Attention is important to understand. This is true now more than ever because the world we live in today is as attention-grabbing as it ever has been. There is so much content available at the click of a button that we don’t know where to start or end. In other words, we don’t know where to pay attention.
By default, everybody loses the attention battle nowadays. But the attention losses incurred by teenagers are especially profound, impacting them at many levels- physical, mental, emotional, present as well as future success. When an Instagram notification pops up on their phone, they helplessly attend to it forgetting all else – be it studies, food or sleep. In this post, we will aim to understand why attention drifts so easily in today’s world, especially among teenagers. Later, in Part II of this post, we will share how you can support your teen to manage their attention better.
I. But first, what is attention? And why is it so important?
We use the word so often yet people find it hard to describe the experience of attention. At Kazivu, we define attention as: the place where our awareness is at any given moment.
In that definition lies its importance too. What we pay attention to determines what we are aware of. It also means that without attention, learning anything is very, very, very hard. How can you learn something if your awareness is elsewhere?
II. How does the brain decide what to pay attention to?
Through 2 ways – either we are actively searching for the ‘thing’ to pay attention to (top-down). For example, when your teenager is sitting in a class and trying to pay attention to a teacher’s instructions. The second way is that something grabs our attention so forcefully that we can’t help but pay attention to it (bottom-up). When your phone lights up with a notification, we feel a kind of restlessness until we check who the message is from, isn’t it?
What this means is that sometimes we decide what to pay attention to. And other times, this gets decided for us – and those are the times we need to be extra wary of. Because too much of the latter can result in a total system hijack.
III. How does the attention system get hijacked?
Our brain is especially sensitive to content that has:
1.Negative news
2.Moving objects
3.Contrasting Colour
4.Comparisons to others
5.Emotional topics
All of these stimuli were always present in our environment e.g. parents comparing siblings, news of a bike accident, disco lights. The challenge in our modern world is that our teenagers’ brains get overloaded with not one, not two but all of these triggers at the same time. How? Smartphones, TV, and other screens, social media apps. These apps and screens with their colourful screens and motion graphics are designed to keep our attention drifting from one item to another perpetually. It feels (and is) humanly impossible to win against these hijackers. Let’s take reels for example. How would you describe a reel?
1.Super short (often < 1 minute)
2.Video
3.Moving objects (pop-ups, animations, moving text)
4.Lot of colour
5.Entertaining
6.Makes you ‘feel things’ (emotional)
7.Shows lives of others in a ‘rosy’ way (makes your own life look dull in comparison)
8.Music in the background
Each of these elements are designed to hijack your attention and not let you focus on anything else. So when you feel that your teen is unable to pay attention to a task, this is the reason. Their brain is still reeling from the last Youtube short that they watched.
To be clear again, smartphones are not the only hijackers of your teen’s attention, there are others too – a friend who has randomly stopped talking to them, a family feud that your teen has gotten dragged into, a teacher’s scolding. But smartphones are more powerful than all of the other hijackers put together because it combines all of the elements listed above that our brain is extra sensitive to.
For teenagers, scattered attention has serious consequences. It results not just in poor learning outcomes but also poor quality of life. Teenagers as it is are at an emotionally vulnerable stage and if not taught how to manage their attention, can struggle to develop into fully functional and emotionally regulated adults.
Simply telling your kid to ‘Just Focus’ won’t help here. It’s like telling a calculator with a weak battery to ‘Just Work’. We need to first fix the hijack and then try and focus.
V. What can you do as a parent to help your teen manage their attention better?
Coming soon in Part II of this post.
