Why Can't You Focus Anymore?

0:00 Welcome to solved everybody. My name is Mark Manson and today I have a question for you. Is your focus so shattered that you read the same paragraph four times, understand none of it, and then reward yourself by checking your phone, and now you're three Instagram reels deep into a video of a golden retriever learning to skateboard, and you can't even remember what you were trying to read in the first place. Me neither. How did I get here? What is this studio? And where's my phone? Well, here's the thing that nobody tells you about focus. The people who are worst at it are usually the ones trying the hardest. They're the ones white knuckling their way through a work session mentally screaming, "Don't check your phone. Don't check your phone." Which, as it turns out, is one of the most reliable ways to make sure you check your phone. The point is,

0:46 focus is not a test of willpower. It's a system of rules, stages, and failure modes that nobody ever bothered to explain to you. And once you stop treating it like a character flaw and start treating it like a design problem, the whole issue changes. So in this episode of Solve, we're going to talk about why your brain treats every open browser tab, unfinished task, and unanswered text like an unpaid debt it can't stop thinking about. We're going to talk about the ancient monks who described your exact scrolling problem in the 4th century. We're going to talk about why trying not to be distracted literally makes you more distracted and the psychological experiment that proves it involves a white bear. We're going to talk about what bees hunting for nectar can teach you about why you can't stop watching Netflix. We're going to talk about the single

1:32 most distracting thing you keep in your workspace. And hint, it's hurting your focus even when it's turned off and face down. We're going to talk about why flow states are not a mystical gift. They're an engineering problem with a specific set of conditions that you can easily set up in your favor. We'll also talk about the difference between an ADHD brain and a neurotypical brain that explains why someone can play video games for 6 hours but can't fold laundry for 6 minutes. We'll get into the philosophical question no productivity system ever bothers to ask you. You've learned how to focus, but what is your focus actually for? Because that is actually the only question that matters. In this episode, we are going to dismantle a lot of stories that you are probably carrying around about your own brain and your own attention. Because once you

2:19 understand how attention actually works, I'm not talking about the motivational poster version of attention, but the real psychological neurological machinery going on, it stops feeling like a moral failing, and it stops feeling like something you're losing. Instead, it feels like something you can finally design and control. My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three-time number one New York Times bestselling author. And this is Drew Bernie, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the only man in North America to be formally uninvited from two separate TED conferences. Dude, get it together. And this is Solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world, where every episode we aim to solve one question in your life once and for all.

3:07 I want to set the stage and this is totally selfish on my part because as you know I'm I am a David Foster Wallace stan uh and he had an absolutely brilliant book called Infinite Jess that I think everybody tries to read at some point and nobody can get get through because it requires too much focus. Uh it's about 1,200 pages. It is extremely long and dense and goes on a million different tangents, but the brilliance of that book is just the format of the book itself is a meta commentary on focus itself and the struggles of focus and modern life. And so I kind of like bringing up the this book as just kind of a backdrop to this episode. I think it it it's one of those things that he was very prophetic when he wrote it. It came out in 1995.

3:54 It came out pre- internet, pre social media, pre- cellphone. Uh but the the premise of the book is that there is a piece of entertainment that is so entertaining that when you show it to somebody, they will literally die because they would rather watch this piece of entertainment than eat, sleep, talk to other human beings, bathe, do whatever. And so everybody who sees this piece of entertainment ends up dying from it. As a result, the piece of entertainment and it's funny because in the book it is it is known as the entertainment and the amazing thing is that in the book the the entertainment becomes an instrument of terrorism and it is leveraged politically by various groups to uh basically terrorize the recipients of it. very prophetic then yes in many

4:42 ways I mean it's it's I think what what Wallace captures is that technology was ascending to a place where things were so addictive so engaging so mesmerizing that it was starting to destroy us both cognitively and physically and I think he would argue spiritually what's interesting about the book as well and Infinite Jessica kind of has an A story line and a B story What's interesting is nobody ever talks about the B story line which is about a recovering drug addict and his experience going through all the various rehabs and recovery centers. And it's funny because when you're reading the book it keeps cutting away to this this former addict and like he's in a halfway house and he's like struggling with his addiction and it for like 500 pages you're like

5:31 what's with this guy? Why do we keep coming back to him? And I think what's interesting is that what I think what Wallace was implicating was that many of the same skills and mindsets necessary in addiction recovery were soon going to be required like a prerequisite for all of us when confronting technology and entertainment in our lives. That might be the real prophetic part then, huh? It that that's just it's just an interesting point that I'm going to leave out there. Okay. I'll return to the book periodically throughout throughout the episode just because I I do think the book makes some very very salient points around the issues of attention and focus and how it's affecting us and how it how it's affecting society. Uh what's interesting though is that this

6:17 idea that our attention spans are being destroyed has been pretty much common place for my entire life, your entire life as well, going all the way back to the '9s. I remember being a kid and uh my grandparents telling me that the the television was rotting my brain and how video games were going to destroy my ability to do anything useful in the world. Not true. When we were young adults, people were saying the same thing about social media and and smartphones. And now people are saying the same thing about AI. It seems to be a prophecy that just never quite comes true. Uh and a lot of people have made a lot of money uh proliferating this prophecy that never comes true. I remember in 2008 there was a book called The Shallows. I don't know if you ever read it by a guy named Nicholas Carr. He was a journalist at the New York Times. And the entire book was

7:07 all of the ways that we were becoming stupid and illiterate and uh losing our ability to focus and pay attention to anything. And this was I mean this was really just about Google in the internet much less like I don't even think like Facebook was that big at the time. What's interesting is that if you go back and look at that book now, it is a comprehensive 300page exercise in and in and how correlation is not causation. U there's a lot of like handwaving and and freaking out about things that are are uh various studies of and and indicators that are going on in society, but um with with the with the benefit of hindsight, we kind of know now that none of the stuff that he was worried about ended up coming true. So this question is our attention spans getting worse?

