gets scared,

you look mental. Often people call the police, actually. So she decided to try something different. She runs a group called Let Grow. It's Let Grow.org. I really recommend all parents go to this website. What they do is they go to whole schools and whole neighbourhoods and persuade everyone to give their kids increasing levels of independence that build up to playing outside again. And I think of all the conversations I have for the book,

one of the most moving was with a kid and a 14-year-old boy in a Let Grow program in Long Island. This was just as COVID was hitting. and he was a big strapping 14 year old boy until this program had begun he had never been out of his home on his own without adults right and I said to him so what happened when the program began he said oh me and my friends we started to play ball games together

it was really good and then he said he leaned forward he said he said we went into the woods nearby even though there was no cell phone reception in the woods he said that like some mind-blank thing and I said what did you do in the and he said, oh, we built a fort, and now we're building another fort. And I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but really it was like watching his, it was like watching this boy come to life when he described it. And I thought about how many kids I know who never get to go out and explore anything. And do you think I think also on that, you know, it's, it's important for us to

tap back into play as well, because if we're getting all our needs, you know, are kind of that, those dopamine hits from from technology you know actually there's a there's there's so much more to be enjoyed through through play so thank you thank you so much i honestly i think we could easily do like an extra special bumper long um episode but yeah thank you just become start noting where you're where you're trying to multitask know that actually it's not effective you're being conned into thinking that it's going to you know get you more done but actually it's it's wrecking your attention and the quality of the output is not going to be what you want you're going to end up with toothpaste or down your jumper and read this book

read stolen focus because there's a better life absolutely so yeah what a brilliant book it's an absolute you know must read for me and it's been an absolute privilege and a pleasure to talk to you oh thank you so much i meant to say on my publishers hit me with a taser that um if people go to stolenfocusbook.com, they can see what Hillary Clinton, Oprah, Emma Thompson, and lots of other people said about the book. And they can listen to audio of loads of people we've talked about for free as well. Brilliant. Yeah. Good. Do it. And just devour this stuff because it will come out or come out of you in really good ways. So thank you. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe or review because it makes a massive

difference to how many people it can reach. You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. You might like to check out my three books, Mind Oath and Mother, Know Your Worth, and my new book, The Little Book of Calm for New Mums, grounding words for the highs, the lows and the moments in between. It's a little book you don't need to read it from front to back. You just pick whatever emotion resonates to find a mantra, a tip and some supportive words to bring comfort and clarity. You can also find all my resources, guides and videos. It's all with the sole focus of supporting your emotional and mental well-being as a month. They are all 12 pounds and you can find them on anamatha.com.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.