What did your mind used to be like as a child? Do you remember where and when and how it would wander — to the raindrops on the window? The ants climbing ginormous blades of grass? The feeling of different textures on your bare feet?
These are the kinds of questions posed in a course offered by the international “School of Radical Attention,” described recently by The Atlantic writer Kaitlyn Tiffany. The specific class, “How to Build an Attention Sanctuary,” was a six-week workshop focused on “unraveling the coercive powers of social media, phones and digital life” while also teaching how to “rediscover the joy of undivided attention.”
Yet, “How do you build an attention sanctuary?” the course instructors ask. “Have we always needed attention sanctuaries? Or is there something specific about right now?”
A gently percolating movement
The people behind the class call themselves the “Friends of Attention” and operate a nonprofit called the Institute for Sustained Attention. Some of their leaders wrote a public appeal in The New York Times in 2023, calling for more societal “attention to attention” reflected in “dedicated spaces to learn (or relearn) the powers of this precious faculty.”
Broader discussion of attention problems in the U.S. has largely revolved around clinical diagnostic labels that apply to only a subset of Americans. What’s unique here is an acknowledgement that a far broader swath of people in modern society are grappling with chronic distraction, and various forms of what experts call “degraded attention.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn — who is widely regarded as a pioneer in American mindfulness — has said repeatedly over the years that “most Americans are now struggling with some kind of real attention problem.”
Others have made similar appeals over the years to push back on the distracting digital society, from Canadian writer Carl Honore’s 2005 international best-selling manifesto on the “Slow Movement” (“In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed”), to more recent appeals by Georgetown professor Cal Newport for “Digital Minimalism” (”Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World”) and by Christian writers Erin Loechner (“Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path”) and John Mark Comer (“The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World”).
Recent years have seen the expansion of attention-deepening courses, along with dozens of other books on slowing down the pace of life (“Slow Productivity”; “Slow Seasons”; “The Slow Home”; “Live Slowly: A Gentle Invitation to Exhale”; “Seeking Slow: Reclaim Moments of Calm in Your Day”) and doing less (“The Year of Less”; “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”; “How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving”).
None of these authors are arguing against the importance of action and accomplishment, or advocating for even more sofa time with Netflix. Rather, they are making various cases for how to navigate modern living while preserving serenity, sweetness and especially, attention.
More attention to attention
Parents and teachers harping on how children need to “pay more attention” is nothing new. But how exactly is a child (or adult) supposed to do that? This is the question diverse authors, leaders, teachers and activists keep emphasizing as needing far more attention. Although they say “this revolution starts in our classrooms,” the Friends of Attention authors, D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt, are not calling for yet more prompts that young people not fidget and stay focused. Instead, they say “we must make attention itself the thing being taught” (emphasis their own).
These people are among those calling for a “new paradigm of attention education” — one that comes by seeing each human body as “a sensitive attentional instrument” — with corresponding education encouraging people to “dig in on the magic of this instrument.”
Rather than only relevant to a subset of people struggling with ADHD, Burnett, Loh and Schmidt see this as relevant for every human being, but especially for teachers and students, artists, athletes, welders, surfers — “anyone who does anything with care and immersive commitment, anyone who treasures true attention.”
Traditional calls for literacy and an “informed citizenry” as a bedrock of democracy, they argue, are not enough given mounting “fears of informational saturation and perpetual distraction.” As they go on to argue, “What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”
“Life is the sum total of what we pay attention to,” says podcaster Ezra Klein, agreeing that: “What forces are in control of our attention — and how we get it back — is a defining question of our age.”
Attention as a form of love
This is not merely about cognitive focus. “Attention is a form of love,” Burnett, Loh and Schmidt further argue, which explains why they describe their mission as a commitment to a future “where every person is equipped to freely give their attention (that is, their care) to each other and the world.”
“Relationships are one of the biggest areas that are suffering in our lives as a result of this lack of attention,” says Rachel Reist, a local expert in the training of attention — having worked for years teaching hundreds of adults, teenagers and young children mindfulness classes at the Davis Mindfulness Center in Layton, Utah. Inattention “interrupts that deep intimacy that we all crave,” she says, “and so then we search for it in other places, rather than learning to be truly present with ourselves and with one another.”
Attention is an “act of friendship, of resistance, of freedom,” writes Stefanie Hessler, director of an art institute in Norway.
