The Wellness Scoop - Why You Need to Find Connection in the Modern World

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

We’re joined by Johann Hari, a writer and journalist, who travelled all over the world to interview and learn from the leading scientists investigating why we’re losing focus to what matters and what the impact of chronic distraction is, and also to those developing the solutions. We discuss: Why we’re living in an attention crisis and why willpower isn’t the problem Why we need to stop task switching The impact of being chronically distracted on our brain power Why sleep and diet are critical components of reclaiming focus Why restoring childhood is so important The individual and collective changes for solving our attention crisis How to get into a flow state to find deep focus Why stress undermines our ability to focus Johann Hari: ‘Stolen Focus’ https://stolenfocusbook.com https://johannhari.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, I'm Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, and this is our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better. Each episode explores various aspects of our mental and our physical health to help you make small simple changes to your life to feel both happier and healthier. So today we're looking at focus and our ability to feel more connected, more present, more aware, and by proxy, happier. But we recorded this episode a few weeks ago, and I've been really umming and ahhing about whether or not continuing on the podcast on these sorts of themes feels trivial and perhaps not exactly the right thing

to do with what feels like a unfolding and really terrifying crisis that's happening in Ukraine with the absolutely brutal invasion by Russia. I'm recording this now on day five of the invasion, and it feels challenging to know whether to record this and release it or not. On balance, it feels that it probably is helpful, but I just wanted to flag that before we get into the conversation, because I appreciate there is a huge amount of emotion, of fear, of nervousness. And of course, we're only seeing the smallest fraction of feeling the most minute fraction of what the absolutely heroic people in Ukraine are feeling. So I hope this is helpful in some capacity. I really took a lot from Johan in this conversation. If you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to

the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. But loads of us never get 23 minutes spare. So we're constantly operating at this diminished level of brain power. One study by Professor Larry Rosen found that if you receive just eight text messages an hour, which doesn't sound like very much, it diminishes your brain power for the main thing you're trying to focus on by 30%, which is extraordinary. I would argue huge numbers of us are losing that 30% of our brain power throughout the day. But the most important thing to understand that I learned from my book, Stolen Focus, is it doesn't have to be that way. We can get our

focus and attention back, but we have to understand these factors that are invading our attention and actually deal with them. Before we delve into today's episode, I wanted to introduce you to our sponsor and also a little note on sponsors, which is that we'll only be working with brands that I personally use and personally love and that will never promote something on here that isn't totally authentic or that we don't really really believe in. So for the next few months our podcast sponsor is going to be Simproof, a supplements company that I've been using to support my gut health for about five years now. So I've been using it for years and years before I started working with them. I know gut health is such a prevalent topic at the moment and we're going to

have a mini episode specifically on eating for gut health at the end of January as I know it's something so many of you are interested in too. The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that support pretty much all aspects of our mental and physical health from digestion to our immune system, energy production and mental health. And keeping the right balance of good bacteria in our gut is just so important. Our diet and lifestyles have a huge impact on that, but adding in live bacteria can really help too. The bacteria in Simprove, which is a water-based supplement, can really survive the long journey from the mouth to the gut where they can then multiply and support our microbiome i truly swear by it and i hope you love it too for anyone wanting to try it they've shared a 15 off code with us so you just need to use ella15 which is

valid on simprove.com for new customers based in the uk but they also have a subscribers package if you're an existing customer. I am so excited to tell you about today's guest, Johan Hari, who is a writer and journalist. His first two books, Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, were both New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into over 38 different languages. His TED Talk on addiction and depression has also been viewed more than 80 million times. So I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that we really need his help because it can be incredibly difficult at times to stay focused on the task that we're doing. And I know I wish that I could get some of that focus back. So today we're going to be talking to Johan about his latest book, Stolen Focus, which explores just that. In the research for his latest book, he's traveled all

over the world to interview and learn from the leading scientists investigating why we're losing our focus, the link that that has to our well-being, and also to start to develop the solutions and the questions that we really need to delve into. So welcome, Johan, and thank you so much for joining us today. Hi Ella, I'm so happy to speak with you. I've been so looking forward to this. I think everything you write about feels so relevant to anyone listening and all of us who've grown up in a world of technology and a very, very busy modern life. And I think we're seeing this attention deficit and an ability to focus play out in every part of our lives. And we were speaking actually to an amazing journalist called Catherine a few weeks ago about fun being the antidote to technology and this

addiction that we have to our screens. And it's really got me thinking a lot personally about how much time I spend doing four things at once and not focusing. So on a personal level, really looking forward to this conversation today. and I know you've said that in each of your books you're trying to write to uncover and solve a different mystery and I wondered what got you interested in the mystery of the enormous decline in attention and focus yeah to be honest Ella it was really personal like I just felt my own attention going to shit you know with each year that passed, it felt like things that require deep focus, like reading a book, having deep conversations, were getting more and

more like running up a down escalator. Do you know what I mean? Like I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I could see this happening, like you say, to pretty much everyone around me. And I was particularly worried about the young people in my life, a lot of whom are amazing, but seem to be kind of whirring at the speed of Snapchat, you know, where nothing still or serious could touch them. And so I decided to kind of figure out, well, what's going on here? I was trained in the social sciences at Cambridge University. So I started to use that to try to get to the bottom of this. So I ended up going on this really big journey all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne

to interview over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention and really dig deeply into their research. And what I learned from them is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been significantly rising in recent years. It includes some aspects of our tech, but actually goes way beyond our tech from the food we eat to the sleep we don't get. There's a huge array of factors that are doing this to us. So if your ability to focus and pay attention is going to shit like mine was, you're not imagining it. It's not just you. It's not a failing in you. Something big is happening

