You looked up from your phone 10 seconds ago. Your focus hasn't caught up.
On why multi-tasking is zero-tasking, attention fragmentation, and why your focus doesn't return the moment you look back up.
The phone goes off somewhere between the dal and the second roti. Then again, before you’ve finished the thought you’re halfway through saying out loud. A delivery update, a message in the building WhatsApp group, someone reacting to something you sent at four in the afternoon. The instinct to check Instagram while waiting for the kettle to boil… Most people don’t think of these tiny interruptions as stress because they’re just so ingrained into the texture of everyday life. But our brains do notice.
A recent review in Nature Human Behaviour put a number to that feeling: younger people now receive a median of 237 notifications a day, each one a small instruction to stop what you’re doing and look elsewhere. The volume of interruptions seems to matter more than the hours spent on the screen, which is to say a day full of buzzes can leave you more frayed than an afternoon lost to a film.
What wears you down is the switching. Every alert asks the brain to drop the task, take in something new, work out whether it’s urgent, and then find its way back to where it was. The cost of one is nothing, but Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine who has spent two decades studying how technology affects attention, found that we now spend an average of 47 seconds on any screen before switching to something else. In 2004, that number was closer to two and a half minutes. The direction of travel is not encouraging. More striking still: after an interruption, it takes the brain around 25 minutes to fully return to the original task. So yes, while the cost of one notification is almost nothing, the cost of several hundred could potentially be the whole day (Gloria Mark, Attention Span, 2023).
Part of why this is so hard to resist comes down to anticipation. Every notification carries the chance that something good could be waiting, and the brain is built to chase that kind of uncertain reward. A phone never gives you the satisfaction of being finished either, because there is always another refresh, another thread, another reel cued up behind the last one, and so you spend the day in a low hum of alertness without noticing, and the bill arrives later as poor sleep, a shorter fuse, a vague sense of being depleted. Researchers refer to this as ‘attention fragmentation’ or ‘“cognitive fragmentation’, a state where focus becomes repeatedly disrupted throughout the day. Over time, the brain starts adapting to interruption as its default mode.
I don’t know about you, but where I notice it most is in those little ordinary gaps: there was a time (although it feels like fiction now) that you’d planned to meet someone and so you’d go there and you’d… wait. And while you waited, you’d look around; perhaps you’d be a bit self-conscious and twitchy, sure, but you did look around and people-watch in that little gap. An auto ride or a queue at the bank? Downtime, between-time, but those gaps don’t really exist any longer because they’re always filled, and so our nervous systems learn to expect input, to go looking for it when none arrives.
The body was built for rhythm, for stretches of effort followed by real recovery, and that is the part modern days have slowly written out. But what we miss is that this is where the repair lives, too: the first hour of the morning when the phone doesn’t get touched, an unbroken stretch of work… of course, there are simple remedies as well. Notifications off by default or allowed only by the few things that deserve them, or the phone left in another room overnight, so the day neither starts nor ends inside it.
Which is why perhaps attention might be the next big thing in wellness; for so many years, the dialogue has leaned heavily on the idea of optimisation. Better supplements, wearables, routines…. But a growing conversation is emerging around protecting attention itself. People are turning off nonessential notifications, creating screen-free mornings, leaving phones outside the bedroom, and becoming more intentional about when and how they consume information, not because they’re looking to walk away from modern life, but because of a realisation that they are calmer and feel clearer when their brains and thoughts aren’t constantly interrupted. In a time when information is everywhere, it’s no longer the thing I’m craving. I’m craving the sensation of being fully in the present moment again.
1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com