“‘If we want to own our attention again — and use it at full blast to bring the world forth … and feed our souls — we have to declare war with the shallow distractions we have welcomed into our lives,” writes Jeannette Cooperman, author of “The Common Reader.”
After admitting he’s beginning to feel his age, Ezra Klein, The New York Times podcaster, says, “I don’t think time is the right way to measure whatever it is I have left — attention is. I only have so much attention left to give. And it’s how I use that attention that will decide what I make of that time.”
So what more do experts say any of us can do to revive, reclaim and cultivate our own attention?
1. Looking at our lives more deeply
On the first day of “how to build an attention sanctuary,” Kaitlyn Tiffany describes receiving a homework assignment to conduct a “household attention audit.” That entails taking notes during the week about times she observed herself or a loved one “deeply absorbed in their device,” or equally absorbed in a connection with other human beings and the living world around them.
They say it can be helpful to detail places where our focus shifts and changes, in a way that helps you and your loved ones create “a basic meta-attentional awareness” of when your attention, as Tiffany says, is “moving from one thing to another and why.”
Debi Barley, another founding teacher at the Davis Mindfulness Center likewise describes a first step for anyone interested in deepening their attentional capacity as “just to step back and recognize what’s going on, acknowledging all of the things that are pulling us away from being right here, with our surroundings, with our environment, with the people in our lives.”
Rather than only evaluating things as they are, the school encourages people to also anticipate a future where hoped-for-changes actually come to pass. Tiffany confides, “I wanted to be more patient. I didn’t want to dismiss things out of hand as boring just because I was having a hard time concentrating. I didn’t want to waste my time watching the stupidest videos ever made just because they’re there.”
What did this busy writer imagine herself feeling by the end of the course? “I am happy to be alone with my thoughts or together in conversation with other people.”
2. Practicing attention
None of this emerges simply from wanting it, visualizing it or noticing that it’s not happening yet. A different way of living depends on a certain kind of intentionality, dedication and work, these experts agree.
Barley encourages people to try experimenting with simply noticing the full details of moments here and there — “the senses, the sounds, the smells, the tones of voice” — as well as “getting a sense of how the people that you’re with — how they’re really doing.”
Relationships all around us represent unique opportunities to practice attention, according to these attention specialists. “Sometimes we’re so distracted with life that we’re really not checking in with people,” Barley says, “and we miss subtle cues that if we were paying attention, these people might feel more connected and loved and noticed.”
Reist describes her excitement at seeing one of her students recently discovering the power of “just listening to their teenager when they walk into their bedroom at 11 o’clock at night and Mom really wants to sleep, but instead she listens … without fixing.”
Barley recalls a student who was lost in habitual “numbing out” with chronic distraction and consequentially feeling “really disconnected from a lot of things,” including family members. But learning to practice being present “awoke him” — helping him “remember who he really was.”
“There was a sense of joy in his face,” Barley recalls. “He was excited to get back into some hobbies that he used to really enjoy, and had forgotten that he enjoyed them.” She went on to say that “people really do experience more joy when they intentionally bring themselves back to the present moment” — even if that present isn’t where they “hope to one day be.”
When people start to experience small pleasures of daily living, Barley says, it’s often a shock to them. “Oh, wow. This is so joyful,” students tell her.
Reist also describes how surprised people can be as they begin to really taste a bite of food, enjoy the face of a friend, relish a beautiful new idea or suddenly notice “this bug crawling on the ground, and it was the most beautiful bug they’ve ever seen.”
“They’re just enraptured with the ordinary every day,” she adds, in part because they’ve learned it’s possible to more and more “strip away” all of the other distractions.
Among other things, people learn they don’t need as much as they might have assumed to feel happy. Reist describes with a smile people “rediscovering simple joys in life, like being fully present for that dessert you love, rather than having to have two and three and four servings of it because you missed the first one.”
3. Taking care of the instrument
Inattention to our physical health can disrupt our capacity for attention as much as anything else. “It’s a remarkable experiment in your personal attentional resources to see what happens to your attention when you don’t get much sleep,” says Klein, a father of young children. “It’s not just that it is hard to read a book,” he says. “In a very strange way, I notice for me … that I begin to crave distraction.”
Johann Hari, author of “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again,” tells Klein on his podcast, “There’s a pretty broad consensus that we sleep significantly less than we used to, for all sorts of reason” — with human beings sleeping, on average, “20 percent less than we did a century ago.”