to all of us. And actually what I kind of realised is your attention didn't collapse. Your attention's been stolen from you. And once you understand that and what's stealing it, it opens up a whole different set of solutions that we can pursue together to this problem. And one of the things I thought when I was reading your book, you know, we've talked quite a lot on here about happiness and it's not really a tangible concept in some ways. It's a sort of fleeting concept that so many of us are chasing. But I've certainly found and I know from so many people we've interviewed that there is this really deep connection from an ability to stay present, which is obviously so innately linked to being able to be focused and a sense of happiness and I wondered how you felt that linked into your research. Oh my god so many ways I mean the thing that made me decide to write the book was a moment that really drove home to me that we're having this crisis and being present because for a long time I'd been thinking about

this subject but I think I was afraid to look into it to be honest I was worried about what I would find and I think I was a bit ashamed about my own attentional lapses and the thing that made me realize I had to look into it was it might sound strange so I've got someone in my life I call him my godson Adam in the book that's I've slightly changed some of the details for reasons that become obvious and when he was nine he developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis. And what was particularly cute about it was that he didn't know that Elvis had become a cheesy cliche. So he would sing like Viva Las Vegas or Suspicious Minds with all the kind of heart-catching sincerity of a little boy who genuinely believes it's cool. And every night when I tucked him in, he would get me to

tell him the story of Elvis's life. Right. And one night I was telling the story and I mentioned obviously Graceland where Elvis lived and he, and he looked at me really intensely and he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I was like, yeah, sure. The way you do with nine-year-olds knowing next week it'll be Legoland or whatever. And he said, no, do you really promise? Do you swear you'll take me to Graceland one whatever. And he said, no, do you really promise? Do you swear you'll take me to Graceland one day? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that again for 10 years until everything had gone wrong. So he dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he just spent literally all his waking time alternating between his iPad and his iPhone

between you know YouTube, porn, Snapchat and in many ways like I said before it really seemed like he was moving at the speed of Snapchat right where nothing still could touch him and one day we were sitting on my sofa just behind where my laptop is now. I was funny. I feel emotional even thinking about it. And we were sitting on the sofa and all day I had been trying to get a conversation going with him and I couldn't because he was just staring at his devices. And to be completely honest with you, I wasn't that much better, right? 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 was like, what? He didn't even remember this moment when he was nine. I was like, no, let's break this numbing routine. Let's get out of here. Let's go all over the South. But you've got to promise me one thing, that when we go, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day, right? Because there's no point going if you're just going to stare at your phone all day. And he said, yeah, I could see it excited something in him and that he wanted to break this routine, that he wasn't happy. So two weeks later, we flew from Heathrow to New Orleans,

which is where we started. A couple of weeks later, we got to Memphis, to Graceland. And when you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there's no physical person to show you around. This is even before COVID. What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in some earbuds and the iPad shows you around. So it says, you know, go left, go right. Every room you're in, it tells you a story about that room. And everywhere you go, there's a picture of that

place you are on the iPad in front of you. So we're walking around and what happens is everyone just walks around staring at their iPad, right? So I'm getting more and more tense being like, this is ridiculous, right? And I've tried to make eye contact with someone to go, oh, this is funny. We're the people who traveled thousands of miles and actually looked at the thing we traveled to, right? And the only person I managed to make eye contact with was a guy, briefly made eye contact with a guy. And then I realized he'd only looked away from his iPad so he could take out his iPhone and take a selfie. And anyway, we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's called the jungle room because

it's got loads of fake plants in it. And there was this Canadian couple next to us. And the Canadian guy 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 left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed. I thought he was joking, right? But then I kind of turned and him and his wife are just swiping back and forward. And I turned to them and I said, hey, sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. You could just turn your head. Because look, we're in the jungle room. You don't have to look at it on the internet. We're actually there. And they just looked at me like I was completely mad and

walked away. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was standing in a corner, staring at Snapchat. Because from the minute we landed, he could not stop. He just couldn't stop. And I went up to him and I was really angry. And I said, I know you're frightened of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out, right? You're not showing up at your own life. You're not present at your own existence. And I did a thing that's never a good idea with a teenager. I tried to grab the phone out of his hands and he also stormed off. And I wandered around Memphis on my own that afternoon and later that day I found him at the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying and I went up to him he was sitting

by the swimming pool staring at his phone and I apologised and he didn't look up from his phone he was still looking at Snapchat but he said I know something's really wrong here but I don't know what it is and I thought about how all these people we'd seen that day, I thought, oh, we'll escape so that we can get away from this crisis of being present. But this crisis of people being unable to be present was everywhere around us, right? And that was when I thought, okay, I need to investigate this. I need to figure out what the hell's going on here. Gosh, it's a really powerful story, but it's exactly what you said. And I think it's so easy to blame ourselves and be and be you know think I've got no willpower to be

looking at my phone all the time you know to be watching tv but also on your phone but also talking to your flatmate your partner you know you've got your kids there you're making them dinner but you're also checking your emails and you're also checking they're okay and I think so many of us find ourselves in that position and but as you said it's kind of become the default now and it's almost the point that we don't even realize how strange it is to be spending such a huge proportion of our lives on our devices I actually read a piece in the times this weekend and it was an interview with some they're around 20 and they said they listened to all their lectures every podcast everything on at least 1.5 times so they

are literally actively speeding up their lives which I just think is so interesting but Johan I wondered before we kind of get any further if you could how would you define this attention lapse because as we were just saying it's become the default almost to do nine things at once and spend so much time looking at our devices how how do you know that you are struggling with your attention it's a really good question and a lot of the time we don't i'm just thinking about something you said a second ago first ella which is exactly what you said that we feel like it's a failure of willpower the story i had when i started this journey which i later learned was wrong is i'm just not strong enough right there's something wrong with me and i had

