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Scrolling Is Damaging Your Attention Span
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You used to be able to read a book for an hour and
now you can't even get through one paragraph
without checking your phone.
You used to have actual thoughts,
your own thoughts and now it feels like half of what comes out of your
mouth is something that you saw on a real three days ago.
If this sounds familiar,
this video is for you because scrolling is actually doing something super dangerous to our ability to think.
And I want to walk you through what's actually happening.
And then I'm going to share five things I do instead that have completely changed how my brain feels.
If you're new here, welcome.
My name is Veronica.
And on this channel, I talk a lot about nervous system regulation, your attention, your focus and dopamine.
I actually have a free guide called your nervous system reset that pairs really well with today's video.
If you want to check it out, I'll leave the link in the description.
Alright, so let's begin with part one and talk about what's actually happening to your brain.
Why it feels like your attention span is gone and you can't think of anything original anymore.
The answer is, the network that produces original thinking is literally offline.
There's a part of your brain called the default mode network.
And this is the part that comes online when you're not doing anything,
when you're staring at a window, when you're
enjoying your morning coffee without being on your phone.
When you're walking somewhere
and just looking around, taking in all the nature, I know it sounds like the boarding part
of the brain, but it's actually really important, because that's where original thinking happens.
And the catch is,
this network only turns on when you're unstimulated,
when you're not using social media, when you're not
using your phone.
The second you try to fill every single gap with input, it just shuts off.
So if you fill every single quiet moment of your day with scrolling, this network never gets to come online.
And this network is often offline for so many of us because our dopamine has been recalibrated.
There's this amazing book called Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lemke.
And I highly recommend this book to all of you guys.
In the book, Dr.
Anna Lemke describes how modern life messes with our reward system, with our dopamine.
And her research shows that if you flat your brain with constant high dopamine inputs like scrolling,
social media, sugar, anything
that gives you a quick hit, your brain tries to compensate.
And the result is that your baseline drops below the level that you started with.
Things that used to feel good in the past like
a slow walk in your neighborhood.
or a conversation with a friend where no one is getting distracted by their phones,
all of that now feels flat
because something is missing.
Quick dopamine hits are missing and anything that
requires friction to be interesting and
rewarding like reading this
full book or learning a new skill All of that starts to feel unbearable.
Not because it actually is, but because your brain has been recalibrated.
And those small simple things just don't give you the same hit.
They're not as interesting anymore.
And they also require so much friction to get started and to continue.
Like scrolling on TikTok is so much easier than
reading this full book.
It requires hours and hours of concentration
and, you know, sitting down and actually focusing on the words and understanding all of the main lessons.
And the most important thing I learned from this book is that
it actually takes around four weeks of pulling back
from all of those high dopamine activities to reset your baseline.
Not three days, not a weekend dopamine detox. 4 weeks.
And most people who try to cut back actually give up on day 5,
right when it's about to actually start
feeling better.
So if you're trying to use your phone less right now and at the beginning it feels weird,
boring, unusual, you
probably have to wait 4 weeks to actually notice a significant improvement.
Also in the past, what I would often say is that when I am scrolling, I am resting.
It's how I am rewarding myself for a day of, you know, hard work, doing something working.
And so now I just want to scroll for a network.
But now I realize that in my case, and I think that's the case for most people, scrolling is investing.
It's actually keeping you in freeze.
You open the app, you zone out for an hour, and you tell yourself that you are decompressing.
But somehow you get up feeling worse than when you started.
You feel heavier, you feel numb, you feel so much more tired than in the very beginning.
And I want to show you guys this framework in neuroscience called the polyvagal theory.
It was developed by doctors Stephen Porges and it basically says that your nervous system has three states.
One, two, three.
There is safety right here when you're feeling calm, alert, present.
There is firefly when you're feeling anxious, activated and tense.
And there is freeze.
When your body feels so overwhelmed, then it just shuts down.
You go numb, you check out and time disappears.
And that's exactly how I feel when I scroll on social media for hours and hours.
Rest, good quality rest that actually makes you feel restful.
can only happen in this safety zone.
But scrolling doesn't put you on safety.
Depending on how you feel,
it can either put you in fight or flight, it can make you feel very angry
or in freeze.
This is something that happens to me all the time.
And so if we connected back to your default mode network,
that part of your brain can only turn on when
you're in safety.
