The year was 2005, I was in the first year of my engineering graduation course. Of the colleges I could have attended, I went to the one which had the better football field. For me, that was enough because in those years all I cared about was football. I was a great example of someone who was present in the class but never attentive. I had mastered the art of looking at the teacher attentively and nodding at the right moments while not being able to register a single word he said because I was too busy day dreaming about football. Maybe I had overestimated the effectiveness of my facade because a couple of times the teacher did ask me a follow up question, only to find me clueless about it. Either he saw through my act or maybe I was doing it so well that he thought of me as the most attentive student of all time and decided to ask me a question for some self validation. Either ways, it didn’t work out for either of us.
I was not in the minority here and as anyone who has done engineering would know, you can afford to be clueless for the entire year about the subjects as long as you are able to turn yourself into a sudden prodigy for those last few weeks before the exams and learn more than what is humanly possible in a very short window of time as you prepare for the exams. This was the law of the land, and there was justice to be found everywhere in it. Looking at everyone around me, I had convinced myself that short term memory, lack of focus and absent mindedness were just traits of our age and as long as you didn’t suffer ‘academically’ which meant the grades, all was fine.
Then on one fine day, which happened to be during our annual sports festival, I was captaining the football team of my batch, the first year students, and stepped on the field to play a match with another team from our college. With football being one of the premier sports of our college, the matches were held with packed spectators stand and a small setup for commentary over loud speakers. Some of my friends had bagged the job for commentary over loudspeaker that day. Snatching the microphone from each other, they were happy to display their linguistics prowess and wits over the game. We had a challenging game but ended up winning by a narrow margin.
When the match was over, my friends came over to congratulate us, and then apologized in case they went a little overboard during commentary. I had no idea what they were talking about. We found out that the entire commentary section by them was full of witty remarks about the players and the crowd thoroughly enjoyed the embarrassing details that they tastefully revealed about us. However, I did not remember hearing the commentary or the sound of the crowd laughing at or cheering for us. I had heard…nothing. All I could hear in the field was call of my teammates, the referee and the opposing team. I had zero recollection of anything else. That day, I came to understand what it meant to experience THE FLOW.
All of us have felt this in our lives, while reading a book, painting, playing video games, sports, music or just talking to a loved one. We get down to doing something that we love and totally shut ourselves in from the world. Hours go by unnoticed and all the distractions in the world fall impotent in front of you. Just you, and the task that you love. The Flow is the most reinvigorating and satisfying experience one can have. To be engrossed in a task at such a level, that nothing moves you – loud music, noise, someone calling your name…nothing. I don’t remember that last time I felt the flow organically, and I am sure that I am not alone. Flow is experienced by the one thing which we are losing at an alarming pace with every passing year – FOCUS.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were once asked at a gathering to write down on a sheet of paper their secret to success in one word. They both gave the same answer: focus.
The Science Behind Focus
Our ability to focus depends on various components in an interconnected brain network:
Prefrontal Cortex: The executive decision maker that sets goals, maintain priorities and suppresses distractions.
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): Monitors for errors and conflicts. Helps you stay on track.
Basal Ganglia: Manages task switching and habit formation, influencing whether to stay or switch focus.
These regions (and more) in our brain constantly interact with each other and decide where and how much to focus by releasing various chemicals:
Dopamine: Involved in motivation and rewards anticipation. High dopamine makes focus more engaging.
Neorepinephrine: Boosts alertness and readiness to respond.
Acetylecholine: Enhances signal to noise ratio in the brain, helping the brain ignore distractions and stay sharp.
If the right balance between dopamine and neorepinephrine is achieved, we get the optimal state of Flow. If its too little, we feel distracted. If its too much, we feel anxious and jittery.
Why are we losing focus
Digital distraction and notification overload: We all saw this one coming. Apps today are designed to keep your attention for as long as possible. When the business success parameters change to “user base”, “monthly active users” and “average session time” (rather than revenue and profit), companies try all tricks in the books to keep you coming back to the app. Frequent updates, notifications and gamification of the experience provide constant dopamine burst, but it also comes with frequent distractions.
Short video content: Short duration and bite sized content train the brain for immediate dopamine demand and frequent context switching. This is possibly the biggest behaviour modification agent that humans have noticed in our generation:
- Difficult to invest time in content since the next content is available with just a swipe.
- Not allowing our brain to rest and fill it with doom scrolling.
- Reducing the attention span to a few seconds and making slow-rewarding sustained tasks seem more difficult and boring.