7:57 Are we losing our ability to focus? I feel like subjectively we all feel like this is the case. I feel like we're all struggling with it a lot more. There was a famous headline that came out in 2015 claiming that uh the human attention span was now less than a goldfish. And the goldfish is of course the thing that is most famous for having a lack of attention span. Turns out this was [ __ ] Uh this was based on a marketing report from Microsoft. Um and it leveraged some third party data that they never really specified where it came from, right? never peer-reviewed, never validated in any way. Yeah. And it's what's even funnier, too, is that it turns out that uh goldfish do have long-term memories, which they're used in memory studies, even to like they're used in learning and memory studies. I didn't know that

8:43 until we uh researched this episode. You can give them tests just like like rats and mice and stuff like that and they use them in memory and learning studies. They actually have very good memories. Isn't attention span. Just ironic. This is just such a beautiful irony. It's just a sticky idea. is always Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there has been some recent research into our working memories and different cognitive functions and and the truth of the matter is and and this is not a sexy headline. This is not a a super spicy hook that's going to get people like, "Oh my god, I need to listen to the rest of this episode." But it's basically the hard data is showing that the our fundamental ability to focus, to remember things is not being destroyed. like there's not some inherent destruction happening in our brains due to the technology. And I think that's what

9:30 everybody's afraid of. I think what's happening, and this is what we're going to discover in this episode, is simply that our brains didn't evolve to be in these environments, and we're in a new environment where the inputs are plentiful and quite different and and so there is an adaptation that has to happen that is simply not happen. And what's interesting is that this experience of us being in a new environment, this has happened with every wave of technology. You can go back, you know, we talked about TV and video games when we were kids. People, there were moral panics around the radio. But when that came out, when novels were introduced in the 19th century, uh, adults freaked out that children weren't be able weren't going to be able to to pay attention

10:18 long enough to make important life decisions because their their heads were going to be buried in books the entire time reading some fantastical story about something. I mean, you can go all the way back. There's a fantastic book about depression called the noonday demon and the author talks about medieval Christian monks going back 800 years ago and how they wrote extensively about a concept called aidia which was like a restless mental state that drove them to constantly check doors and sweep floors and and check in on their their fellow monks because they they couldn't sit still. They like needed to distract themselves constantly. This panic around distraction and the inability to focus. It is as old as humanity itself. It is a struggle that has been everpresent

11:05 in every different permutation of society, every different kind of technology. What has changed has simply been the intensity of the environment that we've been placed in. And as that intensity of the environment shifts and changes uh the nature of us having to balance our focus versus our distraction um changes as well. So if we look at the modern age and all the current technology that we have, we simply have to ask ourselves what is different now like what are the challenges and issues that we're confronted with that our parents were or our grandparents were. uh what do we have to to deal with that is particularly unique and difficult? Um and there's plenty of them, right? I mean, I think for the fact is just the the everpresent access to an infinite amount of information in

11:56 and of itself is a constant issue. There's all sorts of studies that just show that having your phone in the room removes your ability to focus or pay attention as much as you normally do. I remember there was uh there was one study and I I don't know how reputable this study was, but I remember reading an article about it like 10 years ago. They found that when people had dinner with the phone on the table, they paid less attention to the conversation they were having. Never seen that too. Yeah. Even if they didn't even if they didn't pick up the phone, even if they didn't look at the phone, just the fact that the phone is on the table. Yeah. There's been other studies that have basically said if you if you've got it in view while you're working or anything like that, you're way more distractable. Yeah. Yeah. So I I just think that the constant presence of the opportunity for distraction makes the distraction more likely, right? There's also

12:41 a removal of stopping cues, which this is an interesting concept. If you think about media, say pre- internet, pre phone, pre- newswsfeed. Um there was always a clear end that you hit, right? You hit the end of the movie, you hit the last page of the book or the last page of the chapter. Uh you hit the end of a a radio show. These days there's no end. There's like a little container for everything. It's by design, right? It's just like it's just this endless scroll, this endless feed. This it's as soon as you finish one video, the next video is immediately queued up. And so there's no there's no clear demarcation of for your brain of like, okay, I'm done with Tik Tok now. I can go do something else. Do you remember it was probably I don't know five or six years ago that I think it was Instagram toyed with that a little bit. They're like you would

13:27 scroll and you would hit a point and they're like, "Okay, you're all caught up." And then, you know, you're like, "Oh, okay." Yeah. Whatever happened to that? Oh, they I think it lasted like a few months and they were like, "We're we we're losing money." Yeah. Their shareholders clearly did not like that. Yeah. There's a collapse in switching costs, which is interesting. I we're going to talk about switching costs quite a bit later when when we talk about multitasking and and you know, certain practices to avoid when you're trying to focus more and be more productive. A switching cost is is the amount of mental effort that it takes to to move from one paying attention to one task to another task. And the higher the switching cost, the more uh the more friction there is to leave that first task. And so the higher the switching cost, the more likely you are to focus on the first thing and and to stick with it for a long period of time. So, when switching costs are

14:16 reduced, when switching from Tik Tok to Netflix is as simple as just closing one app and opening the other, uh, you're much more likely to switch back and forth. I don't know about you, man, but like it's funny, like I remember when I was a kid, you'd kind of just turn on the TV and maybe you flip through like 10 or 12 channels. You just find the best thing that was on and you just leave it there. Whereas like now when I get on Netflix or or or Hulu or Apple or whatever, I I'll start a show and then I I'll I'll like stress for 10 minutes of like, is this the best show? Is there a better show? Maybe I should go maybe I should go start another show and see how that first 10 minutes is. And then I I'll like I'll actually end up spending an hour and not watch anything just trying to find something. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's such a paradoxical weird thing. And then finally,

