Episode 27: Rebuilding Your Attention Span

Description: This week, Dr. Tina Boogren invites you to fully focus on one thing at a time—whether it’s reading, watching TV, or simply being present—by breaking free from the habits that pull our attention in too many directions.

Resources: How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price

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Transcription:  Hi, and welcome to Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren. This is episode 27 and this week's invitation is to do something with your full attention. 

Let me explain. Again, as always, I know I say this a lot, but just need to remind you that I choose these invitations typically because it's something that I'm working on myself. And I found myself recently talking with a friend and I was sharing that um, I'm just irritated with my own attention span. I feel like my attention span has gotten so ridiculously short. I'm having trouble reading. Reading novels is like one of my favorite things to do, and I used to just easily just pick up my book and get totally absorbed in my book for a long time.

And recently, I just find myself picking up my book and getting distracted immediately. At first I was blaming the book, and then I kept changing books and playing around with different genres, and then I started a novel that I absolutely love, and it's still happening, so it's not the book, it's me. And I think it's this, just, everything that's going on in the world, and all of it, the news cycle, social media. I just have gotten into some bad habits, where I find myself reading, and I'll read for, I don't know, 10-20 minutes, and then, uh, I pick up my phone. That's usually what it is. Let me just be honest. I pick up my phone  and I'm either checking, even just checking email, checking my texts, going on social media, whatever it is. And it's driving me crazy. 

So I am making a conscious effort to get my attention span back. And so what I'm doing is really recommitting to reading where I am picking my book up and I'm putting my phone away, somewhere away where it's not within arm's reach and just reading.  I'll also say this, I'm having a hard time just watching a TV show and I know I'm not alone in this. I've talked with plenty of people about this and there's lots of memes and funny videos about this, of like even just watching something on TV being totally distracted by our phones. And so, I'm also, not only am I going to work on my concentration when I'm reading a book, which is the skill that I'm actually trying to get back to, but even just watching TV.

Can I watch a TV show and not look at my phone? It feels so ridiculous. But this is where I am. And some of you probably are there too. Some of you may not be, and gosh, I love that so much for you, but this is where I am. Where I just am so easily distracted and it doesn't feel good. 

I feel like my nervous system is just all over the board. And this kind of loops back to in episode 25 when I talked about slowing down, right? Even walking more slowly, talking more slowly. I just felt myself slow down right now as I say this. Moving through the world a little bit more slowly creates a sense of calm. And when I do that, I feel my whole nervous system just relax. And I know that when we concentrate on one thing, it's so good for ourselves and for our brains. And it makes me feel better. And, you know, I'm constantly thinking about “how do I want to feel?" There's nothing inherently wrong with picking up our phone when we're watching TV. I mean, we're watching TV, right? It's one thing when we're picking up our phone when we're having a conversation with someone else. These are kind of harmless ways that I'm feeling easily distracted, but it's doing harm to me. It's taking away my own joy. I'm feeling really tethered to my phone these days, and I don't like that feeling at all.

As I'm saying this, I'm like, you know what I need to go find There was a great book that's, um, called How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price, P R I C E. And I read it quite a few years ago. And as I'm saying this out loud, I'm reminded of that book. And I need to go back and look at that again. Of, I think I had some really good habits going for a while that served me well. And then for whatever reason, life and everything else, a constant news cycle. I just kind of lost some of those good habits, so I'm committed to getting those habits back. 

So there's those two things that I'm particularly going to work on this week. I want to, when I'm watching TV, watch TV. If I've made a commitment to watch TV, I'm going to watch TV.  If I want to look at my phone, I'm going to do that, and I'm just going to do that, and not do the task-switching between looking at the TV, looking at my phone, whatever. I just want to do that. And then when it's time to be done with my phone, I want to be done with my phone. And when I pick up my book, which is my favorite thing in the world to do, and I definitely want to do way more reading than I currently am, I am going to just read.

And I know I have to treat myself like a child here and put some rules or boundaries or buffers in place to help me with this. And for me, I know that I need to not have my phone close to me when I'm doing this. So my commitment is that when I go to pick up my book, my phone has to be in a different room, not within arm's reach because it's too easy, it's just too easy. 

And here's what I know in the past when I've worked on invitations like these, I'm twitchy for about the first 10 minutes and there's a lot of research that says for a lot of us, this is so scary, but when we're away from our phones, it's at about the 10 minute mark when we have this desire to pick up our phones, um, or maybe it's looking at our watches. I've totally turned off all notifications on my watch. I can't stand that. That was too much for me, but don't forget, if you're working on this yourself, to also maybe do something with your watch if you get notifications on your Apple Watch or your Garmin or your Fitbit, whatever it is. Maybe you want to make sure that you are locking that down as well if this feels good to you, and maybe you figure out different ways to approach this.

I talk about this in, gosh, which book is it? I believe it's in the 180 Days of Self-Care for Busy Educators. When I was working on that book one of the things I did is I experimented with a 40 for 40 challenge, which was for 40 days. I took 40 minutes of my day, usually in the evening where I had no technology, 40 minutes a day, no technology for 40 days in a row. And, that was so good. It felt so good. And usually what happens is after the 40 minutes mark, it's not like, whoa, I ran over and picked up my phone. It usually was longer than that. But I do know that when I was doing that, it was about the 10 minute mark that I felt myself like, Ooh, this is when I must normally pick up my phone because I'm feeling a reaction to this. 

So it's just a good awareness and something I want to work on. And as always, when I work on something, I like to offer it up to you because we're on this journey side by side, that's for sure. So as you do this this week, feel my hand on your back, as always, cheering so hard for you, and I hope it makes a difference. 

As always, thank you, Adrienne. We're so grateful for you. So grateful to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree for this job I get to do and for you, my badass self care squad. May you slow down. May you find your joy in the activities that you love to do with an incredibly long attention span. Let's work on it. Let's work on it together. Make it a great week.