Multitasking: It’s easy to think that all these attention span and focus related issues are brought in by modern internet giants like Instagram and Tiktok. However, the harbinger of these issues was introduced long back when we were obsessed with the concept of multi-tasking. I remember the time when no job description would end before mentioning multi-tasking as a desired skill in their perfect candidate. Personally, I loathe multi tasking more than any other cause mentioned so far. It is the reason why so many of us feel busy throughout the day yet when the day ends it feels that hardly anything got done. The myth of multi tasking has embedded context switching in our culture to such an extent that switching off your phone and locking yourself in a room to do just ONE task with only one browser window open on your laptop feels like an activity straight out of Squid Game.
How to gain attention back, the science way
Dopamine management
Dopamine is usually the center of conversations around focus, attention and motivation. It is important to manage levels of dopamine to keep us interested in longer, harder tasks.
Shorter tasks: To change the system, we need to embrace the system. We are already used to frequent dopamine bursts. By reducing our regular tasks to shorter durations, we can get more frequent dopamine doses to keep the productivity going. With time, we can train our brain further by slowly increasing the time duration per task.
Dopamine fasting: Staying off the phone to deprive your brain of constant dopamine hits. This helps in bringing down the dopamine level required to stimulate the brain. Similar to reduction in “tolerance” after not drinking alcohol for a long time.
Make tasks engaging and rewarding: Dopamine is all about giving rewards to your brain. By gamifying your tasks through checklists and to-do lists, you provide the stimulation to your brain to keep it engaged. Nothing better than checking off that task from your to-do list!
Neorepinephrine management
This little mouthful of a word (lets call it NRP from now on) sharpens out attention by heightening arousal levels. Too low would make us sleepy and too high would lead to anxiety.
Physical movements: Moving your body at regular intervals can boost NRP levels. You don’t have to go all out here, even light exercise will boost your NRP.
Use the golden hour: Human body is naturally designed to be in cycles of alertness (around 90 mins) followed by recovery (around 20 mins). Take advantage of this cycle by assigning hardest mental work in natural peak alertness window. If you do not know your window, you can begin with hardest task at work as the first thing in the morning. This builds your will power and gives you sense of achievement early in the day. (Source: B)
Mindfulness: This is a wonderful concept that I have personally seen great benefits from. To practice this, I slow down my activity my 20-25% and think about what I am doing (sometimes I talk to myself about it as well). It could be as simple as “now I am walking to the kitchen, I am picking up the glass, filling water in it, drinking it now..” Yes, its a little silly, but it works. It gives you satisfaction of doing even the most mundane chores. It doesn’t let your mind wander and lose focus.
Train the Pre-frontal Cortex (PFC)
The PFC directs attention and suppresses distractions. It is crucial to decision making and the working memory in our brain and its gets to tire fast.
Shorter duration deep work: Shorter sessions of focused tasks followed by breaks helps the PFC to not get tired soon. Pomodoro technique advises us to have 25 mins time slots assisted by alarms for focused tasks. After 25 mins, take a 5 mins break. After 3 such rounds, take a longer break to recharge your brain. Slowly increase the session duration by 5-10 mins at a time over the next few months.
Remove distractions: Keeping our working desk clean and having the phone away during the session helps the brain focus on the task at hand. Easier said than done though, but thats how low the bar can be sometimes. Anxiety and stress of not having your phone in line of sight is a real thing, and is called Nomophobia (source: C)
Attention training: Practicing meditation, reading long form content or playing focus heavy games like chess can train the PFC.
Boosting Neurochemistry through lifestyle
Dopamine & norepinephrine are made from amino acids (tyrosine, phenylalanine) and rely on a healthy brain environment.
Eat: “Brain-healthy” foods like proteins, omega-3 fats (go for those almonds and walnuts), micronutrients (vitamin B’s and magnesium).
Sleep: Get 7-9 hours of sleep daily. This helps regulate and reset the dopamine sensitivity and PFC control.
Stay hydrated: As per my mother, all problems in my life would be solved if I just drank more water. She may be right.
The Sun’s rays do not burn, until brought to a focus – Alexander Graham Bell
Quick fix 1: One quick fix that helps me if I feel my mind is wandering and not able to focus is what I call “Binocular vision”. If I am reading something on the laptop, I will make binoculars out of my hands and look at the screen through that. This reduces surrounding visual input to the brain and helps it focus. May sound like hocus-pocus, but science supports it.
Quick fix 2: When feeling distracted, white noise can be great tool to block sensory distractions from your surroundings. My favorite is this when I am working and this when I am doing personal tasks.
Sources:
A: Dr Gloria Mark https://gloriamark.com/attention-span/
B: Huberman Lab https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-to-grow-from-doing-hard-things-michael-easter
Cloud Pandey 
brilliant read buddy.
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