We are all 'losing' it and this is why

 A man using his phone at work. (Courtesy)

You used to be a voracious reader - getting through book after book with ease because you just enjoyed it. Now you can't get through one book a year. Or maybe you weren't a reader, but loved movies. Nowadays you can hardly sit still from the beginning to the end of one movie. Or maybe you would get through uninterrupted studying for three hours during preps and now getting through a thirty-minute talk without your mind wandering feels impossible, and you can barely focus at work. "What happened to me?" You wonder.

You are not alone. This is a phenomenon that is being seen in almost everyone who lives in the modern, fast-paced 21st century.

"I get distracted easily, and I noticed that it was becoming a problem way back in university, but the real impact of me losing focus showed when I started working, especially because I was a freelancer," says Sylvester Otieno.

"I had to manage my own time and I would tell myself, 'Let me just browse Instagram for five minutes'. Next thing I know, it has been five hours and work has not gotten done."

Here is something that might catch your attention: research shows that college students can now only focus for 65 seconds at a time, while the average office worker focuses on a given task for there minutes. People are really struggling with focus, and tech is one of the biggest culprits.

"There is something about social media and phones, such that even if you weren't expecting someone to text you, you keep looking at your phone to see if there is a notification. So it steals your time. And then in that moment when you are checking for a notification you go in a little deeper and check a few people's stories. If you add up all those moments during the day you will find that you have wasted a lot of time," says Otieno.

It is also not just those moments where you are actively looking at the content from the notification that eats up our time, but having to keep switching back and forth from the notification to the task and back is detrimental to our ability to focus. This is according to Johann Hari, author of the book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again.

"Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said "your brain can only produce one or two thoughts" in your conscious mind at once. That's it. "We're very, very single-minded," Hari writes.

He explains that we believe we are multi-tasking but that could not be further from the truth.

"When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. 'They're switching back and forth. They don't notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they're actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task - [and] that comes with a cost,'" Hari writes, quoting Prof Miller.

This, he explains, results in a drop in your performance and you become slower because of all that back-and-forth switching, which is referred to as the "switch-cost effect."

"It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren't only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves - you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount," he writes.

The effect of this can be costly, as Otieno found out from his experience.

"I have lost gigs and contracts, the biggest end result was making less money than I could have, because I wasn't working as much. My attention had all been taken up by devices so my work ethic was terrible," he explains. Multiply this by several million people and you realize what it could be doing to our economy and societal wellbeing.

One of the worst effects tech may be having is on children. Remember how we used to go outside and we could play with almost anything and we were endlessly creative? Children nowadays are stuck on tablets and games on phones instead of using their minds creatively, which is crucial in the developmental stage.

It is, however, not a lost cause. If you, a friend or a relative has ever lost your phone and were unable to replace it for, say, a month, you may have realized that something amazing happened - the first week might have been torture, as you were experience literal withdrawal symptoms, like a true addict. By the second week, you were starting to feel more present and in the moment. You paid attention more. Your mind felt less cluttered. And if you tried to read, you paid attention without the gargantuan effort it takes nowadays, exactly as you used to before all this tech appeared. It's almost like a miracle. "I don't even miss my phone," you or your friend might have said.

Otieno decided to do this intentionally. Once he realized the impact his lack of focus was having on him, including doing a number on his mental health, he ditched all social media, uninstalling every app so as to be free of phone addiction. The longest he managed to stay off it was six months straight, and the results were staggering.

"It was unbelievable. My work ethic improved as my focus improved. Improving my work then directly improved my income, since as a freelancer the more you work, the more you earn. You have a better reputation because you can meet client deadlines since you're not constantly thinking of checking your phone. So you're really invested in the project you're doing, the quality of the project improves, your turnaround improves, you get more clients, you do jobs in shorter deadlines and all that," he says.

He was, however, not able to stay off it forever as he had planned. He would stay off for a few weeks, which he still does today, before having to get back on.

"It turned out to be difficult to stay off it completely. When I hung out with people once in a while I would realize I had no idea what was going on in the world. There are stories that trend that aren't on mainstream news, so I would decide to go back and check what has been happening. That's how I would get sucked back in, checking one story and then scrolling endlessly," he says.

Some of his clients also preferred communicating on WhatsApp rather than email. He is also a content creator, so it was impossible for him to stay off completely as content needs to be pushed on social media in this age, he explains. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him so that he could stay on his phone, so he devised a plan that brought a semblance of balance.

"Because I find it hard to completely quit, during the week I am off social media completely. Then on Friday evening after work I download a few apps, I catch up with what is happening in the world and then on Sunday night or Monday morning I delete them again," he says.

This system has worked for him fairly well, with the effect that over the week, a lot of the time he knows that the phone is somewhere in his house, but he doesn't know where exactly and doesn't think about it much.

"I have young children, so when I'm with my children, I'm with my children. At my young age I'm the one complaining about everyone else, including elders and children, being on their phone," he says.

"You're trying to have a good time, have conversations and catch up, but everyone is on their phones. It really opens your eyes to how destructive the distraction has become to normal life and spending quality time with each other."

Experts say that doing a screen fast like Otieno did and setting rules around phone usage are some of the ways you can break the addiction. Based on advice from addiction experts, the New York Times says that in addition to that, you can find easier ways to distance yourself from your phone each day, like allotting times of the day or days of the week when you don't use your phone at all, such as before and after work.

The paper explains that you can also make your phone less appealing by changing the screen to grayscale or turning off notifications, deleting apps that you find difficult to avoid and periodically rearranging the apps on your phone so that they become harder to find and less likely to lure you into a mindless loop of checking and rechecking simply out of habit.