Reclaiming Your Focus and the "Appstinence" Movement
Is It Time for You to Re-Learn How to Pay Attention in Our Increasingly Distracted World?
History is often laid out in ages: the Prehistoric Age, the Industrial Age, the Gilded Age. Defining the current state of affairs as a so-called “age” could branch off in a number of directions, depending on your particular focus. You might call it the Digital Age or the Age of A.I., both of which would be accurate descriptors.
There is another way of looking at our present moment in time, however. It’s an age in which we’ve grown accustomed to same-day delivery, an age in which entertainment is consumed in seconds-long intervals, one in which we can stream almost any movie or television show imaginable with just the click of a button.
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Everything, seemingly, is at our fingertips or well within our reach, night or day, anytime we want. In other words, it is the Age of Everything Everywhere All At Once — and it is doing a number on our attention spans.
The Attention Question, in Focus
While the claim that goldfish have incredibly short attention spans has been roundly debunked, there is evidence out there that suggests humans live in a time when it is easier than ever for distractions to get in our way.
Having constant and immediate access to information and entertainment doesn’t necessarily sound like a negative thing on its face, but the practical effect can sometimes be akin to sensory overload: a million things fighting for our attention, with none of them able to fully latch onto it.
According to Dr. Gloria Mark, chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and someone who has spent time studying human attention spans for over two decades, the average time a person is able to focus on a single thing has fallen from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to something more like 45 seconds in the last few years.
The reason for this is not exactly clear, but there is plenty of speculation that the rise of social media (and the instant, all-day access we have to it via our smart phones) over that same timeframe has had more than a little to do with it.
Experts in this area have not been able to directly link social media use to attentional issues, but a recent review of hundreds of social media-focused studies did conclude that constant scrolling can cause behavioral addiction and sleep deprivation in kids and teens, which in turn can produce less-than-optimal mental health outcomes.
But even if there is not much in the way of definitive evidence, it’s not difficult to draw the line from higher rates of social media usage to addictive behaviors or sleep quality issues, and then from there to the conclusion that these negative mental health outcomes could be making it more of a challenge to maintain focus. It’s only a theory, yes, but it’s a highly plausible one.
Understanding how social media affects our brains is helpful here. According to the National Institutes of Health, prolonged social media use alters the pathways within our internal reward systems.
Every like, favorite, share, comment, and reply is equivalent to a tiny shot of dopamine firing off inside our heads; enough of these over a set period of time and you, my friend, have rewired your own brain, Pavlovian style. (The integration of A.I. into social media algorithms, by the way, has only made the potential for addictive behavior that much stronger.)
Introducing the “Appstinence” Movement
So how do we fight back? How do we reverse the seemingly inescapable erosion of this finite resource we call attention, which is being increasingly hijacked by worsening social media addiction?
There are plenty of practical and actionable ways to attempt to achieve this, and we’ll get to those in a moment, but first we have to talk about a little thing called “appstinence”.
The movement, which was started by 24-year-old Harvard alum Gabriela Nguyen, is all about breaking away from our smartphones and reconnecting with the “real world”.
This is accomplished via a five-step process which allows for a gradual breakup from all things digital, as opposed to quitting cold turkey. The 5D Method, as it is called, is fairly straightforward, with each step able to be boiled down to a single word: decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade, and depart.
Before you head down that path, however, there is one very important preliminary step: prepare. This initial step, as laid out on the movement’s website, involves writing down four things before you truly embark on your appstinence journey.
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Those four things are: the reason you want to leave social media, what fears you have about doing so, a list of realistic analog activities you could incorporate into your regular routine, and a list of family and friends that you want to make sure you keep in regular contact with. After you’ve nailed these things down, the real work of appstinence can begin.
The first three steps — decrease, deactivate, delete — are concerned with lowering our use of mobile apps until we reach the point where we are ready to fully separate ourselves from them.
It starts with deleting some of those apps from your phone and only accessing them on other kinds of devices, such as a laptop or tablet. The point is to begin building up a barrier by adding an extra step to access certain social media accounts and, hopefully, eliminating the temptation to mindlessly open the app on your phone.
After a few weeks, it will be time to move into deactivation mode, starting with the apps you use the least. While some apps’ deactivation processes are instantaneous, there are others, such as Facebook, Instagram, and X, that have built-in 30-day deactivation periods.