Your original creative thinking happens when this network is online.
Obviously not when you're on freeze.
And so when I learned all of that,
that's how I started noticing that, okay, when I scroll, I feel like
I'm on freeze.
And so
That prevents me from truly resting and that also prevents me from thinking clearly,
from having all of those
originally creative thoughts.
It's a double loss.
You don't get the rest you came for and you don't get your thoughts back either.
Now in part two, let's talk about what I do instead, to actually teach myself to think again.
The first thing I do is I read out loud.
When you read silently, especially after years of scrolling, your eyes just skim.
You're reading a book the same way you're reading the comments on TikTok, fast,
surface level looking for the next thing.
But I noticed for myself that when I read out loud, that actually allows me to slow down.
So I have two strategies.
The first one is reading out loud.
And the second one is reading while listening to the audiobook because
this strategy works really great for me as well.
hearing my own voice or maybe an audiobook is very effective for me because my brain
registers that very differently from passive reading and
it also helps me take my focus back if
I feel like okay right now I'm distracted that is okay because
again in the past I always felt like it was so
easy for me to read like 50
pages, 100 pages.
It was so easy.
But now, sometimes, I feel like my attention and my focus are really struggling.
And I need something to actually help me come back to the present moment.
So I either start reading out loud or I just listen to an audiobook while reading at the same time.
The second thing I do is I keep something in my hands.
So it can be something super simple.
Like I think I told you guys in one of my previous videos that I always have a
notebook on my desk.
It's always open.
Just like this, so that if I have an idea,
I want to doodle something,
I can always use my notebook
instead of picking up my phone.
Because the thing is, for many of us, the action of picking up our phones is already a habit.
You know, just like, holding your phone, picking it up every three minutes, it's a habit.
And so, instead of just, okay, now I'm not gonna do anything,
I'm not gonna hold anything in my hands, That's
often pretty hard, so what I propose instead is replacing it with something else.
So on my desk I have my notebook.
I also have
my lip balms that I really like to play with because they have these cute little attachments that
allow me to hook them onto my bag.
but usually I just keep them on my desk and so if
I feel like I want to just, you know,
touch something, hold something in my hands, I do that.
Some other ideas that
I can give you guys here is you can use a Rubik's Cube or maybe like a
fidget toy.
I think they're called Worry Beats.
Like something that you can hold in your hands because
the idea here is not to tell you that okay now
you don't need to, you know, hold anything.
just like sit like this all day and that's it.
All of these things are helping you to need something different, something other than your phone.
Because a huge part of why we even scroll isn't the content, it's the motion,
it's having something in your hands.
So replacing it with something low stakes and something fun is always better.
The next thing I do is I walk without anything in my ears.
This one has honestly been the hardest for me to even start because in the past,
I was a huge productivity
freak, a big perfectionist, and so I always wanted to optimize absolutely everything.
Every single hour of my time, I was always listening to everything and to X speed.
And you know, every quiet moment, I wanted to have it stack things.
So when I was walking somewhere,
I was always listening to a podcast because I always wanted to learn new things.
And I still do.
But now, I also understand the importance of the default mode network.
because I even notice it for myself.
When I'm always listening to something, when I'm feeling every quiet moment with input, I feel more anxious.
Like right before I fall asleep, that's the time all of those thoughts actually pop up and I'm like
Okay, let's think now. And
now what I do instead is I create those moments during
the day for my brain to be creative and
to think and to process things.
And I think in general,
I can apply this habit to physical activities that you can practice without technology because you
guys know I do yoga and there are so many different ways I can practice yoga.
Like I can do it at home,
I can use my phone,
to watch like a video on YouTube and just
practice this way or I can go outside.
I can practice yoga outside in a park or maybe I can go to yoga studio and
be surrounded by people
who are doing the exact same thing who are all working towards the same goal
and we're all not using our
phones and that just feels so nice, you know,
to be completely disconnected from the world for at least 60, 90 minutes.
Habit number four that
I have implemented recently is I have one slow thing every single day that I refuse to optimize.
It started with something super small and
super simple like enjoying my morning mantra without my phone without absolutely anything because
it usually takes me around five to ten minutes to
Drink this, and then I looked at other things that I
did every single day that I can subtract my phone from.
For example, in a past, every time I would go take a shower, I would always listen to a podcast.