If it’s true that “humans are as sensitive to light as algae,” as doctor Charles Czeisler told Hari, then he says it’s significant how much artificial light we’re exposed to before bed. “90 percent of Americans stare at a glowing screen within an hour of going to sleep.”
Czeisler’s own research on tired people confirmed that you can “appear to be awake” — looking around, talking and moving about life — while “whole parts of your brain have gone to sleep.” Hari reflects, “When we say we’re half asleep, it turns out that’s not a metaphor. A lot of us are literally living half asleep.”
There are many other ways to care for our “attentional instruments.” Hari says the “way we eat is profoundly harming our ability to focus and pay attention,” pointing towards research on various food-dyes and toxins in food that disrupt attention, as well as the expansion of nutritional psychiatry. “So imagine that every morning you eat the standard American or British breakfast. You have sugary cereal, you have white bread with butter.”
That “releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain” — a bolt of glucose that wakes you up … for a while. But when you or your child gets to their desk a few hours later, he says, “you’ll experience a severe energy crash. And you’ll get what’s called brain fog,” at least until “you have another sugary, carby treat or some caffeine.”
“The way we eat at the moment puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes, which cause patches of brain fog throughout the day,” Hari summarizes. By contrast, “if you eat food that releases energy at a steadier level, which most humans have in the past, you will not experience so much brain fog.”
It’s like putting rocket fuel in a small car, nutritionist Dale Pennock told him. “It goes really fast for a little while and then it just stops. What we need to do is put in the fuel that our bodies were designed to absorb.”
4. Prioritizing periods of deeper attention
“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” Hari remembers feeling about the stress of his hyper-busy digital life. So he tried an experiment of three months with no smartphone — and not even a laptop to get onto the internet. Hari began to notice profound shifts inside. Not only did he finally have time to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he started going out in nature more.
“I came back from these long walks feeling so alive and mentally fertile. And I started building in loads of space for mind-wandering. I started to see connections between things I hadn’t thought about before. I started processing things in my past, I started creating visions for the future.”
Compared with the stimuli overload he had bathed in for so long, Hari says, “for the first time in many years, I wasn’t being overwhelmed.”
Writer Georges Perec similarly experimented in 1974 with sitting at a corner cafe in Paris, as Burnett, Loh and Schmidt summarize: “Over the course of three days, he recorded everything he saw, with particular attention to the supposedly mundane events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.”
For most people, three months or even a full day of such immersion feels impossible. Barley describes the value of “building mini retreats into our life” — be that away from the phone, or other kinds of spiritual retreats. Burnett, Loh and Schmidt suggest going out into the neighborhood and seeing what it’s like to “spend 30 minutes jotting down their observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world around them.”
As people do so and share observations with each other, they often experience a newfound “giddy, collective sense that the world is ours” — meaning, shared with everyone around you. “In no time it becomes clear that attention — giving it and getting it — constitutes social life,” they say, with a deeper awareness of the world around us helping us all “create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.”
5. Snatching back pockets of full attention
Kaitlyn Tiffany admits secretly wishing her class instructor, Jac Mullen, would urge something “truly radical” like throwing her smartphone away or boldly quitting all “laptop jobs.”
But instead, the author writes, she was directed towards smaller adjustments to improve her family’s “attention ecology.”
“I really think family meal times could be one of the most natural times” for deeper attentiveness, Reist said. “Hopefully families are having family meal times. If not, that’s a really good place to start. Turning off all of the devices and just having a meal together.”
Rather than feeling like adults need to be the ones constantly instructing children in how to do this, Reist adds provocatively that children, who Kabat-Zinn once called “little Zen master teachers,” may be the ones to “teach us how to be present, like if we really pay attention to our children, they’ll teach us. They’re there and exploring and savoring and talking and listening.”
“What you can mostly do, if you have the time and the resources, is snatch back some small pieces of territory along the edges,” Tiffany concludes — along the way to crafting and strengthening our different “attention sanctuaries.”
This isn’t about changing everything. Even small adjustments can add up, from experimenting with some new phone boundaries (no phone first thing in the morning and for the last part of your night, or creating “no-phone zones” and times in the home), to disciplining yourself to “just say no” to mindlessly scrolling social media, Youtube or streaming services. And don’t forget, these experts say, to allow yourself extra attentional indulgences — from relishing a statue or painting, to calling up a friend you’ve been missing, to sitting on a couch and just, well … sitting.
“Try a little harder and be a little better,” Tiffany says.