Hey screenager, I bet you can’t sit through this whole story uninterrupted.
Yeah, there’s not going to be subway surfers on the side of this story. Not even a slime tutorial or soap cutting video with this story playing in the back.
In today’s world, phones are extremely important. I mean, your whole life is basically on there, packed into a tiny glowing rectangle. It’s really neat, but have you ever noticed how hard it’s getting to focus? Did you finish your homework before doomscrolling? Were you listening to music throughout the day because you couldn’t stand a couple minutes of quiet?
Whether you see these behaviors in yourself, or other people, you are not alone.
Just last week I was sitting down at my desk at 10 p.m., on a Sunday night, struggling to take my AP U.S. History notes, and that’s when it really hit me. Although the work itself was easy, and could be done quickly with focus, I just couldn’t get myself to read the words on the pages. The words were all scrambled, and anything that I read wasn’t actually understood or remembered. I told myself I could take a phone break every 20 minutes. Soon after with my lack of control, that 20 went down to just five minutes. I noticed that I can’t nearly focus as well as I used to, even on simple tasks.
I see this happening to so many others daily.
In the classroom, eyes wander away from the screen, hands fidget around, people look at the clock counting down the minutes until class gets out. Is anyone even listening to the teacher? Sitting at my lunch table I start rambling to my friends about a story, and then boom. I look back over and they are on their phone scrolling on their Instagram feed. At home when my family sits down for dinner together, my little brother watches YouTube, ignoring our conversations. He throws a huge tantrum when I try to take it away.
It’s a constant cycle. Just because you are physically around people in these situations, doesn’t mean you are mentally checked in. Whether you care about it or not, this is truly terrifying to see.
Our attention spans are shrinking. You and I have been conditioned to crave quick dopamine hits through social media. We are attached to that “feel-good chemical” and if scrolling is the quickest way to get it, that’s what we do.
According to Stanford Medicine, we are extremely vulnerable to the overconsumption of these social connection apps because of the large amounts of dopamine it releases into our brain’s reward pathway, similarly to what various drugs do. This is scientifically why it is so highly addictive, no matter what kind of content you consume.
This is why we come back to it every time: short form content, scrolling through comments on a funny video and monitoring the likes you get on your new post.
According to a study done by the Microsoft Corporation, within the last two decades, the average human attention span has gone down from 12 seconds to only eight seconds. Although it is extremely hard to accurately measure the exact average attention span in a person due to everyone being widely different, we can still make an estimate of this decrease in focus. This means that there has been about, on average, a 33% decrease in concentration with our attention spans. Due to this, on average, we have an even shorter attention span than a goldfish which is nine seconds. How come we are smarter, but have such a hard time focusing?
It also really makes me think, when did I turn from a seven-year-old picking dandelions out of the backyard or jumping in puddles during a thunderstorm for hours to…wait OMG did I forget to do my streaks on Snapchat?
Little kids are starting to lose their childhood. I see more kids playing “Steal a Brainrot” on Roblox, but don’t nearly see enough of them running around outside. Isn’t it concerning how the future generations of doctors and teachers are glued to their screens?
We have lost each other, but stay with me for a little longer, it’s not too late to heal. I don’t have a quick video on the steps to detox your brain from this captivity of zoning out, but I can give you some tips. Go outside for a walk without listening to music, be present at a meal without looking at your phone and maybe try reading a book too.
Slowly we could reverse the effects of this eight second epidemic.
Stop overdosing your brain by sending it to the dopamine dungeon. Step out in the world for the sake of younger generations, who will be running our world. Just take one minute and focus on the bright possibilities of the future.
