Day 17: Exercise Your Attention Span
Welcome to Day 17 of the Phone Breakup Challenge!
Now that we’ve begun to deliberately practice stillness, our next step is to work on restrengthening our muscles of attention and our ability to ignore distractions. It’s like any skill: the more you practice, the better you’ll get at it.
Today we’re going to play around with some informal ways to start strengthening your attention span. Here are a few options – choose one or two to try, and then tell us about your experience in the comments.
Choose a short period of time today—for example, your walk to work or class—when you can put your phone away and actively pay attention to the world around you. Notice the details of what you can see, hear, and smell. If you notice your thoughts drifting, gently bring yourself back to your senses.
Take a “music bath”: get comfortable and close your eyes as you listen to a favorite piece of music as closely as you can, trying to pick out each individual instrument.
Go analog: If you have a paper or a project that you want or need to work on, try turning off your computer and writing a draft by hand or working through your thoughts with pen and paper.
Get physical: Go for a walk or a run without your phone, or try going to a yoga class and seeing how long you can stay present with your breath and body.
Do a hobby: Put away your phone and do a hobby (crafting, playing music, doing a puzzle, etc) with no distractions.
Last but certainly not least, you could try the #1 simplest AND most effective strategy for getting your attention span back:
Read—in print, and with your phone off.
Not only can getting lost in a book be a very relaxing and restorative experience, but it’s also exactly the type of mental exercise that strengthens our attention spans and encourages deep and creative thought.
Why? Because extracting meaning from symbols requires your brain both to maintain focus on those symbols and to simultaneously ignore everything else going on around you. Over time, regular reading causes physical changes to the brain in areas responsible for reasoning, processing visual signals, and even memory.
Don’t worry if you can’t remember the last time you read for more than 30 seconds without getting distracted. I can tell you, based on the experiences of thousands of people who have gone through the process, that once you start to read again, your ability to stay focused will come back quickly.
So there you go!
For the rest of our time together, please incorporate 10 to 30 minutes of at least one attention-building exercise into your daily routine—starting today.
To scrolling less, living more, and taking back our brains!
PS: Curious about why I didn’t suggest that you meditate? That’s an option, too . . . but we’ll talk about that tomorrow.
PPS:
As always, you can ask me and your fellow participants questions—and share observations and insights with each other— by leaving a comment.
You can also send me questions privately simply by responding to your daily email, but I encourage you to engage with the community; you may be surprised to discover that other people are struggling with the same thing!
If you leave a comment on the blog, please be sure to check back — I read through every comment, and try to respond to each one! (And other people often chime in, too.)
Remember! This weekend, from Friday to Saturday night (2/20-2/21), I’ll be inviting you to take a full 24-hour break from your phone. Please make sure that this is in your calendar – and I also recommend inviting a friend to do it with you. (You may even want to make a plan right now for something fun to do together on Saturday.) I know this idea is probably making you anxious. But trust me: you’ll be grateful you did it.
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Catherine will be popping in once a day to read through and respond to your comments. You may also hear from other members of the team, Maryana and Laura, who are helping with logistics.