Do you have a hard time focusing? Are you a little anxious when you aren’t looking at your phone? Do you find yourself checking your email or social media dozens of times a day?

Do you want to change that?

Stolen Focus follows author Johann Hari and his journey into discovering the impacts of modern technology on our attention spans. It begins with him expressing frustration over his shortening attention span, and his discovery that many others feel the same way. He preforms a sort of experiment on himself where he spends an extended period of time without modern technology, a sort of tech detox, and the effects of that experience on his mental health and outlook. In addition to this experiment, he also interviews experts in psychology and tech, even sitting down with professionals who designed the interface for the most popular social media websites used today.

What did he find? Well, first, he discovered a strong pattern pointing to a significant decrease in attention decades in the making. Contributing factors include diet, addictive interface designs, and a lack of government regulation. I’m going to be honest, this isn’t a “one solution fixes the problem” type of book, Hari is very clear that in order to fix these problems there needs to be regulation at the federal level, but he does provide some great suggestions to help lessen the impact on an individual level. Things like limiting your screen time or social media scrolling to certain times of the day, diet changes, mental exercises, and staying active can have positive effects on your attention span.

My summary is not nearly doing this piece of literature justice, if you’re interested in learning more about this topic I highly recommend you read the book for yourself. Hari is an incredible author, with a strong voice and easy to follow narrative that will make it a captivating read for anyone.

Find a place that sells the book here.