Why You Have Trouble Paying Attention (Premium)
Most of us recognize this situation: We’re finding it harder to concentrate, we are too distracted–and our children are too. In short, we are losing focus. We are exposed to an excess amount of information that raises our stress level, rather than contributing to a wellspring of knowledge, solution-finding, and care for ourselves and families.
This new book drills it down for you and offers suggestions.
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Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again
Why are we losing the ability to focus and pay attention—and how we can get it back. A New York Times bestseller, Stolen Focus addresses these issues. The table of contents offers a revealing overview of key problems facing society that affect our contentration:
- Increase in speed, switching, filtering
- Crippling of our flow states
- The rise of physical and mental exhaustion
- The collapse of sustained reading
- The disruption of mind-wandering
- The rise of technology that can track and manipulate you
- The rise of cruel optimism
- The first glimpses of the deeper solution
- The surge in stress and how it is triggering vigilance
- The places that figured out how to reverse the surge in speed and exhaustion
- Our deteriorating diets and rising pollution
- The rise of ADHD and how we are responding to it
- The confinement of our children, physically and psychologically
Read about the author’s approach: In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions—even abandoning his phone for three months—but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit.
Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention.
In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.
Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus—as individuals, and as a society—if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.
Text from Amazon.com. Read more here
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