Review: Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again

Once upon a time, I used to be quite good at avoiding distractions. My phone usage per day sat below an hour, often below a half hour. I don't know if life got busy, or I got lazy, or something happened, but I've been in a mind-numbing time-wasting haze for a while now. Naturally, I turned to self-help books.

I (partially) jest; the author of this book was quite adamant that this is less of another offering to the endless pile of short-term feel-good anectdote-strew length-elongated-just-like-this-sentence-I-didn't-think-of-an-end-for-this; rather, it is part self-help and part call to action.

Part 1: Self-Help

The expected part first: there's (what I think is) some really good actionable advice in here. I've forgotten all of it since reading this about a month ago, so rereading my notes now and transcribing them here is my attempt at hammering them into some secretive corner of my brain that hasn't succumbed to sick Corbet's Couloir tricks and overpriced server hardware on Facebook Marketplace. Before I do, and you get the impression that reading my list is enough to transmit the information properly, I think there's a case to be made for reading the book yourself. Not just to support someone who put a lot of time and energy into what is clearly a topic they're passionate about, but because I don't think reading summaries has the same effect as absorbing the surrounding context, both because spending more time on it might help lodge it somewhere in your noggin, and because there's more to one-liner life advice or observations than can be gleaned from that line alone.

Tangents begone, here's my quick summary, with no distinction for what the author claims vs what they can back up (although they do try to be clear when things aren't clear), split into general information, and actionable things:

Chapter 1: We Are Unga Bunga

• Human brains have a finite bandwidth to analyze/memorize information, a limit that has not funadamentally changed over the past couple hundred years
• The amount of information we're exposed to has exploded over the past couple hundred years, easy outpacing our ability to ingest everything we see
• Brain speed is also relatively fixed, and there's only so much it can handle at a time
• Multitasking is a myth and has objective performance penalties; this includes distractions like background noise

To Do:

• Be deliberate about what information you expose yourself to
• Take it slow when trying to learn something
• Avoid distractions/multitasking

Chapter 2: Three Simple (and Impossible) Steps To Happiness

• Flow state (deep concentration/focus) is only achieved when the following is met:

1. The task has a defined goal
2. The task is meaningful to you
3. The task is not too hard, nor too easy

To Do:

• Figure out how to choose and partition tasks such that they meet as many of these as possible (not always going to be possible)

Chapter 3: A Real Snoozefest

• It only takes a small amount of sleep deprivation to significantly impact our ability to concentrate
• Apparently when we're sleep deprived, our brains take little conscious microsleeps
• Deep sleep is needed to flush the toilet that's accumulated brain-cell poop all day (author's words, not mine)
• Narcoleptics tend to be more creative, as our brains form connections during dreams, which tend to happen at the end of deep REM (rapid eye movement), which is the 7h-8h mark
• There's an evolutionary mechanism that gives us energy near sunset so we can get back to our unga-bunga caves, but this is also triggered by late-night screens or lights, making it harder to go to bed

To Do:

• Avoid screens and artificial light an hour or two before bed
• Get sufficient sleep

Chapter 4: Khornate Nerds

• Reading long-form books is highly correlated with attention (or are people with more attention more likely to read long-form books?)
• 57% of Americans don't read a single book per year
• "The medium is the message": mediums encode certain values implicitely; Twitter, for example, encodes the idea that 80 characters is sufficient to meaningfully transmit information (or maybe that 80 characters isn't enough to transmit meaningful information, and therefore nothing on there is meaningful? Unclear)
• There is empirical evidence that we learn better when reading on paper vs on a screen, even if the information is identical

To Do:

• Sap for the sap gods! Pulp for the pulp throne!
• idunno lol

Chapter 5: Oh I'm a Wanderer, Yes I'm a Wanderer, I Wander Round a-Round a-Round a-Round

• Simply focusing on one thing is insufficient; mind-wandering is also necessary to let our brain digest it in the background (leading to the doodoo from chapter 3, I presume)

To Do:

• Take the time to let your mind wander, so that it can properly digest the hopefully nutritious meal you've served it

Chapter 6/7: When Everything is Awful, Nothing is Awful

• Social media/ad-funded platforms are inherently incentivized to maximize engagement; this means pushing inflammatory content, since our brains latch on to that more
• Fake content spreads significantly faster than real content, leading to constant exposure to manufactured crises
• Society is losing the ability to distinguish real problems from fabricated ones, losing the ability to follow real ones to their conclusion, and to act/participate in societal reform

To Do:

• I honestly don't know. There are clearly major world/national/local events that deserve our attention, or that we are personally well suited to track or contribute to solving, or just care about personally. There are also a lot of events that while horrific, we may not be able to do much about personally. Maybe we need to pick our battles carefully, monitor our energy?