Now, I do it some time, but not every single time,
because I want to give my brain some time to
actually relax and think freely.
What all of this does is it teaches your nervous system that being unstimulated isn't dangerous.
That it's actually very safe.
It might feel very new and very weird and usually, you know, in those quiet moments,
we start to ruminate on things.
We get a lot of thoughts because we never have those moments of quiet.
We're so used to picking up our phones the moment we feel bored.
here i also want to add one really important thing i
don't want you guys to experience this all or nothing
thinking like now you can never use your phone when you're cooking something let's say so
basically you can never have
it stuck that's not what i'm trying to communicate what i'm trying
to say is sometimes it's nice to just be
focused on one thing like cooking or cleaning or taking a shower.
And of course, sometimes you can still, you know, go outside and take a walk while listening to music.
That's still totally okay.
The point is, create more moments during the day when you can feel bored.
Because that is when your mind can actually wander and create all those beautiful, original thoughts.
Alright, and finally habit number five that I started doing is I'm slowly replacing my phone with single use objects.
Our phones feel impossible to put down, not just because the apps are so addictive.
It's also because our phones literally do everything.
Your phone is your alarm clock, your camera, your journal, your book,
your map, your music, your workout videos, the way
you talk to your mom, your grocery list, your calculator, your calendar, you watch, you get the point.
And yes, it's really great that
all of this human progress has allowed us to have all of those things in
just one device.
Like, I'm really grateful for that.
But at the same time,
we have to recognize that sometimes when all you want to do is set an alarm,
the next moment you realize that you're on TikTok scrolling because your phone literally has all of these apps.
And so that's why now I'm slowly trying to add those single use objects back into my life,
like having a
physical alarm clock next to my bed.
Because now I don't really have an excuse, right?
Like why do I need to have my phone next to me when I sleep?
Okay, for an alarm, but I have a physical alarm clock.
So now I can just leave my phone in here. Done.
I have a real journal that I use and I write by hand so I don't need my phone.
And what I have been noticing for myself is that
the more single use objects I have in my home that
can actually replace my phone That makes my phone less magnetic.
Like I'm starting to use it less and less and
I'm actually starting to lose the habit of you know reaching
for my phone every single time to send an alarm
or to journal or to read a book because I don't
really use my phone for that anymore.
Alright and finally in part four I actually want to talk about what you get back.
What actually comes back when you start to put your phone down?
The obvious thing is yes, you get your attention back.
You start to feel more regulated.
You're more patient.
You're more present in conversations.
You can finish a book.
You can sit through a movie.
All of that is true and it's so amazing.
But the thing that I'm also noticing right now that's been happening to me is sensory awakening.
What I mean by that
is, for example, when I buy flowers from my house, now every time I pass by
the flowers, I want to smell them.
I want to touch them.
If I see like a very interesting looking fabric, I immediately want to touch it.
Like I feel like now I want to touch absolutely everything.
The leaves are the trees outside, the texture of a stone.
And this is honestly pretty new to me.
And I think the reason why it's happening is because when you're scrolling,
you're not really noticing anything in your physical environment.
Let alone, you don't really get the thoughts of I wonder what it feels like if I touch it.
And also in the past,
my brain didn't have any of the space to actually register it because it was full
of all of that input that I was getting from somewhere else, from my phone, from social media.
And the second thing is that your hands were busy because you were always holding your phone,
you were always touching
it, it was always right here.
And your hands kind of forget what other things even feel like.
Your sense of touch, which is one of the most regulating senses we have, just goes dormant.
So when you put your phone down, your hands go looking for things to feel.
They're waking up again.
And it's honestly not just touch, it's everything.
The sky looks more beautiful.
The light in your kitchen at 4pm looks absolutely amazing.
The way it never did before.
The smell of your coffee hits differently.
You can hear birds you never notice lived in your neighborhood.
Music sounds richer because now you're actually listening instead of just using it as background sounds.
So all of those things just feel amazing.
And they happen when you finally put your phone down.
Alright guys, I think it's going to be it for today's video.
If you liked it, please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Also, just a reminder, if you want to check it out, you can get my free nervous system guide.
The link is going to be in the description.
If you want to continue watching something, you can click right here.
Otherwise, thank you so much for being here and I'll see you in my next video. Bye!