15:05 there's there's a concept called variable reward design. And this is actually speaking of addiction, this is the basis uh you know, this is why why things like gambling become addictive is because you're rewarded, but you're rewarded in in unpredictable time frames and in unpredictable amounts. And there's just something about our neurological circuitry that like when rewards are unpredictable, we just want to sit there and keep hitting the button and see what comes up next. And then this, of course, doesn't even get into the the algorithmic recommendations, the the autoplay, the personalization. Um it it's just we're we live in such a different attention environment than any other humans uh in in history that it makes sense that we are seemingly struggling

15:55 more than ever before. But again, people mistake the the increased struggle for focus and attention for an increased inability to focus and attention. And there's nothing fundamental within us that has broken or been changed or altered permanently. the machinery is all still there. And anybody who's gone through a digital detox or, you know, disconnected, gone on a vacation, maybe gone up to the cabin in the woods, you notice that within a day or two your brain kind of resets and you're you're there's this like relief that happens when you're not constantly being inundated anymore. Yeah. I think there was this guy way back in the 70s actually who kind of called this and and saw this coming. It was this Herbert Simon. um he worked I I believe he worked in uh kind of like

16:42 the consulting world the business consulting world and what he noticed was that the problem like you were saying basically was that it it wasn't necessarily information production had become very cheap at that point even even back then in the 70s that was a big trend uh that he saw is like being able to produce information was becoming cheaper easier faster we were just starting to come into this whole society this whole world of cheap and abundant information. That's what changed. Yeah. And so there was all these companies. He said, "All you companies are focusing on producing this information. The real resource now though is going to be the attention needed to process all of that." And we're still living through that over 50 years later, even when he he called that back in the 70s. So yeah. Yeah. In Silicon Valley, this is known as the attention economy. And it's

17:29 Yeah. You've written about this before. Yeah. And it it is ultimately like whatever whatever the new scarcity is, that's the driver of value. And so if you can if you can hold and maintain people's attention the longest, then you can monetize it the most. That's that's the it's the new currency of today's Aren't people just weird? We figured out a way to monetize attention. That's just wild. But here we are. Yeah. Here we are. Here we are. So, the best way I've conceptualized this, and this is this is maybe uh again, I think this kind of lays the framework for for where this episode is going to go, but I wrote I wrote an article way back in 2018 called the attention diet. And I think the metaphor that I found that lands for a lot of people is to think of the information around you like food, right? So it's if you go back 100 years ago, 200 years ago,

18:16 food was scarce. Uh and you had to actually work for your own food. And because of that, you you didn't see as much obesity. You didn't see as much heart disease. You didn't see as much, you know, uh diabetes and all these other uh problems that come from the modern food system. Well, what happened was food got industrialized. It no longer became scarce. There was actually an abundance of it. And because there was an abundance, there became a competition to uh make food as pleasing as possible, as as addictive as possible. And so what do you get? You get a rise in obesity. You get a rise in diabetes. You get all these health problems that start emerging because people start eating a bunch of crap and they don't know how to stop. So as a result, people had to learn how to

19:01 go on a diet. They had to learn how to to control their own urges, stop themselves from indulging on certain things. They had to learn a little bit about nutrition, about what was good for them, what was bad for them. And then you got the health movement that kind of spawned in response to the industrialized food system. I think the exact same thing is happening with information. For most of human history, information was scarce. You had to work really hard to get it. And so people cognitively speaking were quite lean and healthy. They were just deprived. They didn't have much optionality and they didn't have much abundance. Now information is completely abundant. And because it's abundant, it is now competing all the time for your attention. And because it's competing all the time for your attention, it becomes it's kind of like the

19:48 junk food of information, right? It's like super salty and sweet and it's very addictive and you be you start to compulsively consume it. And so the same way we had to develop uh awareness and understanding around our physical health, I think we have to develop an awareness and understanding around ourformational health and our attentional health and understand okay yeah this is like the junk food of information. I need to learn how to cut myself off from it. I have to learn how to control my my impulses, my urges. Maybe understand where they're coming from because otherwise you'll become mentally and cognitively obese, diabetic, whatever, whatever, how, however far you want to extend this metaphor. And I do think that this is very much what David Foster Wallace was getting at in Infinite Jest is he he said that ultimately you have to take kind of the monklike self-control

20:39 of a recovery addict and you have to apply that to watching TV or in the these days it would be using your your stupid phone. This episode is brought to you by DuckDuck Go. We use AI for everything these days. We use it for work. We use it for personal stuff. And we use it for truly unhinged questions that you only ask when you're in a crisis at 1:00 in the morning. And the convenience makes it easy to overshare without realizing it. But most of us do not stop to think, what happens to all of this data? And that's why I appreciate what DuckDuckGo is doing with Duck.ai. When you go to duck.ai, you can chat privately with any popular AI tool like ChatgBT, Claude, and many others. But your conversations are not used for tracking, training, or building some giant creepy profile about you.

21:26 There's no account required, no subscription fee. Everything is completely free. And it's from DuckDuck.go, a company that has been focused on protecting privacy online since 2008. So if you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit duck.ai/solved today. That's duck.ai/solved. A private way to chat with AI from duck.go, go where AI is always optional and private. Okay. Well, so I'm glad you brought up the food analogy already, uh, because I think a lot of this episode is going to be, uh, kind of focused around that. Okay. So, to explain kind of how your mind works when we're focused or distracted, right? I first want to talk about bees a little bit here.

