3 Simple Ways to Increase Your Attention Span
Our attention spans are dwindling.
Because of social media, we are more dependent than ever on things being quick and easy to digest. This makes it harder to pay attention to tasks that demand our attention for more than a couple of seconds — like work, school, and longer forms of media.
This can — and needs to — change. For instance, as someone who spends most of her time studying, working, writing, and reading, it is essential for me to be able to attend to a task over an extended period of time. Out of this necessity, I have managed to find three simple ways to increase my attention span.
You can do so too, to improve your attention span bit by bit every day.
1: Practice patience
At its core, a lack of attention is a lack of patience.
The more patient you are with yourself and others, the less dependent you are on things moving at a quick pace. Thus, patience is an effective internal antidote to the external forces that pry your attention away from important tasks.
Being patient is not a state of mind or a personality trait outside of your control — instead, it is a choice you constantly have to make. People with greater attention spans choose to remain patient in times of turbulence or boredom. They acknowledge that change comes with time, and that time passes more slowly than what the digital world wants them to admit. Attention spans crumble in busy environments, but patience keeps this outer and inner chaos from ruining it. Therefore, you do not need to have a patient soul to make patient choices.
I practice patience in small doses every day. Before I get on the bus, I wait for everyone else to go on board and then take an additional second or two before I follow. While everyone around me hurries to get to the next place, I choose to stay calm — and this orderliness has gotten me much farther in this world of disorder than hurrying has.
So, when everything else demands your attention, choose to stay patient.
2: Avoid multitasking
Multitasking kills attention.
By doing multiple tasks at once, you train your brain to become unable to focus on one thing at a time. Over the long run, it becomes more and more difficult next time to focus on just one of the tasks without the other.
This is especially the case with dopamine-inducing activities. High-dopamine behaviors like watching TV, eating food, and scrolling on social media, are addictive. But when you do multiple of these at the same time, you become dependent on doing more than one dopamine-high activity at once to satisfy your attention span. Thus, even the most fun tasks cease to hold your attention on their own. This will inevitably have a negative impact on other, less dopamine-inducing tasks, like studying, working, and doing housework.
The way to combat this — and to dedicate focus to one task at a time — is by reducing the number of tasks you do at the same time. I do this by working out without listening to music, reading without eating snacks, and going for long walks in silence. This will be tedious at first, but as Improvement Pill on YouTube claims, getting through this initial stage of boredom is the key to increasing focus.
In other words, practice dedicating your attention to only one task at a time.
3: Refocus
You do not choose to lose focus, but you can always choose to re-focus.
Indeed, what determines success is not the number of your distractions, but how often you choose to refocus despite these distractions. After all, no matter how many attention-stealing cues you remove from your environment, you are bound to get distracted by something.
The best thing to do in these instances is to refocus. The Mindfulness principle works wonders here: Acknowledge your distractions and bring your attention back to the task at hand. This might be difficult at first, but it is a simple practice that rewards greatly. It allows you to take control of your life and get things done. And it allows you to be unfazed by the distractions that your attention span wants you to follow.
Your attention span decreases every time you choose to allow external and internal cues to take control of your actions. And because there is no magical cure against distraction, it is your responsibility to take matters into your own hands and to choose differently.
When you notice that your attention span fails you, therefore, choose to guide your focus back to where it needs to be.
After all, your attention span grows or shrinks according to your choices.
So, choose to be patient. Choose to do one thing at a time. Choose to refocus.
And watch your attention span grow.