a real epiphany about this very early in the research when I went to interview a guy, an amazing scientist called Professor Roy Baumeister, who's one of the leading experts on willpower in the world, arguably the leading expert on willpower in the world. He's done loads of the most famous experiments on willpower. He's researched willpower for 30 years. He wrote a book called Willpower, right? So he's the guy. And I went to interview him and I said, I'm thinking of writing a book about why we're struggling to focus and pay attention. I'm just interested in your insights. And he said something like, the exact words are in the book. You know, it's interesting you say that because I found my attention's gotten really bad. I just play video games on my phone all the

time. But I was sort of sitting opposite him and I was like, I didn't say this obviously, but I was like, wait, didn't you write a book called Willpower? Aren't you the leading expert on Willpower? Like if even you are saying, oh my God, I play Candy Crush all the time. I suddenly thought, whoa, maybe the answer doesn't lie in Willpower. Maybe there's a wider answer here because it was almost like that moment at the end of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where they realise everyone's been body snatched, right? I was like, if even he's saying that, but the question you asked is really important. But how do we know? Because in a way what's happened is we've fallen for delusion. We can feel something's wrong, but we can't quite see how. This began to fall into place for me when I went to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

and interviewed one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller. And he said to me, look, there's one thing about the human brain you've got to understand more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see. You can only think about one or two things at a time. But what's happened is we've fallen from massive delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is scientists get people into labs

and they get people, not just teenagers, older people as well, to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, right? To give them more than one task and they track them. And what they discovered is you can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very quickly between them. Like you're saying, you're cooking the kids dinner, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're switching, switching, switching. And it turns out that comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You'll make more mistakes. You'll remember much less about what you do. You'll be less creative. And exactly what you're saying, that we can feel like something's wrong, a bit like my godson saying, I know something's wrong,

but I don't know what it is. We can feel something's wrong, but we don't quite understand. That's one of the 12 things that are bearing on our attention. And it sounds like when I describe that, I think a lot of people listening will be like, yeah, I get that. But they'll think, that must be quite a small effect. This effect is huge. One study by Professor Larry Rosen found just receiving eight text messages an hour, which doesn't sound like very much, reduces your brain power for the main thing you're trying to focus on by 30%, right? That's a big, I would argue most of us are losing that 30% of our brain power throughout the day. Or think about another example, Hewlett Packard, the printer company, who always calls paper jams in my experience, I'll never forgive them.

They called in a scientist to do a study on their workers. It's a very small study, but it's backed by wider evidence. And he split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, and you won't be interrupted. And the second group was told, do whatever your task is, but you're going to have to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So basically how most of us live, right? And at the end of it, the scientist tested the IQ of both groups. What he discovered is the group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been interrupted. To give you a

sense of how big that is, if you and me got stoned now Ella, if we just smoked a fat spliff together, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So being chronically distracted is twice as bad for your intelligence in the short term as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than you would sitting at your desk doing what most of us do, which is not getting stoned but doing one thing at a time, than you would sitting at your desk doing what most of us do, which is not getting stoned, but being constantly interrupted. To be clear, it would be better to be neither stoned nor interrupted. But this is why Professor Miller said to me,

we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being interrupted all the time. Does that ring true to you? That couldn't honestly resonate more. I'm actually quite embarrassed to say last year, having become quite acutely aware of this, and I think becoming a parent had really exacerbated it for me because I realised I was with my very small newborn and I was still on my phone. And I did this, I think it was 10 week mindfulness course. And I was quite taken aback by how difficult I found some of the quite small tasks each week,

such as leaving your phone at home and going to do a small task with 100% attention on that. So I did it, it was just during lockdown, and we've got a coffee shop about five, six minutes walk away. And I would do that, I would leave it there, I would go on my own, and I would walk there and I would get a coffee and I would really try and focus on every sense of that coffee, how the coffee cup felt, how hot it was, how each mouthful felt, what was exactly around me, how did it feel as my foot hit the pavement, the flowers, you know, it was spring, blossom, et cetera. And just so aware every time my mind went to whatever I was doing next, bring it back. Where is my fee? Where are my fee? How does the coffee taste, et cetera. And it was so extraordinary to realize

the simple things that you're missing because so much of the time when you go and do those simple things like get a coffee, you're also thinking about your next meeting. And you're also aware of your phone in your pocket or you're texting someone and you're trying to do an order and you're doing this. And I just realised how much I was doing that and how much I felt it was taking away from my life, which really sparked my own interest in what you're doing. I think you've put that brilliantly. And I think it's interesting to think about the layers of this problem, right? Because often some people go, oh, distraction, it's an irritation. And what you're describing rightly is how this problem goes much deeper than that. I would say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's

starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of attention and focus. And when attention and focus break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down. Actually, your ability to solve your problems breaks down. And one person who really helped me to think about how deeply it challenges your life when you can't focus is an amazing guy called Dr. James Williams, who did work at the heart of Google and was horrified by what they were doing to people's attention. One day he spoke at a tech conference full of people who were designing the apps that obsess us and our kids. And he said to

them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand now. And not one person put up their hand because they're horrified by what they're doing to us. And so he quit and he became, I would argue, the leading philosopher of attention in the world. I went to interview him in Moscow, where he lives now because his wife works for the World Health Organization. And he helped, gave me this framework that I think really speaks to what you're talking about, Ella. So he said that there's kind of three layers of attention, three kinds of attention. I would argue there's four. So the first layer is what he calls your spotlight. So this is the kind of attention most of us think about when we think about attention. So imagine I want to go to the

fridge now and get a Diet Coke, but on the way I get a text, I forget what I went to the kitchen for, I come back, right? Or, you know, I want to read the chapter of a book, but I get pulled away, you know, or you want to talk to me, but imagine your kids come up from the basement now and start yelling, right? That would be an interruption of your spotlight. Your spotlight is your ability to narrow your light down to one short-term task and focus on that. So obviously, we all know that that's being interrupted, right? And that we've been kind of talking about that kind of disruption.

