By Esther Gaon
With today’s technology, you never have to be bored a day in your life.
Whether it’s binging the next trending show on Netflix or scrolling through Instagram, the next dopamine hit is always a click away. Having zero-effort, ready-to-go stimulation is nice, but it also comes at a cost: our attention spans.
In an interview on the podcast Speaking of Psychology, Gloria Mark, Ph.D., a chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, discussed her research measuring people’s attention spans for technology. In 2004, she said, the average attention span “on any screen” was two and a half minutes. In 2012, that number dropped to 75 seconds, and in recent years it went down again to an average of 47 seconds.
47 seconds. That’s it. That’s the longest a person can consistently concentrate. That’s shorter than the amount of time it takes for your phone to restart. Or to brush your teeth (hopefully!). This is why most social media reels can only be a minute long — any longer and they lose people. These astonishing results showcase the profound effects of technological advancements we have made in the last 20 years on our psyche.
As our attention spans shrink, so does our tolerance for being bored. It’s rare to see someone just sit on a subway, stand in a line or wait for their Starbucks order to be called without their head buried in their phone. Too many, myself included, find it uncomfortable to just be. There’s always another text to check, another clip to watch.
84% of Americans check their phones within their first 10 minutes of being awake. 76% feel uneasy about leaving their phone at home. 46% say they have never gone longer than 24 hours without their cell phone. The average American picks up their phone 186 times in a single day.
And yet, less than half of the American population consider themselves addicted to their cell phones.
Over the course of my life, I’ve lost my phone several times across multiple countries, without a way to quickly replace it. When that inevitably happens, I am forced to go through my daily life without that immediate dopamine rush. For the first week or so, any time I get that uncomfortable feeling, I instantly think to pull out my phone, only to remember I don’t have it anymore. This realization is followed by renewed grief at my loss, and then I start to find ways to compensate for the loss by looking around at my surroundings or, more likely, bugging my friends to talk to the pitiful soul who’s lost without her phone. At least I’ll admit to being addicted, unlike half of the nation.
But once those few weeks pass, I begin to find those moments of awkwardness somewhat nice. They become a time to reflect, reorganize my thoughts and wonder. A time to ignite my creativity. I can finally take a minute to think about where I’m going, where my life is headed. I have time to look around and comment on my surroundings, see what picks at my interest. I can observe the people around me, see things about them that I might not have noticed before. As a writer, I usually find that these are the moments that I come up with the best ideas.
What irony — out of an unengaged state the engaged mind flourishes.
At first, I thought this phenomenon was unique to me, and that I was the first to notice it. Turns out I was a few thousand people off.
Aaron Angello, poet, playwright, essayist and professor at Hood College, lays it out quite nicely. He writes, “Rather than boredom resulting from a lack of imagination, I think it provides access to the imaginative mind.” When you give your mind the time to wander off, it does just that. And sometimes, it’s only through that wandering that you can find the keys to your imagination.
Some of the greatest modern works of creativity have come from boredom. In a 2016 interview, J.K. Rowling recalled how the idea for the Harry Potter series came about. She was on a train back to London after apartment-hunting with her boyfriend in Manchester when the idea “fell into” her head. At the time, she was frustrated for not having a pen to write her idea down, but now her perspective has changed. “[I]t was the best thing for me,” she said. “It gave me the full four hours on the train to think up all the ideas for the book.” She, like me, used her time of nothing to come up with something, maybe even her best something. If not for her stillness — and her willingness to let her brain lead the way — Harry Potter might never have existed.
In those moments of boredom and stillness — whether you’re in class or stuck inside on a snow day — let your mind daydream. According to a study by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the ability to daydream actually means that your brain is more efficient. According to Eric Schumacher, a Georgia Tech associate psychology professor, a higher brain efficiency means you have greater capacity to think, which lets the brain wander off while you perform easy and ritual tasks. A daydreaming brain is one capable of its own unique creativity.
The more we let ourselves unlock this side of our incredible brains, the more we will innovate, create, inspire and change the world around us. After all, was it not creativity that brought about the technology that impacted our attention spans in the first place? We have the ability to come up with all of these “advancements,” but they only advance us if they are used in the right way. The Digital Age has so many pros — it connects us and lets us interact with people across the globe, recent medical advancements have saved so many lives, and so much more — but used the wrong way, it can hurt us like it hurt our attention spans.
Technology today is a tool, but we shouldn’t rely on it so much that it becomes a crutch that diminishes our ability to think. To imagine. To daydream. To be creative. Because these parts of us are what makes us sophisticated and interesting — so human.
The minute we refuse to be uncomfortable — to be bored — that’s when we lose our uniqueness. Let your wondrous brain do what it was made to do. Take a minute out of the who-knows-how-many-hours-a-day you are on your phone, and think. Be creative. Maybe to you that means writing down a stream of consciousness in a notebook, to others it’ll be painting and for a few it is just sitting with themselves. Let your mind wander and find the key to your uniqueness. You may be bored, but you’ll never be boring a day in your life.
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