Johann Hari on his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention

Virgin Radio

12 Jan 2022, 14:52

International bestselling author Johann Hari joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about his new book, for which he went on a three-year journey to uncover why we struggle to focus.

Stolen Focus, which is out now, sees the author interview world-leading experts on attention to find out why teenagers now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and why office workers on average manage only three minutes. He told Chris: “I noticed that my own ability to pay attention was just getting worse and worse. With every year that passed, it felt like things that required deep focus, like reading a book, watching a long film, were getting more and more like running up a down escalator. I could do it, but it was getting harder and harder.

“Whenever I felt this happen, I would go into this little spiral of shaming myself. I would say, ‘Oh, you’re just being lazy, you don’t have enough willpower.’ But then I started looking at the figures that suggested this is really widespread.” 

Johann, who is 42, added: “For every child who was diagnosed with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there are now 100 children diagnosed with serious attention problems. I started to think, is there something bigger going on here?”

When writing his book, Johann learned how, as individuals and as a society, we can get our focus back. “I went on a really big journey all over the world, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, and I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world on attention and focus, and I learned from them that this is scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better, or can make it worse.”

The writer said that our inability to focus is not a personal failing. He explained: “The first thing to understand is that your attention did not collapse, your attention has been stolen from you by really big powerful forces, some of which are tech. Surprisingly, tech is not the biggest, there are other really deep changes in how we’re living that are really corroding our attention, and we’ve got to tackle that at two levels. 

“At the individual level, we’ve got to protect ourselves and our children as best we can… But also, we’ve got to take on these forces that are doing this to us, because at the moment, it’s like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day, and then that person is leaning forward to us and going, ‘Do you know what mate, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn’t scratch so much.’ Now, I’m strongly in favour of meditation, but we’ve also got to stop the forces that are pouring this itching powder over us.”

Johann told Chris that “only 15 percent of us wake up feeling refreshed," and explained: “The food we eat is having a terrible effect on our ability to pay attention. The amount of sleep we get in our culture is destroying our ability to pay attention.”

The New York Times bestseller also spoke about the effects of distractions at work. He told Chris: “Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist to come in and do a little study with their workers, and he split their workers into two groups. The first group, the scientist told them, ‘Just do whatever your task is for the day, and you’re not going to be interrupted.’ And the second group was told, ‘Do your task, and you’re going to have to answer your emails and a heavy amount of phone calls.’ And then at the end of it, they tested the IQ of both of these groups. The people who had been interrupted scored ten IQ points lower than the people that hadn’t. 

“To give you a sense of how big that effect is, if you or me sat here now… and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points. So, being distracted, at least in the short-term - there’s a longer debate about cannabis in the longer term - is twice as bad for you as getting stoned.” 

With mobile phones being a major cause of distraction, Johann gave an example of how he forces himself to not look at his. “I’ve got a kSafe, which is basically a big plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in, you put the lid on, you turn the dial at the top and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day,” he said. “I use that every day for four hours.”

When speaking about social media, Johann exclaimed that “the core thing to understand is that social media doesn’t have to work this way.” 

He went on to say: “It used to be common for people to paint their homes with lead paint, and to put leaded petrol in their cars…. And then it was discovered that… exposure to lead, generally, really damages children’s ability to pay attention. So what did we do? We did not ban paint, we did not ban petrol. We banned leaded paint and leaded petrol. In the same way, there are specific aspects of how social media works that need to be banned through regulation. Not the whole thing. There’s lots of good things about social media.”

Johann went on: “The business model for social media is easy. Every time you pick up your phone and scroll, they make more money. Every time you put down your phone. You lose money.

“The solution is to ban that business model and force them to move to another business model.

“There’s lots of other business models they could be made to take. But that’s the equivalent of getting the lead out of the lead paint, right?” 

Johann continued: "If you are struggling to focus and pay attention, stop blaming yourself. It’s not your fault. This is happening to all of us. Your attention is being hacked and invaded, and we’ve got to change our psychology on this. 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! We own our own minds!”

Stolen Focus is out now.

For more great interviews listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky, weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.