But above that, there's another level, which he calls your starlight. And that's pursuit of your more medium and long-term goals. So it's not, I want to go to the fridge and get a Diet Coke. It's, you know, I want to set up my business. I want to be a good mother, whatever it might be, right? It's called your starlight because when you're lost in the desert, you look up to the stars and you remember what direction you're traveling in. And he argues, I think rightly, that our starlight is being disrupted. If you're distracted all the time, it becomes much harder, not just to pursue your short-term goals, but actually to pursue your long-term goals.

But there's a level even above that, which he calls your daylight, which is how you even know what you want your long-term goals to be. How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? How do you know you want to learn the guitar? You figure those things out when you have times of deep thought, moments of reflection, mind wandering. That's called your daylight because you can see a room most clearly when it's flooded with daylight. But he argues, I think very persuasively, that that is being screwed with for lots of us, right? Because we never get any time to reflect and think deeply, almost like our sense of self, our ability to figure out who we are and what we want to be is also breaking down. But I would argue there's even a fourth level of attention that's being disrupted. I would call it our stadium lights. And that's our ability to see each other as a society and achieve goals together as a society. I don't think it's a

coincidence that we've got a huge attention crisis at the same time as all over the world, we're having big political crises because we can't listen to each other without screaming abuse at each other. We can't achieve collective goals, even about things as big as COVID or the climate crisis. So I actually think our attention, that thing you're describing that seems so small, I can't be present with this coffee cup, has so many levels of problems that then causes throughout our lives. This is why throughout Stolen Focus, my book, I try to really stress, okay, we need to understand the 12 factors that are actually causing this and then crucially to pursue the solutions I couldn't agree with you more

wholeheartedly on that as we were talking about earlier when I did that exercise myself I saw this complete shift in who I was as a person I mean I've never been happier I've never been calmer I've never been more present my husband started calling me Ella 2.0. He thought it was so that different, which was quite, quite interesting. And that was really within a few weeks. But it got me thinking because a little bit like what you were saying, as I started my own journey into it, I really realized what I felt would be the kind of total benefit if we could all feel a little bit more present because I think it comes an inherent sense of calm which I feel that kind of constant sense of distraction needing to do nine things at once creates a level of stress that that isn't brilliant for our cohesiveness as you said but I also wondered how you felt that perhaps tapped into the mental health epidemic that we're we're really seeing at. Yeah, it's a huge component because if you can't achieve your goals and you can't solve your problems, of course you're going to

be much more likely to be anxious, much more likely to be depressed. Also, lots of the factors that are damaging our attention are also damaging our mental health. So think about one of the other 12 causes that I write about, sleep. You need to sleep for eight hours a night, right? It's essential for mental health. It's essential for your ability to pay attention. And I interviewed some of the leading sleep experts in the world. And there was one moment this really landed for me. I went to interview a man called Dr. Charles Seisler, who's at Harvard Medical School.

He's advised everyone from the Boston Red Sox to the US Secret Service on the science of sleep. And he's made all sorts of breakthroughs on it. He did this experiment once. It's a really simple little experiment. They get tired people and they're not that tired. And they put them into PET scans, brain scanning machinery. And what he discovered was when you're tired, you can appear to be as awake as I am now, or you are now, you can be talking, you can be looking around you, but whole parts of your brain can have gone to sleep. It turns out the phrase, you know, when you say I'm half asleep, that's not a metaphor. A lot of us are literally half asleep a lot of the time. In fact, if you stay awake for just 19 hours, which doesn't sound like very much, especially not to someone like you who's got small kids, your ability to focus and pay attention

degenerates as much as if you had got legally drunk. And there's lots of reasons for this, but one reason is we think of sleep as like a passive process. You know, you're not doing anything. In fact, sleep is an incredibly active process. Professor Roxanne Prashad, who I interviewed at the University of Minneapolis, explained this to me really well. When you're awake, the whole time you're awake, your brain is building up something called metabolic waste, what she calls brain cell poop, right? Whole time you're awake, a kind of brain cell poop is building up in your brain. And when you go to sleep, your brain starts to clean itself. A watery fluid washes through your brain, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up, and it takes this brain cell poop down out of your brain, into your liver, and then obviously

out of your body. If you don't sleep properly, if you don't get eight hours of your brain, into your liver, and then obviously out of your body. If you don't sleep properly, if you don't get eight hours, your brain doesn't repair. Your brain is literally clogged up. So you know that kind of hungover feeling you have when you're tired. Again, that's not a metaphor. Your brain is clogged up like if you were drunk. You know, we sleep 20% less than we did a century ago. Children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago. And that's particularly, obviously, as you know, the last third of the book is about what's happening to our kids. And this is one of the huge factors that's happening to our children. You know, when children don't sleep, it tends to manifest as mania and an inability to focus and running around a lot, right? And all these factors interact with each other. So think about the sleep

element interacting with the tech element. We all know if you haven't had a good night's sleep, the next day you're much more likely to just mindlessly scroll through Facebook or TikTok or whatever it is, compared to if you rested well. So you can see how a lot of the changes that have happened, like in our sleep or in the food we eat, I can talk about that, or any of these other 12 factors, They all kind of feed into each other. The more tired we get, the more vulnerable we are to the technological hacking. The more we eat food that causes energy spikes and crashes, I can explain that. The more vulnerable we are to not sleeping well. These things all interact with each other. But one of the good things about that is

once you start to unpick these things, you can get into a positive spiral instead of what we're in now, which is a negative spiral. Stop sitting on your aeroplan points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach. Right now, you can save up to 25% in aeroplan points when you book a trip to one of 180 plus Air Canada destinations worldwide. So stop sitting on your next trip and start saving on one. Don't miss out. Your chance to save in points ends February 23rd. Book at aircanada.com.