22:15 Okay. All right. I'm excited. And yeah, bees and how they forage for nectar. Let me guess. Our the human attention span is now less than a bees. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. Not at all. So, so, okay, this actually comes from what's called optimal foraging theory. Okay, this is in biology, right? Basically, like imagine you're a bee in a meadow, okay? And you're flying around and you find a patch of flowers, okay? And you land on a patch of flower. They're full of nectar. You're like, "Hell yeah, [ __ ] yeah." You start just going to town. Yeah. You get nectar drunk, right? You're just you're hammering nectar. First sip's great, second sip's great. You're going for a while. You're hopping around this little patch that's all close together. You're hitting all these. You're draining them all, right? After a little while, though, you start to notice that, oh, okay, it's a little bit harder for me to get nectar out of these flowers here. Mhm. You face a

23:03 dilemma at that point. At what point do you leave that little patch and go look for a new patch, okay, of of flowers for nectar? Okay. This is this is what's called the explore exploit dilemma. Okay. Okay, in in animal behavior and biology, okay, the dilemma is when do you leave? If you have a patch of food somewhere, like what's the optimal time to leave that patch and look for another one? Okay, all animals face this dilemma. All animals do, humans included. You know, when we were nomadic tribes, we would go and we would find a patch of berries or or animals even too that we were following. At what point is it optimal for us to stick around and exploit that patch of food, right, versus leaving? Because if you overh harvest then you potentially destroy the plants and the vegetation and then you like kill the food source for the future. And that's part of it. The

23:53 other part of it though too is like you already said there's an energy cost. There's a cost to switch, right? There's a cost associated with um do I leave this patch? There's energy that you have to spend to go off to this other and and find another patch. There's a risk you're taking too. You're like I have a a food source here. it's depleting, but do I keep exploiting it or do I take the risk and go try to find something better? Okay. Okay. So, those are kind of the two the the risk benefit that you're weighing here. Right. Now your brain works much the same way when it's processing information like you were saying like information is food in the environment for us for our brains right in much the same way we come upon a patch of information whether that's looking at your phone reading a book having a conversation scrolling through social media working on a task

24:41 that you need to work on. All of those are patches of information, right? And your your brain is going in there and it's either exploiting them and eating it all up just like the bee floating around to these flowers or it's deciding, h okay, not a whole lot here. I'm going to go on to something else. Okay. So, again, in in the information age that we live in now, what's changed is there's all this information out there and we have to decide what to exploit and what to explore. So, it sounds like this is my Netflix dilemma, right? 100% when there's 400 shows, I just want to keep exploring and I don't want to like sit and exploit any single show. Exactly. Whereas back when I was a kid Exactly. in Texas and we had three channels on, I just exploited the [ __ ] out

25:26 of each channel, right? Because that's what you had, right? That's what that's what was there. That was your information environment in that case, right? Now, there was this other researcher uh back in the 70s. His name was Eric Charov and he came up with this idea. It's called marginal value theorem. Okay, it doesn't matter the name. You know, all these names are so sexy. Yeah, I'm I'm just going to start adding theorem to the end of everything. Yeah, it makes it sound smart, right? It's very simple though. Basically, um what he found was that animals in a food patch of any kind, the optimal time to leave is when your uh the marginal reward, which is like the next bite you take or the next berry you find, whatever it is, uh is it drops below the average reward that you're getting. So basically like your brain is comparing even in a in a whether

26:13 it's whether it's a food patch, whether it's an information patch, whatever it is, it evaluates the entire environment that you're in first. Okay? And it compares whatever you're focused on at the moment to the rest of the environment. Y okay. And if whatever you're focusing on right now isn't as rewarding as what you would expect from the rest of the environment, you're you're going to you're going to [ __ ] off basically, right? Um and so this again translates very well to the information uh environment that we live in now too. Uh there was another guy this Peter Peroli, he wrote this book called the information forging theory which basically finds the exact same thing. We follow that same pattern that animals do in a in a patch of food in in an information patch that we're rumaging through that we're foraging through. What this really tells us

26:58 though is that modern distraction, it really is a rational response to what's going on to this these environmental changes that you've you've already laid out for us, right? There's all these distorted signals in our environment. They're artificially inflated exploration signals. Ah, specifically of what's going on, right? Gotcha. And so this is like it's just a really good way to frame this is like, okay, is my brain in exploit mode or explorer mode right now? And why? Okay, and I'll we'll get into this a little bit more, but that I think is is kind of keeping the food metaphor going here. This is um this is kind of the modern environmental information landscape that we're in. And this can this can explain a lot of the problems um that we face and show

27:44 us a lot of the solutions as well. Yeah. So then it makes sense if you narrow the the opportunities to explore, right? If you like cut yourself off from certain information sources, then it is it is going to just naturally strike your brain as more useful to exploit, right? To go deep on one thing to spend a ton of time, you know, let's just let's watch this entire show or let's read this entire book. Whereas if as you expand your information avo that that calculus that's going on inside of your brain which is really it sounds like it's happening at a very like base motivational level 100% is yes that that it's it's never

28:30 going to seem worth it and I dude I run into this all the time like all the time. Uh, so X, formerly known as Twitter, they just launched a like a new al they were very public about it. They they updated their al algorithm to to preference long form articles. And so there's all these long form articles that are popping up on my on my X feed. And so I'm scrolling and I I keep seeing all these articles and I'll click on one and I'll read like two paragraphs and I'm like, I'm going to go back to to scrolling. And like I've I've read like the first two or three paragraphs of so many articles and I've not finished a single one and it's just because I'm in this environment of like well I know there's like 18 other articles I could read in the next 20 seconds so like why would I waste my time on this one? Right. Yeah. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about is

