In your book, you talk about some of the common myths around focus. Can you discuss one of the myths and how to combat it?
One of the common narratives that we hear is that we should always strive to be focused, pack in as much as we can, and therefore be productive. But it's just not possible for people to hold sustained attention for long periods of time in the same way that we can't lift weights all day without getting exhausted.
It's really important to work in significant breaks to be able to refresh ourselves and replenish so that we can have better focus when we go back to [work]. People have a limited amount of attentional resources, and when we hold sustained focus for a long period of time, we drain those resources.
The best break is to actually go outside for 20 minutes. And the best thing of all is to be in nature, because we know that's the most restorative kind of break for people.
You’ve talked about how our attention spans have dipped quite a bit from around two and a half minutes to something like 47 seconds over the last decade when we're engaging with screens. What are the potential consequences of this collective dip?
We know that when people are shifting their attention rapidly—which is multitasking—it harms performance in several ways. Number one: people make more errors. There is a study done with doctors that shows that they make more prescribing errors when their attention is shifting.
A second thing is that it slows people down. We think by shifting our attention, we're accomplishing more, right? [We think] we're getting to do work on more different things and faster, but there's a switch cost every time. Imagine you have a whiteboard in your mind, and that whiteboard holds a representation of the information we need in order to do a task. Then all of a sudden, we switch our attention and do something else—let's say email. It's like erasing that whiteboard and then writing up the new information.
The worst thing of all, in my view, is that switching our attention so fast causes stress. We know from decades of laboratory research that blood pressure rises. In my research in living laboratories, we see when people are wearing heart rate monitors, when they're switching their attention fast, their stress goes up.