Conditions apply. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. Absolutely. As you said, there's such an extraordinary interplay between all the factors that you go through. So I wondered if we could get into a little bit more detail. I know

we've already touched on some of these 12 causes from sleep, obviously, and task switching. But let's talk about the food we eat, because that obviously feels particularly relevant to us. Yeah, and I want to be clear, I literally had a McDonald's breakfast. So I don't say this with any sense of superiority at all. On the contrary, this is of all the 12 causes that I write about in Stolen Focus, this is both the one that most surprised me and frankly, the one on which I've made the least progress in terms of my own changes. So there's this really interesting new movement. I know you know about this Ella called nutritional psychiatry, which is psychiatrists who are looking at how the ways we eat affect the way our brains work. And it's a really fascinating movement. I can introduce you to some of the leading people if you like, because I think you'd find them

fascinating, really important thinkers. So I went and interviewed loads of them. And I learned from them there's evidence for at least three ways in which the way we eat at the moment, most of us, is profoundly damaging our focus and attention. The first way is, so imagine you grow up eating kind of the standard breakfast that I grew up eating. You either have sugary cereal or you have like, you know, white toast with butter on it. What that does is it releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain. It releases a whole load of glucose and it feels great. It's like you've woken up, right? As Dale Pinnock, one of Britain's leading nutritionists explained it to me. Suddenly it's like you're woken up for the day, but because it's released so much energy so fast, what happens is you get to your desk an hour or two later, or your kid gets to their school desk and you experience a

really big energy crash. And that gives you brain fog where you just can't think generally until you've had another sugary carby treat, right? And what happens is the way we eat at the moment puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day. And the way Dale put it to me is it's at the moment, it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini, right? It'll go really fast and then it will just stop. Whereas if you eat food that releases energy more steadily throughout the day, as most of our ancestors did, if you eat, I don't know, if you had, say, for example, porridge in the morning, that releases energy more steadily. You don't get these patches of brain fog. Your attention is much better.

The second way in which the way we eat is damaging our focus is for your brain to work fully, optimally, you have to have certain nutrients in your diet and our diets are chronically lacking a lot of these nutrients an obvious example would be omega threes which are found in fresh fish and sardines most of us are not getting enough of that and sadly supplements don't cut it they don't make up for the difference because your brain doesn't absorb nutrients from supplements in anything like the same way it absorbs them when you consume them in foods. The third way is for me actually the most chilling. It's not just that our diets lack the nutrients we need. Our diets also contain chemicals that act on us like drugs. So there was a study in Southampton here in Britain in 2007.

What they did is they got 297 kids and they split them into two groups. The first group was just given water to drink. And the second group was given water laced with food dyes that occur in a lot of the foods we get at the supermarket, in a lot of the sweets we buy, that kind of thing. And then the kids were monitored. And the kids that drank the food dyes were significantly more likely to become hyperactive, manic, unable to focus. So you can see how these three ways are really affecting our ability to focus and pay attention.

I know, and I see that all the time, and it's such a personal passion for me. And it just breaks my heart, to be honest, when you see little kids walking down the street eating these sorts of foods because I think we've become so unaware of our lifestyle choices and the impacts they have a little bit like we were talking at the beginning of the fact it's almost hard to know if you have an attention deficit because it's the default now it's the default now to eat a diet that's so harmful for our health our mental health obviously our focus within that you know to not sleep enough to have chronic stress to not exercise to not take care of our mind and the more I learn the more passionate I feel about about having the conversations that we're having today to try and support as many people as we can in kind of unveiling the lid or on the reality of where we really are and Ella I think it's so important what you're saying and I think also there's for

all of these 12 factors there are two levels at which we've got to tackle these problems right so that I think of them as sort of defense and offense so there's all sorts of individual changes we can make in our own lives to protect ourselves and our children and I'm passionately in favor of those individual changes passionately everyone should do them as much as they can. I've done a lot of them. I also want to be honest with people. That will help, but it will only get you so far. Because we're living in what Professor Joel Nigg,

who's one of the leading experts on children's attention problems, called to me an attentional pathogenic culture. It's like someone is pouring itching powder over our brains all day. And then that person is leaning forward and going, well, hey mate, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much. And you want to go, right, I'll learn to meditate. That is extremely valuable, but we need to stop you pouring itching powder on us, right? And it's why there has to be a second level to this, which I think of as offense, where we have to take on the forces that are doing this to us. Think about food, right? If you're a parent who wants your child to eat healthily, the food industry is waging war on you.