29:15 setting up those limits and and putting containers on things. Yeah. Uh so as to prevent all of that. It's the same type of thing though too or if you have your phone in your environment that's that's a source of information whatever it is. The It's interesting. So, um I was just doing some like light renovations to my house and I didn't have a TV for several months. I was like, I was not watching wa watching a lot of TV anyway. So, I kind of got my living room set back up and I put the TV back up and immediately that's like, you know, it's a source of of uh like noise in my environment that I can go to for some variable rewards uh for just alternate sources of information environment. And sure enough, like I got distracted a whole bunch. Yeah. Yeah. I've had And your kitchen's still not finished. And my kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay. What exactly is going on in the brain though when we we are in let's say exploit versus explore

30:06 mode. Okay. I won't get too far into the weeds of this. I'm going to go high level with it. But there's some really cool stuff. uh back in the mid 2000s there was this uh there were these researchers who um found that this part of your brain the locus uh cerillius which is uh it's it's a midbrain kind of small structure midbrain but it does um direct our attention a lot or it has has a lot to do with direct directing our attention. They found that norepinephrine in this um region kind of regulated that switch between explore and exploit. Okay. At least to some degree. Like um basically when there's like burst of norepinephrine in this part of your brain, you're more likely to be like kind of locked in on something and and focused on it. Okay. And then when as the you know you're you're into something, you're looking at it and then you know

30:52 your attention starts to kind of fade a little bit that norepineph those norepinephrine bursts are kind of coming down and you're coming more towards what they call a tonic phase which is kind of a baseline phase and and your mind starts to wander at that point. There's also, of course, dopamine plays a big role in this, too. A lot of people, like there's a misconception out there, and we've talked about this before. People think dopamine is like the reward chemical. It's not. It's a motivation chemical. It's like what it it's it's motivating you to pay attention to something or to or to um approach something uh out in your environment. Um well, so okay, because there there there was a fad for quite a while. I think it started in the pandemic and it lasted up to maybe a year or two ago, but you saw this on YouTube quite a bit of dopamine detoxes, which was really

31:40 just removingformational sources from your own life so that you were more often in exploit mode. Um, it sounds like that that was just a misnomer that you're not actually, you know, by removing your phone and and not using TV or playing video games and just having a stack of books next to you for 5 days, you're not really doing a dopamine detox. You're really just removing opportunities to go into explore mode. like well is it a misnomer or or is it I don't know if I'd say it's necessarily a misnomer because what's going on there like when when you do have kind of higher levels of dopamine especially in your prefrontal cortex which is like executive function and you know direct you're telling yourself consciously like hey pay pay attention to this thing. Yeah.

32:26 Um and then dopamine comes in and whether you're motivated to continue to pay attention to that thing or not. If you have your phone out though, what's happening is you're like, I'm going to go search another little dopamine patch over here. Yeah. What you're doing is you're dividing up that dopamine between different sources, I think, is what's going on. So, I guess it's a little bit of a misnomer. Um because Yes. It's not a dopamine detox necessarily. It's that you're you're you're trying to uh generate more uh endogenous forms of of dopamine. Yes. And kind of intrinsic forms of it rather than all these external forms. I guess that's a useful way to think about it. Yeah. I mean, I was always I was always skeptical of it because I'm like, well, aren't you if if you're training yourself to just be excited and motivated to like sit in a quiet house and read books for a week. That's still a form of dopamine, right? Like, you know, so it's it's not Yeah,

33:17 I think it's it's not that the dopamine goes away because then you'd probably just be a slug, but like it it's it's being instead of being directed towards a hundred different things, it's being directed towards like two things. That's more accurate, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah, you have that you have that uh the dopamineergic u factors there. The there's also kind of like two brain networks that all of these different chemicals there's other neurochemicals too. So we're oversimplifying just so you know, but there's kind of two main brain uh networks that map pretty well to explore and exploit mode. Uh the exploit mode is called the task positive network and it it's that's high focus, high efficiency, your narrowing of your sensory gates. So like any sensory information is coming in. Um if the task positive network is really online,

34:06 you're focused on something like this is when you shut everything out uh from the outside, sensory cues become really dull. You're not paying attention to temperature or noises or anything like that, right? Then you have the default mode network. This is like self-referential. You're thinking about yourself. Your your mind's wandering. It's literally distracted. Um it's it's it's trying to find something to latch on to basically in the environment, right? Yeah. So those the your your brain and the brain chemicals kind of map onto those two different networks like that. So obviously when we want to focus, we want to be more in that task positive network and outside of the default mode network. When we get into flow, we'll talk a little bit more about that self-referential thing uh and the default mode network. But yeah, for now, just suffice it to say, there's kind of these two main networks that are at play here and competing with each other.

34:53 Okay. Okay. For metabolic resources. Metabolic resources. Yeah. Yeah. Just energy in general. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I don't want to spoil it, but I'm going to guess, you know, because every people when you experience flow, you kind of lose track of yourself. I'm guessing that that that's not a coincidence. That this probably explains that, right? That's a good little teaser for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Stay tuned. And then, yeah, last thing I'll mention though, too, um, we're going to revisit a brain reasoning we we actually talked about in the resilience episode, which is the anterior singulate cortex. If you remember that, that was kind of the I I called that the resilience muscle, if you would, right? And really, what's going on in the anterior singul cortex, one of the functions they we believe anyway, is that it's a costbenefit analysis, right? So like in the resilience episode I talked about how if you are uh engaged in some difficult