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The idea there is obviously to get you to reconsider your decision to step away, but if you are truly committed, you’ve got to stay strong, my friend. Ideally, by the time the 30-day window closes, your account will delete itself and you will have barely noticed.
The first “big boy” step, if you will, is downgrading, which comes after you’ve deactivated and deleted all of your social media accounts (yes, all of them). This is when you purchase a transitional phone, something in between a fully capable smartphone and what some would call a “dumb phone,” and begin truly assimilating back into analog mode.
(If you have no idea where to start, the folks behind the appstinence movement suggest taking a look at the CAT S22 Smart Flip phone, which looks like something straight out of 2006.)
Although you may still need your smartphone for things like banking and double factor authentication, the goal, according to the scriptures of appstinence, is to begin using your much more basic flip phone almost exclusively, as in 95% of the time. If you’re able to completely set your smartphone aside, more power to you as that is the final step in the whole process.
Departing, as Nguyen and company call it, is the moment that only comes when you’ve done the work to untether yourself from the digital world altogether. The apps have gone dark. The social media accounts have been shuttered. The smartphone is no more. You have become appstinent.
By the time you’ve done all this work, whether it takes weeks, months, or a year or more, it’s likely you will have already begun to notice transformations to the ways in which you interact with and move through the world — the real world, that is.
That itch to pull out your phone and mindlessly scroll becomes a thing of the past. What other people are posting online is of little significance; you’ll catch up with the people who matter when you next get the chance. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that the world feels a little less hectic and a little less stressful.
“The overall benefits are extensive,” says Nguyen, who lists mental clarity, greater patience, more reasoned decision-making, and better focus as just some of the rewards to be reaped.
Leaving social media and the digital world behind, she says, was necessary because of the net negatives it was causing: “It degraded multiple facets of my life until I couldn’t really see what was left of my life — there was no big, major event that made me get off; it was the same suboptimal, annoying, frustrating event again and again, including not being able to focus on something because I keep picking up my phone…”
Since founding the movement and becoming one of its loudest voices, Nguyen says she no longer has what she calls the “itch”, which she describes as “that feeling where you just want to open your phone and look at stuff instead of doing what you’d prefer to be doing.”
The caveat here, it should be said, is that practicing appstinence is not a surefire way to increase your ability to focus.
The movement is more so about disconnecting from one world and reconnecting with another, but the beauty of it is that the endeavor, if executed faithfully, has a way of producing various byproducts, which can include improved focus, concentration, and productivity.
If You’re Not Ready to Ditch the Digital World…
Of course, there are other ways to improve our attention spans that don’t involve completely unplugging or throwing our phones out the window. You just have to let the same basic foundations of good mental and physical health be your guide.
“Your concentration is best when you have proper sleep, nutrition, hydration, and work-life balance,” says psychotherapist, speaker, and entrepreneur Joyce Marter.
Marter, who specializes in the psychology of money, recommends instituting a standard morning routine, sticking to the self-imposed boundaries of a structured day, and trying your best to silence negative thoughts.
On the flip side, she advises against multitasking, which can cause stress and reduce productivity, and says it’s a good idea to stay away from too much sugar or caffeine.
Another lifeline to look to is our old pal, mindfulness, or the practice of concentrating on the present moment.
“Our minds are busy, and we are assailed with information coming in from our senses, begging to be processed by the brain, all the time,” writes Dr. Barbara Blatchley, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Agnes Scott College. “When you practice mindfulness, you practice sustaining your attention on just one aspect of the world around you, usually on your breath.”
Over time, the repeated practice of focusing and refocusing your attention through mindful meditation can help hone a number of things, says Blatchley, including selective attention, executive control, and working memory.
You can also reap physiological benefits, such as decreased anxiety levels, improved sleep, lower blood pressure, and an improved ability to cope with chronic pain, she adds.
Mindfulness also includes things like journaling, practicing gratitude, checking in with your body, and observing your own thoughts, all of which can help shift your perspective in a more positive direction and provide mental clarity.
Reclaiming your attention span is not something that will happen overnight, and it certainly won’t happen without putting the work in. Whether that involves employing some of these techniques or taking things a step further and giving something like appstinence a try, the effort you put forth will determine the outcome.
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