More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name. So from the moment we're born, we are taught to associate positive feelings with food that screws up our bodies and our brains, right? So you can see how one of the things we've got to do is a lot of us can eat better, but we've also got to take on the food industry and the tech industry and all sorts of the other factors. But you know, you said this thing a minute ago that I think goes to, of all the 12 causes, I think the one that most touched my heart and the one on which I think we could get action most quickly, which is, you said, you know, it's heartbreaking to see children eating this way. And you're absolutely right. There's another heartbreaking thing about what we're doing to our kids, even more heartbreaking,

I think, which is really damaging their focus and attention. So one of the heroes of my book is a woman called Lenore Skenazi. And she's one of the heroes, not because she described the problem, although she does it brilliantly, but because she built the solution. And it's a solution I think every parent listening will be really interested in. So Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. And from when she was five, Lenore left the house on her own and walked to school on her own. It was 15 minutes away. Generally, she would bump into the other kids, other five-year-olds, all of whom also walked to school on their own. Because that's what almost all children in Britain and the United States did in the 1960s, asking mum and dad, they walked to school on their own. And when they got to the

school for Lenore, there was a 10-year-old boy whose job was to help the five-year-olds cross the road, right? And then school would end at three o'clock and Lenore and her friends would leave on their own and they'd just play freely in the neighborhood until they got hungry at five or six o'clock and then they would go home by the time Lenore was a mother in the 1990s that had completely ended she was expected to walk her children to the school gate and be waiting when they came out by 2003 only 10% of American children ever played outside without an adult supervising them. And Britain is only slightly behind that. And then obviously under COVID, we completely ended it, right? And it turns out that childhood that we've lost contains a huge number of things that are

essential for attention and focus. Again, to give a kind of no shit Sherlock example, the first is exercise. The evidence is overwhelming that children who run around and exercise can pay attention better. As Professor Nigg explains, they grow more brain connections. It hugely improves their attention and focus. But there's an even deeper layer to this. It turns out when children are playing freely with other children without adults supervising them, they learn how to use their attention. They learn what they find interesting, you know, and different kids find different things interesting. They learn how to persuade other kids to pay attention to them. They learn how to take their

turn with other children, all sorts of things that are absolutely fundamental components to attention. If an adult is standing over them telling them what to do, that's like the difference between processed food and real food, right? It just doesn't do it. They don't learn those skills in the same way because there's an adult telling them, directing them. But the reason Lenore, like I say, is the hero is because she built the solution to this, right? Because at first, she tried to just individually persuade parents, look, this is the problem and the solution is to let your kids play outside. And she would often start by saying to them, what's something you loved to do when you were a child that you don't allow your own kid to

do? And you know, they'd say, oh, I used to ride my bike in the woods on my own, all sorts of things. But she discovered it doesn't work just trying to individually persuade parents. Because if you're the only parent who sends your kid out, the kid gets scared, you look like a nutter, and often people actually call the police, right? So she now runs a program called Let Grow. It's letgrow.org. I really recommend everyone listening go to that site. And what they do is they go to whole schools and whole communities and persuade all of them together to give their children increasing levels of independence that build up to letting them play outside. And I went to see lots of their programs across the US. And I think probably the most moving conversation I have for the book,

one of the top two or three, was with a 14-year-old boy in Long Island who was in a Let Grow program. And this boy, to give you a picture of him Ella, he was a big strapping boy, right? He was taller than me. And until this program had begun nine months before, his parents had never let him out of his house on his own. They wouldn't even let him go for a jog around the block. I asked him why, and he said, my parents are afraid of all these kidnappings, he said. This is a town where the French bakeries across the street from the olive oil store. And he had a level of fear that it'd be appropriate if he lived in Syria. Your child is three times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be kidnapped, right? And then this program began. And all the kids in this area started to play outdoors and i asked

this boy what did you do and at first they they just played games in the street and outside right but then he said they went into the woods and he said our phones didn't work in the woods and we still went there he said that would like real awe and i said what did you do in the woods and he said we built a fort. And he looked so proud of himself. And him and his friends would take their phones, even though they didn't work, and sit in this fort. And Lenore was with me that day. And when that boy left, she said to me, think about human history, all of human history. Young people had to hunt and forage and explore and discover things. And, you know, now the only place our kids get to explore anything is on Fortnite, right? We can hardly be surprised

they become obsessed with it. And Lenore said that boy and his friends, given a tiny little sliver of freedom, what did they do? They went into the woods and they built a fort. Because this is so deep in human nature, right? This need is so deep and we've taken that away from our children. So I would argue every single school in Britain should have a Let Grow programme. We need to restore childhood. One of the blessings of this terrible tragedy we've all gone through in the last two years could be that we could realise, we can all see we imprisoned our children in the last two years. I would argue that was necessary. There was an airborne virus. I'm in favour of the restrictions broadly. But we can all see it's had a horrific effect on our children. Horrific, right?

Now, what that should teach us is what we were doing to our kids before that, where we were massively constricting them, was also really harmful. Now we've got to restore childhood. And this is so important for the attention debate. If kids don't develop attention when they're young, they're really going to struggle to do it as adults. This is something that is free. It costs literally nothing. We can restore childhood and that will hugely begin the process of healing attention. It makes so much sense. It's, you know, if you start off with no attention, you've kind of got the world stacked against you, haven't you? But thinking about that for adults who probably lots of people are listening as children weren't quite so bombarded with devices. Perhaps they came in in their teenage years or later. How do we collectively slow down in this world that's kind of exponentially speeding up?

Let's think about this in terms of two layers. So I give dozens of examples for both layers, but I'll just give you two examples and then there's dozens more in the book. So let's think about an individual level, right? I have in the corner of my room here, something called a K-safe. I swear I'm not being paid commission by these people. I've noticed their sales have massively gone up since I started talking about them. But so a K-safe is a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial and it'll lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I will not sit down to watch a film with

my boyfriend unless we both imprison our phones. When my friends come around for dinner, I make everyone put their phone in the phone jail. And it's really interesting. People get really itchy and anxious at first. And then they start to feel the pleasures of focus, the pleasures of attention. And the pleasures of focus are so much greater than whatever shitty message you might be getting from Facebook, right? So that's one example.