35:43 task the ACC is like is this worth it basically that's it's contributing to that that calculation anyway same thing with focus here right is is this information patch in terms of focus we're in focus terms is it worth it to stick here or not okay um and this is influenced by that the locus curelius like I said it comes in and it uh there's connections to it that influence whether or not you're going to stick with this task or not. And and the ACC kind of says, "Okay, is it worth it or not for me to stick in this patch, the resilience side of it, you can work this out. It is a little bit like a muscle um where at first you don't think it's necessarily worth it, but if you stick with it, then you find something that is and then it's kind of self-reinforcing and all that. We'll kind of get into that as well, but that's kind of the main overly simplified brain uh the the

36:34 neurobiology of focus that for our purposes that we're going to use going forward. Okay. Now, for the exploration mode though, too, this is actually kind of important, too. There's there's different kinds of exploration that not all exploration is made equal, right? They have what they what's called directed versus random exploration. And you can probably already guess which one we kind of want to go towards usually anyway, right? Directed is really just it's intentional. You're like, "Okay, something's not working here. I need to go find some other piece of information, so I need to go explore." That's very intentional. You're like, "I have a goal in mind. I know where I'm going with it. It's going to help me probably be rewarding in some kind of way, right?" The random is more just like mind wandering. You're like, "This sucks. I have no idea what's next. I'm just going to let my mind wander. I'm going to scroll Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, whatever."

37:21 Um, and then, uh, there's there's really just an increase in volatility noise in your in your brain going on at this point, right? We obviously use both. Um, and when when uncertainty is is relatively low, we usually bias towards more the the directed. Okay? So, it's like, okay, I kind of know what I need to do here, so I'm going to go off and directly explore something. versus when uncertainty is high. Like I said, like I don't know if this is you're you're on Netflix and you're like, I don't know if this is going to be any good next, right? That's kind of the difference. Now, the main thing to take away from that from the random versus directed types of exploration, you can be more intentional about this, right? You can you can really distinguish these in your brain. We talked a little bit about this in the procrastination episode, but like when

38:11 you are when you do switch a task, ask yourself, am I doing this? Is this teaching me something? Is this switch actually going to teach me something? Am I actually going to gain or am I just escaping from the uncertainty and all the anxiety that that brings up as well? Okay. Um, you can also kind of design this for intentional cycling too. So, this is the other thing is that not all, like I said, not all exploration is necessarily bad. You know, there's this there's a story of like Charles Darwin was obviously a very prolific uh scientist and writer. Uh he struggled with focus though too. He struggled with distraction a lot. So he had a routine and we'll get into all the routines and everything like that. But he would have times where he would sit down and he had these deep focus hours and he'd sit at his desk and he'd think through these things and look through data

38:59 and all of that. And when he got stuck, he would intentionally go on these walks that he had. I think he lived by the ocean. M um and he would go on these walks and um he had this system for like um he'd do these laps around this one pond I think or whatever it was and he had this system of like stones that would count how many laps he did and all of this where he would didn't have to think about it but he just let his mind wander during this very directed uh exper exploration that he did and then he would come back and a lot of times you know you it's like those shower thoughts you have like oh something popped up in this during this time so it's not necessarily that explore mode is bad I don't want to get to that obviously ly there's a time and a place for it. It's just that when we need to be in this exploit mode, we need to be able to shape our environments, like you said, uh in a way that puts our brain into that exploit mode that uh pushes out all

39:48 those other distractions and sources of like cheap dopamine that that will distract us from it. It it's interesting because I I think the key here is actually just the intentionality, right? Like you need you need to be able to exploit, you need to be able to go deep on one task, but you also need to be able to explore And you also there are times where you want to let your mind wander, right? There there I think there are certain especially if you're doing creative tasks. Yes. It's funny because Beethoven had a similar uh routine which is that he would go on daily walks in the afternoon when and and he believed strongly that that was where a lot of his creative inspiration came from. So I think it's you want to be able to access all these phases. You just you just don't want to feel hijacked, right? like you want to feel like right you what whatever phase you're

40:36 in it's that's where you want to be. It's really interesting. We're going to talk about ADHD later, but it's I think one of the paradoxes about ADHD that confuses a lot of people is that ADHD people uh of they're obviously often distracted and uh like can't stay focused on on one thing for a very long time, but then they also get obsessed about stuff, right? an ADHD person will like get fixated on a certain task or a certain hobby or a certain idea and they'll just like go so hard on it that they forget to eat and sleep and they don't do anything else. Uh and what's interesting is that both of those things are the same thing, right? It's a lack of intentionality. In one case, when you're not able to focus on anything, it's you want to focus on a thing, but your mind just

41:23 keeps wandering and going back into explore mode. Whereas in another case, it's you actually want to be able to stop doing something, but you can't stop doing that thing. So impulsivity to it. Yeah. Right. So there's like dishes are piling up and you haven't showered in three days and you're just like locked into this one obsessive thing. So jumping ahead a little bit, but I I do think illustrates the point very well. Yeah, I I do think it's all of these modes are normal and healthy. We evolved them all for a reason. Um the issue is the issue is not being being able to access them intentionally when we want to. Right. No. Exactly. And and even things like boredom and fatigue, those are normal, too. They've been they've kind of been villainized a little bit.

