Have you noticed a potential decrease in your attention span lately? Do you catch yourself tapping on an app or clicking on a link without a clear understanding of why you started? Have you encountered challenges with sleeping, completing a book, or beginning a new one?Have you, recently, picked up your phone – or opened a new browser tab on your computer – intending to do one thing, and without thinking found yourself doing something completely different?
Let’s get more sport specific: have you ever been unable to concentrate during a training session? Continually distracted or fidgety while waiting to fight?
Fencing, like many other sports and skills, revolves around achieving a state of ‘flow.’ This state of flow is a well-documented phenomenon in scientific literature, where one operates at their highest capacity, time seems to stand still, and you feel completely immersed in an activity. It’s often described as being ‘in the zone.’ Some of you may have noticed a decline in experiencing this state in recent years.
Numerous articles and books are quick to attribute these changes to smartphones, social media, or internet technologies, and in some cases, they are probably correct. However, even with this awareness, our behaviour often remains largely unchanged. In essence, a significant portion of the global population across various walks of life has developed a co-dependent relationship with internet-enabled devices. It’s challenging to even imagine a world without smartphones, given their utility and the multitude of distractions they offer.
Nevertheless, succumbing to varying degrees of smartphone addiction has become alarmingly easy. It is an issue that can affect individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and cognitive abilities, as well as those from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The usage of smartphones has the capacity to stimulate the release of dopamine, a brain chemical that can alter one’s mood. Interestingly, as smoking rates have significantly declined in the Western world, leading to improved physical health, a different kind of addiction has emerged unexpectedly, affecting our collective mental well-being. A recent study even indicated that most of us are rarely more than five feet away from our phones.
The blame game
Smartphones, particularly combined with social media, have been blamed for all kinds of things in the last few years; most notably, an immense and well-documented rise in mental health issues across the globe, especially anxiety. There is an increase in the inability to concentrate or focus on tasks requiring specific attention. The number of children admitted to hospital after accidents in public playgrounds has climbed by about a third in five years, according to NHS data – several experts have suggested that some of the increase may be a result of parents being too distracted by their phones and unable to supervise children properly. Dr Sherylle Calder, a South African vision specialist recruited by the England rugby team, even blames smartphones for a significant decline across all sports in skill and visual awareness over the past six years or so.
Blaming technology for social and health problems is not new. But smartphones in particular are a far more adaptably invasive technology, and one we have grown to rely on, perhaps more than anything in modern history.
Most people reading this will have played some kind of computer game either on their phone, a computer, or a console. The best games usually are great at keeping you hooked in some way and coming back; we can even figure out the cunning hook and marvel at it, even while we are nearly powerless to stop playing. However, we all know it’s a game. Social media is more pernicious than that; because it provides what some researchers have called ‘infinity pools’; an endless scroll of information and ads that literally will never end. It’s harder to perceive it as an addiction. What has been called ‘the attention economy’ produces constant demands on the brain: often tiny slivers of time, but with each one adding to the cognitive load very slightly.
It turns out that the human brain is actually terrible at multi-tasking. Several recent studies have shown show that people who engage in constant multi-tasking – which can includes checking your phone constantly – have essentially rewired their brains, resulting in lower IQ scores, decreased cognitive performance, and perhaps most frightening of all long-term, a lower capacity for emotional empathy. Essentially, our phones have turned us into chronic multitaskers, and it can deeply affected some areas of the brain. Putting in the kind of deep work which requires focused attention becomes exponentially more difficult.
But the technological cat is well out of the bag; smartphones and social media are not going anywhere. Most of us cannot give them up for all manner of reasons – am sure you can supply your own.
So what can we do?
Getting ‘distraction fit’
A good analogy is to food and fitness. In the post-war 20th century most people got an huge influx of processed and fast food, with people in the West having abundant calories for the first time. Naturally, there was an enormous increase in obesity, heart disease and diabetes, which became the primary killers in most countries. For a long time there was general advice about food pyramids and exercise, which broadly speaking has been mostly ineffective. People know what they should do, but they don’t do it.
But if you think of the healthiest and fittest person you know, they will most likely subscribe to a particular philosophy of either eating or exercise. They make consistent decisions about what they will do and what they will consume, and they do this in the pursuit of feeling their best for the greatest amount of time. In the 21st century, many people are embracing consistent health, exercise and diets, and the levels of heart disease and strokes have fallen concurrently.
Similarly, having a consistent philosophy on how you will have technology such as smartphones in your life is a way out of the forest. The writer Cal Newport recommends assessing all technology: an app, a gadget, or a digital service – with the question: “What’s the cost in terms of my time attention required to have this thing in my life, and what’s the best way I can use this to support myself?”.
For example: Instagram may bring a great deal of value into your life, but if you spend three hours a day on it, that will cost you many other opportunities. Could what you need to accomplish there be done in 10 minutes of an evening, and would that actually get 99% of the value you would get from being on a service? If you could make that a strict rule (and there are technological solutions to enforce something like that), you could be on the way to owning the technology, rather than the technology owning you.
If you’re reading this, you are a fencer, and you don’t need the benefits of fencing restating to you. The sense of flow, calm and satisfaction you get when you are performing really well is irreplaceable by anything else. Sport, and indeed all activities you do just for the sake of them, for the quality, joy and camaraderie help build resilience in other areas of your life. Papering over boredom with a constant stream of distractions means you will end up avoiding the self-reflection that you need to actually build essential skills – and indeed, a life. ⚔️
LIMITING DISTRACTIONS: FIVE KEY PATHS
Make it positive
Limiting the use of smartphones – or many other things – quite often will make you feel like you are giving something up that you enjoy, which makes it more likely that you will backslide. Try and reframe decisions you make: you are rebuilding your relationship with technology for positive ends, not just eliminating something.
Awareness
Amid growing concern, the major tech companies started building tools into smartphones that enable users to keep track of their smartphone use. On iPhones, this is called Screen Time, on Android the same tool is called Digital Wellbeing. Becoming aware of just how much you use phones, and how, is the first step towards making changes.
Turning off triggers
Turning off notifications for all apps and preventing the inevitable micro-distractions is invariably the first thing recommended by most writers on the subject. There are also tools built into to modern operating systems that allow you to filter notifications to just messages from your boss or your partner, for example.
Leave your phone out of your bedroom
Almost all digital detox advice mentions this as an essential part of taking control of technology, and it is credited with improving sleep – although for many people, this is one of the hardest steps of all to take!
Using site and app blockers
There is software available for smartphones and computers that can block specific apps or websites for a set period of time. This is an extremely effective tool for changing behaviour – use it.