I also have on my laptop an app called Freedom, which can either cut you off from specific websites, say you were addicted to Twitter, or from the entire internet for however long you tell it to. So that's an example of a personal intervention. I use both of those for four hours a day so I can write. I wouldn't have been able to write my book if I hadn't done that. So that is an example. I give dozens and dozens more in the book of things individuals can do. But I'm very conscious, lots of people listening will hear me say that, that I do that for four hours a day and think, fuck off, mate, I can't do that.

My boss could message me. I would get in trouble. I can't do that. And they're absolutely right. Me saying to them that advice is not, in the current environment in which we live, it's not a lovely piece of self-help advice. A lot of people will experience it as a taunt, which is why we need to have this second collective level where we fight for it to be possible for everyone to do that. So I'll give you, that can sound very fancy and very abstract. Let me give you a concrete example of a place I went where they achieved that. In France in 2018, they had a huge crisis of what they called le burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government, under pressure from trade unions, set up an inquiry to figure out why is everyone getting so burned out? What's going on?

And they discovered one of the key reasons was that 35% of French workers felt they could never stop checking their phone because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night. And if they didn't answer, they'd be in trouble. And it was just exhausting people. They couldn't spend uninterrupted time with their children. They couldn't ever really feel they got any headspace. I mean, I remember when we were kids, Ella, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors. And even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? We've gone from it being basically no one to almost half the economy being on call all the time. So to solve this problem, the French government introduced a new law, which gives every

worker a right. It's called the right to disconnect. It's very simple. It takes two parts. Every worker has to have their work hours written down and defined in their contract. And every worker has the right to not check their phone or email after those work hours are finished, unless they're being paid overtime. And so I went to Paris, obviously before the plague, to sort of talk to people about how this had affected their lives. You know, just before I was there, Rent-A-Kill, the pest control company, were fined 70,000 euros for trying to get one of their workers to check his email an hour after he left work. Now, you can see how France is not some hypothetical science fiction construct, right? France exists. It's whatever it is, 40 miles away across the channel.

We can do that, right? You can see how that's a collective change that frees people up to make the individual changes that they want to make. So what I argue in the book, just like we needed and need a feminist movement for women to reclaim their bodies and their lives, I would argue we need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. We need to take on the forces that are doing this. We need to regulate the tech companies to deal with the specific aspects of these apps that are designed, consciously designed, to hack and invade our attention. We need to regulate the food industry. We need to give workers rights so they're not being constantly technologically interrupted. There's a whole array of things. We've got to restore

childhood. There's a whole array of big factors we've got to fight for together. We've got to have both these levels. i don't want to bullshit people right i'm passionately in favor of this individual advice like i keep stressing it will help but in a society that's pouring acid on your attention all the time we've also got to deal with the people who are pouring acid on our attention right we've got to do both and we absolutely can do both but it requires a shift in psychology. And this goes right back to what you said at the start, Ella. We've got to stop blaming ourselves. We've got to stop saying, oh, I've done something wrong with my willpower. I met the man who's the leading expert in the world on willpower and he couldn't solve it, right? Willpower isn't going to get us there.

Individual changes can massively help, but this is being done to all of us. And I would argue the shift in psychology we've got to make is stop blaming ourselves, start getting angry at the forces that are doing this to us and our kids, and think differently about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own own minds and we can take them back if we want to. But at the moment we're in a race. On the one side of this race, you've got all these 12 factors that I write about in Style and Focus that are invading our attention. And lots of them, if we don't act, are going to get worse. Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley,

said the world will be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your kid than Facebook. Okay, now think about the next iteration, the next TikTok, the metaverse, all of these things. So that's one side of the race, these factors that are invading our attention. On the other side of this race, we've got to have a movement of all of us saying, no, no, you don't get to do this to us. No, this is not a good life. This is not what we want for us and our children. We choose a life where we, sure, we have some speed and we have some fun and we have our devices, but we also want a life where we can think deeply, where we can focus, where we can mind wander, where we can make sense of our lives, where we can read books, where we can focus, where we can mind wander, where we can make sense

of our lives, where we can read books, where our children can play outside. That's the life we want. That's the life we can get to, but we won't get it unless we fight for it. Gosh, it's certainly a rallying call for action, isn't it? And I feel very inspired. I'm not just saying that. I so appreciate your extensive knowledge and passion for the topic, because you said, I think, right at the beginning, it's really easy to say this nature of our society, which is obviously deeply concerning and deserves that really kind of passionate call for action. I wondered if there were three take-homes for our listeners, the three things that everyone should know about why we can't focus and why taking back that control of our attention is just so important. I wondered what you'd say they were.

Oh God, there's so many. It's difficult for me to distill it down to three, but I guess I would say, firstly, we don't have to tolerate this. This isn't a force of nature. This is something that is being done to us and we can stop it being done to us. That's one thing I would say. The second is I would talk about flow.

I think this will really help people who are listening. So everyone listening will have experienced a flow state, even if you don't know the term. A flow state is when you're doing something that's really meaningful to you and you just totally get into it and your sense of time falls away, your sense of ego falls away. The way one rock climber put it is, flow is when you feel like you are the rock you're climbing. And it turns out flow is really important. It you are the rock you're climbing and it turns out flow is really important it's actually the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide and really important because it's also the once you get into it it's the easiest form of attention to provide when you're in a flow state it's not like memorizing facts for an exam we're like oh

shit what year did henry the eighth die or whatever it just really easily. And different people get into flow doing different things. For me, it's writing. For you, it might be, you know, rock climbing, playing a guitar, painting a canvas, making bagels, doing brain surgery. It could be anything, anything that's meaningful. So I wanted to figure out, okay, if this is a gusher of attention that exists inside all of us, and it is, where do we drill to get that gusher, right? How do we do it? So I went to interview an incredible man named Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is the man who first discovered flow states in the 1960s, used the phrase, and studied them for 50 years. And he discovered a huge number of things. But I think for anyone listening who wants