42:09 Those are normal, too. But they're just they're signals. Yeah. Right. In your environment, just like uh just like a signal for something, okay, this is really rewarding, something that I can dive into and latch on to. if you're bored or fatigued by something that you could treat that as a signal though as well. Um it's not just that you've run out of willpower. It's that hey there they're probably like for whatever reason maybe it's valid maybe it's not your brain is saying this is not a patch you need to exploit right now. Right. Right. That's what the boredom and and fatigue can often often tell us. Um, so, so lapses in our focus really can be more treated more like diagnostic information, right? It's either there's something going on in the environment or something going on with this task that I need to address. Yeah. Okay. So, really

42:57 what I want to do is like kind of remove all the moralizing around it for sure. Um, and just start to show that what's really going on here is that the environment again has all of these artificial uh kind of like signals on steroids right now that are pushing us more and more into this explore mode because it what whatever source is pushing those to usually is incentivized to put us into explore. Don't pay attention to that over there. Pay attention to this over here. No, pay attention to this. Pay attention to this. That's actually what's going on here is that we're just getting pushed. Our brains have these modes for exploiting patches of information, what I keep calling patches of information uh and or exploring new ones. Your environment has so much uh uh sway and which what you pay attention to that that's what a lot of this episode is going to be about

43:46 is is tilting that back towards okay when you want to get into exploit mode, how do we do that? a little bit of a curveball I'm going to throw here is that I do think some of this is strangely culturally defined like it was it was interesting being reminded that like people used to freak out about teenagers reading novels like like that that was a moral panic the telegraph too I found some like they were everybody's like oh my god if we can just communicate instantly what are we we're going to stop writing letters or like when the radio came out they're like oh people aren't going to have conversations anymore because they're just going to listen to the radioact Right. So it it is interesting that uh you know the human mind is incredibly adaptable and the the nature of of explore versus exploit, what ratio it's happening, what what is hijacking and what is not like many

44:37 of these things are are just kind of culturally predetermined based on what the previous generation was used to. Right? So, it's the today we would look at like today if you met a teenager who couldn't stop reading novels, you you'd probably find that very respectable. You're like, "Wow, look at look at them. Timmy is just crushing book after book. That's amazing. Timmy's going to go far." Whereas in the 1800s, they were freaking out about it. And it just makes you wonder of like where these definitions of what how much attention we should have for each thing come from. And that that's not to defend like all the all the the technological attention hijacking that goes on today. I do think it is problematic for a few different reasons which we'll discuss in this episode. But I just I think it's worth considering that uh there's no hard set rule around this. Like

45:29 there's no rule saying that like oh this is your brain's only supposed to pay attention to this this many information patches at any given day or any given time. Uh, a lot of this is just it's just what we're used to, right? And and when it changes, uh, it scares us. Yeah. You know, we kind of freak out a little bit. Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he had this great quote where he said that any technology that's invented before you're 35, you take for granted and assume is normal. Any technology invented after you're 35, you assume is going to be the end of the world. That checks out. That absolutely checks out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and and not only are like the way your attention is divided up, not only is that culturally determined, I mean mental health in general, ADHD wasn't really there wasn't even

46:19 a word for it really until what the 20s, 30s, 80s. Yeah. But well, there there wasn't a diagnosis for it until the Right. Right. Right. Yeah. The um and they called it something different before then. Yeah. They they had different names for it in the past. But and that was really only because you look at the way economic change had happened. we were going more and more from uh you know kind of a manual labor based economy to an information economy. All of a sudden we found all these people who who don't fit well into that. Yep. And so we culturally define that as something different. I'm not saying it doesn't exist obviously. I'm not I'm not one of those people like ADHD isn't real. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying the way we think about it and the way we approach it and the way we treat it. Yes. Is very very culturally dependent. Same thing with uh how we sit down and do our work. It's I so I just did a YouTube video on on ADHD and I talked about this how a lot of what we consider mental health is culturally determined. I mean homosexuality

47:10 used to be a mental illness that was diagnosible through the DSM uh yeah through like the 70s or 80s until 1973. I mean, there was back in the late 19th century, uh, they used to diagnose women with quote unquote hysteria because they were being too emotional, and the the primary treatment for that was to essentially lock them in the bedroom and socially isolate them until they calm down. Super [ __ ] up. But like that was considered normal mental health treatment in the 19th century. There is a cultural element here of like what is quote unquote normal, what is expected, um what is well adapted. I mean ultimately it is not to get too philosophical here but ultimately our goal in any context is to be well adapted to our environment. And I think in the case of

48:00 technology today, there are situations where like the junk food, right, where we feel overwhelmed with choice, we feel uh we feel compulsive. Um a lot of our executive functioning is is hijacked through various means through marketing and um and just like insanely attractive synthetic food or content. So we we have to develop new ways to adapt to our environment and and some of that can be just all three in our environment, right? It's like you just don't even buy the junk food in the first place. Uh so you won't be tempted by it. You delete Instagram and Tik Tok so you won't be temp tempted by it. Or you develop systems and and mechanisms for yourself um to to make sure that you you adhere to to what you want. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to get a lot

48:50 of those. Yep. So yeah, this episode is brought to you by I am eight. You know that feeling when you're trying to be healthier, but it turns into a second full-time job. You've got your little stack of vitamins. You've got all your smoothie ingredients. You got all this mystery green powder stuff going on and eight different browser tabs open about gut health. And yet, you still feel like me. That's why a few months ago, I started using IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials. It's a oneanddone wellness drink that actually makes things simple and actually works. It's one scoop, one drink, 92 nutrients, and that's 16 different supplements in one. You've got adaptogens, you've got CoQ10, MSM, pre-pro and postbiotics, plus real science behind it. It was co-founded by David Beckham and it developed from the folks at the Mayo Clinic, Cedar Cyani, and a former NASA

49:38 chief scientist. So, it's not exactly a Tik Tok wellness trend. It's vegan, gluten-free, non-GMO, and NSF certified. So, you know, it's going to be clean and tested. I drink it first thing in the morning. It tastes surprisingly good and it saves me from having to think about wellness for the rest of the day. And yeah, my digestion is better, my energy is up, and the supplement graveyard is officially closed. No more dealing with 28 bottles every [ __ ] morning. But here's the deal for you guys. If you go to im8alth.com/solve and use the code solve, you will get a free welcome kit. You'll get five free travel packets and 10% off your order. Again, that is immerhealth.com/solve and then use the code solve at checkout. Heal better, think clearer, spend less time googling magnesium. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug

