5 Ways Smartphone Usage Destroys Focus

All of us have heard that using our smartphones is bad for focus, but why? Is it completely exaggerated? And.. If smartphones do cause issues with focus, what’s actually happening?

Today we're going to explore the five scientifically proven ways that smartphone usage destroys our focus and how to mitigate the worst effects.

1 – Reduced attention span

The first and most obvious way that smartphones reduce our ability to focus is ourattention span. Which is defined as “the length of time for which a person is able to concentrate on a particular activity or subject.”

Because most smartphone content is usually short form this gets our brains used to only focusing for at most a few minutes at a time. This makes it challenging for us to be able to focus for extended periods. Which, typically, is required to complete high quality, meaningful work or learn complex topics.

2 – Context switching

One of the most damaging ways that our focus is affected by the smartphone is context switching. Context switching is when we continuously flit from one task to the next; emails, checking our phones and trying to actually do productive work.

There is a massive problem with this. Recent studies have shown that it takes our brains 15 minutes to get fully focused on a new task. It also takes a lot more energy to switch between tasks than focus on one.

If you’ve ever spent a day switching between your phone, emails and work, and feel like you got nothing done but feel exhausted, then you have experienced context switching.

3 – Continuous Partial attention

Unfortunately our smartphones don’t just affect us whilst we’re using them. Our brains are being literally rewired into a state of Continuous Partial Attention by our phones.

Continuous partial attention is what allows us to split our attention between different tasks simultaneously. This is something essential if you’re cooking a meal whilst watching a child or walking, listening to music and watching for cars that could hit you.

The problem is that because we constantly have our phone with us we’re conditioned to be constantly splitting our attention. Making it feel incredibly difficult when we have a task that requires 100% of our focus.

4 – Decreased information retention

We also struggle to learn as effectively when we’re using our smartphones. Studies have shown that students who report being heavy smartphone users have decreased academic performance, with weaker short and long term memory.

In the fast moving information age where we need to retain important information and regularly upgrade our skills, this reduced ability to retain information is extremely detrimental.

5 – Impaired cognitive capacity

The most mind blowing study about phone usage found that just having your phone near you, not using it at all, impairs your cognitive capacity.

Scientists found there wasn’t a significant difference between subjects that did and did not have their phones present when performing simple tasks. However, as soon as the complexity of the tasks increased, subjects with their mobile phones present (not in use) performed significantly worse across a battery of cognitive tests.

Proving that our phones remain a powerful distractor and weaken our focus just by being near us, even if we can muster the willpower to not pick our phone up.

Conclusion:

With all the ways that smartphone use hurts our ability to focus it can feel like there’s no hope, that we have to accept that we’ll forever be short attention span, poor memory, phone addicts who’re unable to deeply focus and reach our full potential.

We felt that there needed to be a solution, but couldn’t seem to find one. Which is why we developed the FocusLock. An innovative product that you can use to lock your phone away for an amount of time that you set.

Giving you a break from your phone so you can consistently bring your full focus to your work, studying or just being more present.

Learn More

Country/region