to get into a flow state, there's three of his findings that I think will really help you. The first is, there's no guarantee but you want to maximise your chance of getting into a flow state, do these three things. The first is, you've got to narrow down to one goal and for a while set aside all your other goals. If you're trying to do two things, three things, four things at a time, you won't get into flow. Secondly, you've got to choose a goal that's meaningful to you. If a goal isn't meaningful to you, your attention will slip and slide off it. So maybe your goal is to play the guitar. If I try and play the guitar, it sounds like a cat is being murdered, right? So I'm not going to get into flow doing that. Thirdly, and this is a little

bit counterintuitive, but it will really help if you choose something that is at the edge of your comfort zone, at the edge of your abilities. So let's say that you're a kind of medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just try and clamber over your garden wall, it's too easy. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Kilimanjaro, it's just going to be overwhelming. You want to choose a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one that you climbed last time. So if you do these three things, narrow down to one goal, make sure it's a meaningful goal, push yourself to the edge of your abilities but not beyond them, then you maximize your chances of getting into flow. It really helps. I recommend

everyone try it. And the third thing, I would talk a little bit about stress. So stress profoundly undermines your ability to focus and pay attention. And I think what we've all just been through, although I know people are sick of talking about COVID and I am too, really helps us to think about this. So I remember at the start of COVID, loads of my friends who were not doing the heroic work of being a nurse or the other emergency services saying to me, oh, we're going to be locked inside for a while. I'm going to finally read Tolstoy. I'm going to learn French on Duolingo. And everyone will have noticed, no fucker read Tolstoy and no one learned French, right? In fact, people Googling, how do I get my brain to work, went up by 300%. And I think the reason can help us as we get out of COVID as well. So I interviewed a woman

called Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, totally incredible woman. You should have her on your podcast, Ella. She's the Surgeon General of California. So the kind of leading medical figure in the state, the equivalent of Chris Whitty. And she said to me one day, this is before COVID, I stress, so she wasn't specifically talking about COVID. She was explaining how stress damages attention. She said, imagine one day you're walking down the street and out of the blue, you're attacked by a bear and you survive. In the weeks and months that follow, something totally involuntary will happen to your attention. You'll find it harder to do something like read a book, be present with your child, because a big part of your brain will be scanning

the horizon for risk and danger. Something came out of the blue and harmed you. So you're going to be like, what else might come out of the blue and attack me? It's totally involuntary. Okay, now imagine a bear attacked you again. Then you would likely go into a state called hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is where you just can't focus on things like reading or being present with your child because your brain is entirely focused on detecting risk and danger all around you. Traumatized kids go into hypervigilance, or soldiers who come back from a war are classic examples of hypervigilance. There was a wonderful child psychiatrist in Australia, Dr. John Giuradini, who said to me that deep focus is a really good strategy when you're safe.

Read a book, you'll learn, you'll grow. Deep focus is a really dumb strategy when you're in danger. You'd be a fool to sit at the Battle of the Somme reading a novel. You're going to get shot, right? So when we don't feel safe, when we're stressed, we will struggle to focus. And that is not your fault. So anyone who struggled to focus during a pandemic, it's not your fault. The bear came back. The bear came back two more times. So anything that reduces stress will over time improve deep focus and attention. So obviously I go through lots of things in the book that can help people to reduce stress.

But again, it's about that understanding this isn't your fault. The more you blame yourself, the harder it will be to get out of it. There are things you can do as an individual that will help deal with these problems. But knowing that it's not your fault will really help you. And knowing that actually often we're in these states that we evolved to have for good reasons. If you're in danger, you evolved to be vigilant. That's not some flaw in you, right? We wouldn't have survived as a species if we didn't do that. So yeah, I think it's about understanding many of these deeper factors and lots more that I go through in the book. And on a final note, the podcast is called Delicious Ways to Feel Better. I wondered if there's one thing that you do every day to help yourself feel better?

Every day I read at least half an hour of fiction. And reading fiction has always been a really important part of my life, but particularly during the pandemic. And can I recommend a specific novelist who's absolutely blown my mind? I want to give a shout out to Andy Miller on the Backlisted podcast. I learned about her from him. Anita Bruckner, the writer Anita Bruckner. Oh, my God, she's so good. Any of her novels are good, but if anyone wants just a place to start, you could really start anywhere.

Visitors or Hotel Dulac du lac oh she's amazing and reading fiction you're imagining what it's like to be another person you're getting out of your own head i find reading fiction such a joy obviously i read a lot of non-fiction because like i'm a non-fiction writer and a lot of that gives me pleasure as well but that's also got a really big work component for me whereas reading fiction especially reading it before I go to sleep, because it's also, reading fiction is a calmer state. Also, you're not exposing yourself to artificial light that wakes you up or much less.

I would say reading fiction is such a joy and it's one that is hugely declining in our society. The figures on this are just staggering. So I would say, yeah, read fiction. I know that's a weird thing for a non-fiction writer to say. Obviously, I want you to read my book as well. But yeah, fiction. What a joy.

It's funny you say that. I've been reading Before Bed every night for the last few weeks. I have to admit, I've been reading some quite trashy novels. What have you been reading, Talo? I'm currently reading a book called The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I read the first one of that. What an amazingly clever like so often with books in that genre you can sort of tell what's about to happen I did not see that coming at all

like it what a brilliant is the second one is good it really is it's exactly that it's the easiest read but it's fantastic so very much nodding along to to that but Johan honestly I can't thank you enough it has been the most fascinating eye-opening conversation i'm sure everyone listening has felt the same so thank you so much for joining us thank you so much everyone for listening and we really look forward to seeing you back here soon you're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads.

Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.