50:26 Administration and this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So, why the [ __ ] are we so distracted all the time? After combing through tons of psychological research, I have narrowed it down to four factors. They're basically four factors that consistently trigger our distraction. So, if you're a person who struggles to focus on a consistent basis, if you're a person who is always getting distracted, your mind's wandering constantly, you never seem to be able to get anything done, chances are it is one or more of these four factors. But before we get into the four factors, I do want to touch on one famous study and it actually comes from my main man Dan Gilbert. It's one of my my favorite psychological researcher. I don't know

51:16 if you have a favorite psychological researcher. He's good. He's good. He's out of Harvard. He's and he's real meticulous and he's very analytical. Yeah, he's good. Dan Gilbert's the man. He's great at he he's great at finding these like little counterintuitive uh things and he just sets up like really fun experiments like this one. So he did this one with Matthew Killingsworth. What they did is they actually created an iPhone app that would randomly ping people throughout the day and asked them what they were doing and how focused they were while they were doing it. Whether their mind was wandering or not, whether they're engaged with whatever they were doing. And what they found is that people are pretty much distracted all the [ __ ] time. All the time. In fact, they deduced that people spend 47% of their time not thinking about the thing that they're doing while they do

52:04 it. That sounds that sounds low to me. What year? This was like late 2000s, right? 2010. This was 2010. 2010. Okay. So, that's it's probably even worse. It's probably even higher now. But still, that's almost half the time. Yeah. That's in itself is And by the way, like they really they had absolutely no prejudice about what they were measuring against. So they they they calculated how distracted people were for each activity that they were doing. They they even found that people were distracted 10% of the time during sex. So it's the bar is low. The bar is very very low. But the point of all this, it's actually a very So hold on. Wait. I'm just going through my head.

52:49 PE people people they would they had this app. Yes. And when people were having sex, people would check the app and respond to I I think they probably got got a notification. And then what you're supposed to do is when you get what were you immediately doing? Yeah. And then you have to say exactly what what were you doing and were you engaged and focused on it. Right. Okay. Uh and apparently 10% of people having sex were not paying attention to the sex that they were having. Okay. Okay. that might say more about their relationships than than their distractability, but that that's another podcast. Um, this ended up being a pretty it's it's become a pretty famous study. You see it get posted quite a bit. Uh, great title. Dan Gilbert has great titles for his He's a good marketer for for an academic. Yeah, he is. Yeah, he's got great titles for his papers. Um

53:36 it was called a wandering mind is an unhappy mind because what they found is that generally that the more people's the more distracted people were uh the less happy and satisfied they were with whatever they were doing. But I only bring this up to say that distraction is the norm. It's almost the default in many ways. Like it is what we'll see when we go through these four triggers is that what we'll find is that it you're not distracted because something's happening to you. you're actually distracted because of a lack of something going on. Okay. So, these four triggers I've actually boiled down into a lack of four different things. The first one is a lack of importance. Now, you and I, we spend a lot of time talking about values. We spend a lot of time talking about

54:22 uh knowing what to give a [ __ ] about, prioritization. What's interesting about the focus research is that a lot of your ability to focus comes down to what's often referred to as salience of how important is the thing in front of you? Is there is there a clear goal or objective you're trying to accomplish? Is there is there something valuable that is being added to the world? Is this going to be meaningful to you in some way? And it turns out that if A you're not doing something meaningful, if you're just doing some [ __ ] that you find it think is kind of pointless or b if there's a lack of clarity around what is meaningful, like if there's uh a lot of stuff that's going on that feels very meaningful um or it feels like nothing's meaningful, then you're

55:09 probably going to have a lot of distraction. Your mind's going to wander quite a bit. So again in this in in this context the way to think about it is that the default is for your mind to wander. It is for you to be in that explore mode because part of exploration is trying to find something that is meaningful. Trying to find something that is salient, some something that's worth paying attention to. So if you don't have if you don't have a clear prioritization of this thing matters, then you you're going to really really struggle to focus on it. Yeah. part of that that that's like a survival mechanism too. I think that's probably something I should have mentioned back in the explore exploit kind of paradigm I was talking about, but that's a survival mechanism, right? Like if you're not looking for something in your environment, you're you're dead at some point,

55:55 right? Right. Yeah. I mean, if nothing if nothing important is going on, then why should you waste, you know, if you if you if you think about your your mind in in metabolic terms, right? It's like your your brain is expensive, attention is expensive, executive function is expensive from an energy point of view. Uh it makes sense that we evolve minds that if there's nothing really important in front of us, why waste the energy? Why not just kick back and let your mind wander and you know fall into your the default mode network? Trigger number two is a lack of clarity. So trigger one is not knowing what's important or not having anything important in front of you. Trigger two is it not being clear whether something's important or not. Turns

56:42 out that when you introduce ambiguity to people uh they kind of don't know what to do anymore. This can this can also happen if you do you know you mentioned the story about Darwin earlier like if you do have something if you do have some sort of objective or value that you're pursuing but you get stuck and it's not immediately obvious what to do next that's another moment that your mind can start to wander because you're like okay well I want this thing but I don't know how to get there and it doesn't seem like there's any obvious way to do it so then you you start to get distracted again from an evolution utionary point of view, it makes sense that if you feel stymied or blocked in some way, you transition out of exploit mode into explore mode, right? Because now you need to find

57:28 a new solution. You need to find uh a new way around whatever the block is, right? And so, uh Darwin with his walks, it's a way to let your mind wander in a very intentional way

…