anolog0

Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is it implying that we spend less time on websites because our attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention spans.

Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would have to measure attention span through a metric like duration spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones), is there something else people mean when they talk about attention spans getting worse?

Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of focus, there would be some clear metric for focus which researchers would have 20-30 years of data and studies on, right? This should be a very testable hypothesis, so where is all the hard science on it?

Even in this article, the author just takes some statements from neuroscientists and a study on context-switching in order to make a bunch of unfounded conjecture.

I think of course that there's room for all sorts of practices, and what everybody needs in order to improve their life is different depending on their specific problems and personality.

For me, I tried meditation at one point for at least 30 minutes a day for two months, and I can honestly say that it didn't seem to do anything for me. Focusing on my breath did not give me self-insights, it did not relax my anxiety, and it did not help me solve my problems.

Talk therapy has been useful although it still never solved my problems.

I'm hesitant to say any one thing is responsible for causing change in me, but one thing that has unquestionably helped is a type of self-therapy called Focusing. It's similar to meditation, but instead of focusing on your breath, it's an ordered process of focusing on your feelings. It has been the source of actual insights into why I feel and behave in certain ways. I think it's a lot closer to what people are looking for from meditation—meditation might give you insights into how your brain works, but it's not designed to give you insights into your real and troubling thoughts and emotions.

Here's the website if you want to look into it https://focusing.org/sixsteps