Chapter 10: A Perpetual Panic Attack

• Stress leads to hypervigilance, which spreads attention evenly in the search for threats, and impeds our ability to focus on individual things

To Do:

• Ignore the hysteria (easier said than done, of course)

Chapter 12: U!S!A! U!S!A!

• High sugar food causes sugar rushes, the crash from which provably reduces attention
• Chemical pollutants (lead, BPA, etc.) provably affect attention, and have been banned in many countries to empirically positive effect (but not in the US)

To Do:

• Avoid high sugar food, avoid nasty chemicals

Chapter ???: I Don't Remember Where I Read This

• We sometimes reach for "bad things" like our phone or junk food because we're dealing with something else, some other internal trigger

To Do:

• Try to figure out what is incentivizing you to avoid work or seek out distractions or comfort, and what you can do to self-sooth/mitigate it

Part 2: Cruel Optimism and Systemic Change

An astute observer might point out that I missed some chapters. It wasn't that I didn't read them (although I may have only skimmed one or two), but rather that I wanted to address their content in a separate section. Everything in the first section are things you yourself can do, but the author takes great pains to point out what they describe as "Cruel Optimism", where we are told that we can solve an at least partially systemic problem through individual action alone, which will just lead to disappointment when we fail. You can lose weight, all you have to do is cut calories, exercise, and read a diet book. You can fix your attention-span, all you need to do is follow the instructions listed above! While individual actions are important, they will not solve society-wide problems, just like diet books didn't solve obesity.

One great example of this (to me, at least), is background noise in cities; I like being in quiet environments, but California apartments seem to be constructed of micron-thin sheets of hopes and dreams, because they do jack all to insulate you from the nearest fifty-lane monstrosity or private/military airport or local delinquent who decided that what their lowered 2003 Honda Civic with clashing spoiler needed was less muffler, and short of plunking the equivalent of a small country's GDP on reworking a condo you couldn't afford in the first place, you're going to be stuck with that perpetual noisemare no matter how many internal struggles you resolve or how locked down you phone is between 9pm and 7am except when you really want to use TikTok.

Moving back to attention in particular, the author points out that even Facebook's internal studies have found that they are directly contributing to unhappiness, unrest, radicalization, and more, yet there's no incentive to stop because that's the content that drives their success metrics; without regulatory intervention or large scale social movements or both, nothing will change.

I found the chapter on children and ADHD especially interesting; the general idea is that children in the USA in particular may be over-prescribed for ADHD, when really the symptoms they're exhibiting may in many cases be partially caused by being placed in an environment that is antethical to how children have grown up for all of human history, where learning was done through play, and not sitting in class doing rote memorization for hours on end; in the US, only 73% of schools now have any form of recess. The author draws parallels to animals in captivity, and how even the leading specialist in zoo animal medication says that the medicine is just a bandaid on the underlying problem, that horses are designed to graze most of the day, polar bears are designed to walk miles per day, and circling back around, humans are not meant to sit for hours a day. Finland has exceptional academic performance on the global stage, and their school is from 9am-2pm-ish (forgor), with little to no homework.

Conclusion

Like any self-help-esque book worth its salt, this one revolves around the author's experience with the topic. Having read how they left distractions behind for weeks only to fall back into them harder than ever soon after returning to normal life, I am not surprised that soon after reading this book and going through perhaps two days of deeper focus, I've also returned to old habits. Maybe I need to re-read my summary every couple days to keep it fresh on my mind. Maybe I need to throw my phone into Mount Doom. I'm not sure. Either way, I hope this book is more tangibly benefitial for you than it is for me.