Can’t concentrate? How to reboot your attention span

The Gujarat-born, Chicago-raised 50-year-old first started studying the science of attention in the early 2000s, after suffering her own crisis of attention. A new mother at the time, she was also under pressure at work, and found herself struggling to focus – even while reading her son a simple bedtime story.

“I started getting very concerned, because my life outwardly looked like everything I wanted, yet internally I was not really there for it,” she says. “Everything in your life has been geared towards [having] a fulfilling personal and professional life, but what’s the point if you can’t actually experience it?”

Loading

A colleague she respected recommended meditation. Jha had been sceptical – during childhood she had seen her father meditating and decided it wasn’t for her – but admits that when she tried it, “it kind of woke me up”.

The difference the practice made to her ability to focus her attention surprised her so much she decided to test it in her lab, where she could make brainwave recordings. In one exercise – which I briefly tried out, until I became too distracted by the constant drip-feed of emails arriving in my inbox – participants are asked to click their space bar every time they see a number appear, unless it’s a number three. It is designed to be so boring the mind naturally starts to wander.

Jha says the papers that she produced off the back of her initial research were the first to take a systematic look at the effects of mindfulness meditation training on the brain’s system of attention.

Among her subjects were people who were going on an intensive month-long mindfulness meditation retreat. Their attention was found to have significantly improved after they returned.

Loading

“The other really exciting [discovery] for me was the more meditation people did individually, the more they benefited,” she says. “So we found people who were practising about 12 minutes a day or more were benefiting. The more they practised beyond 12 minutes, the more they benefited.

“But the people who were practising for less than 12 minutes were actually not benefiting. So we were finding there is a minimum effective dose and it tends to be about 12 minutes, about three to five times a week and the more you do beyond that the better.”

During meditation, you have to keep directing your wandering mind back to your breath, and the present moment. Training ourselves to do this doesn’t mean our mind won’t wander when we’re engaged in other tasks; but it means we’ll notice far more quickly when our attention has strayed, and be able to bring it back.

“So you might catch yourself just as you’re about to open an app on your phone, rather than after you have lost 20 minutes scrolling.

Jha does not believe it is realistic to try to unplug ourselves from modern technology altogether. “At this point our technology is like food and air, you can’t live without it,” she says.

“We have to train our ability to check in with our own mind, moment by moment, so we have more ownership of where our attention is.”

“You’ve got to figure out how to have a different relationship with it. It’s not possible to function in a normal way if you say ‘I’m going to break up with my phone,’ and it’s not going to work, because the algorithms developed by teams of engineers to pull your attention have been completely curated for your particular interest – and that is hard to overcome.

“We have to train our ability to check in with our own mind, moment by moment, so we have more ownership of where our attention is.”

Loading

On the other hand, Jha also believes we must challenge the way modern technology is designed to distract us. “We’ve got to demand some changes in how technology is actually offered to us. If a technology company decided to make you click before you advanced to a screen, that small shift would provide a pause so you might say ‘do I really want to?’ More responsible and humane technology is going to be key.”

How much has paying attention to her attention helped her? “I’m not fighting the fact I feel distractible. It’s now a key cue I need to do something differently instead of feeling I’m a failure because my mind won’t cooperate.”

The Telegraph, London

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.