The Internet Ruined My Brain: How I Fixed My Focus

Summary

Highlights

• Elizabeth Filips shares her struggle with maintaining focus amid the distractions of modern technology. 🎮
• The concept of attention goes beyond productivity—it's integral to our identity and autonomy. 🧠
• Two types of attention are discussed: endogenous (internal drive) and exogenous (external stimuli). 🌍
• Elizabeth proposes exercises like the 'miracle question' to reconnect with one's intrinsic motivations. ✨
• Writing and journaling can shift focus from distraction back to meaningful engagement. 📚

Key Takeaways

• The internet can overwhelm our attention, making it hard to focus on one task for long periods. 📱
• Attention isn't just about productivity; it's tied to our character and personal agency. 👤
• Using a notebook and pen for reflection can help reclaim focus and balance attention. 📝
• Reflection exercises can unearth motivations and shift your perspective on daunting tasks. 🔍
• Embracing the 'exploit mode' can help retrain your brain by sticking to a single task. 🚀

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to the Speaker's Journey with Focus This chapter introduces the speaker's lifelong fascination with focus and speed. As a child, they spent hours alone drawing and memorizing movie lines. During their teenage years, they developed speed-reading and touch-typing skills to manage school work. As an adult, they honed their ability to consume information rapidly, including watching videos at quadruple speed and noticing micro-lags in technology. These experiences illustrate a significant theme in the speaker's journey: an enduring emphasis on focus and efficiency.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Misconception of Productivity The chapter titled 'Misconception of Productivity' delves into the illusion of enhanced productivity through multitasking. Despite the sense of increased mental speed and productivity, the narrator finds themselves watching university lectures alongside YouTube videos while using their phone, yet still feeling unengaged. This chapter discusses how exposure to numerous activities and stimuli throughout the day becomes addictively normal, while single-tasking seems dull. The narrator finds anything that forces them to confront their own thoughts unbearably uncomfortable, illustrating a struggle with true engagement and presence.
• 02:00 - 03:00: The Human Aspect of Attention The chapter delves into the complexities of attention in the modern age, particularly focusing on Generation Alpha, known for their anxiety and scattered focus. It highlights how the rapid pace of modern life negatively impacts our mental well-being, more than we typically acknowledge. The narrative also suggests that our fundamental misunderstanding of 'attention' contributes to these detrimental effects.
• 03:00 - 04:00: The Balance of Attention Types As competition increases across industries, attention becomes increasingly valuable, both for completing tasks and as an expression of individuality, according to philosophers like Schiller and Garve. Attention is not just a tool for task completion but a reflection of character, autonomy, and humanity.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Solution: Writing and Reflection The chapter discusses the concept of 'Solution: Writing and Reflection,' emphasizing the importance of attention in the modern world. It argues how technology, designed to capture attention, dehumanizes individuals by stripping their focus away. As technology advances, humanity seems to regress, impacting personal dignity, life quality, and professional success. This reflection is a call to value and protect our attention against the relentless market forces vying for it.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Explaining Two Frameworks: Miracle Question & Dialogue with Tasks The chapter introduces a solution involving the use of a notebook and pen, emphasizing that no purchase is necessary as all information is freely accessible. The author shares insights from various books and studies that have informed their theory on attention, aiming to present a method to rebuild it.
• 06:00 - 08:00: Dealing with Anxiety and Procrastination This chapter delves into the relationship between anxiety and procrastination, presenting a logical understanding accompanied by practical exercises to manage these challenges. The exercises include writing and reflection tasks designed to be flexible and integrated into daily life without pressure. They emphasize understanding the core principles rather than forming strict habits. This approach aims to redirect attention and reclaim personal equilibrium. A key concept introduced is 'two truths no lie,' emphasizing that distraction is not simply the opposite of the intended focus.
• 08:00 - 10:00: The Importance of Continuous Writing for Anxiety Relief Continuous writing serves as a therapeutic tool, aiding in anxiety relief by providing a structured outlet for thoughts and emotions.
• 10:00 - 12:00: Capturing Motivation for Future Use The chapter discusses the mechanics of attention and motivation, challenging the traditional notion of finding the will to work. It suggests that motivation isn't about forcing focus on tasks but about understanding where our attention already lies. Referencing a finding from psychologist Michael Posner in 1980, it notes that people can focus both actively and passively, suggesting the need to retrace and understand our inherent attention patterns to leverage motivation effectively.
• 12:00 - 13:00: Conclusion and Encouragement The chapter discusses two types of attention: endogenous and exogenous.

The Internet Ruined My Brain: How I Fixed My Focus Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] this was me at 6 I would sit alone drawing for hours or rewatch movies so many times I knew every line by heart this was me as a teen by then I could touch type and speedread to keep up with my schoolwork as an adult I went further watching videos at over four time speed and like everyone watching this video detecting lags that are only nanc long in our computers or or phones so all of
• 00:30 - 01:00 this speeding up of my brain surely means I'm so much more productive and get a lot more done right right right in reality no I would watch University lectures alongside YouTube videos while on my phone and still feel I wasn't engaged enough seeing thousands of faces a day became normal acceleration addictive doing one activity at a time boring anything that left me with my own thoughts even a little unbearable while increasingly being able to cut capture
• 01:00 - 01:30 and keep my attention was becoming impossible now that anxiety and scatteredness defines generation Alpha is well known but even as an ex- Millennial child currently with as much anxiety as your average squirrel or prime consumer I can see how making everything modern synonymous with acceleration can have effects on our brain that are much more Sinister than we commonly think and it all comes down to one thing our misunderstanding of attention as as standards and
• 01:30 - 02:00 competition rise in every industry and it becomes harder to stand out or even survive it's easy to reduce our attention to just the thing we need to work and complete tasks after all that's where we most frequently use it and most obviously suffer its loss this reasoning is sound but incomplete according to philosophers such as Schiller wolf lri garve attention is also our character the manifestation of our directed will our source of agency our autonomy what makes us human this is why after all we
• 02:00 - 02:30 are judged on and become what we pay attention to James Williams called the market for attention a type of human trafficking attention grabbing technology literally dehumanizing us through the constant stripping of our attention while we've been upgrading technology we've been downgrading Humanity so we need attention for our own personal dignity and life and for Success at work whatever that means and as a definite victim of acceleration
• 02:30 - 03:00 I'm going to cautiously put forward a solution that has been working for me all you will need is one notebook and one pen just to be clear I am not selling you anything here you can get the template of the questions below if you like but no new information is behind a pay wall I'll explain all my thoughts in this video everything is based on multiple books and studies I've read in the last few years with which I've created my theory on how attention works and therefore how we might be able to rebuild build it in this video I'll
• 03:00 - 03:30 explain both the information logic and the four exercises I've been using the exercises are writing reflection tasks and are no huge project to add to your life in Elizabeth fashion there is no habits or regularity to this you just do it when you can and when you need to the main thing is understanding the principles hopefully if you're like me it will make sense and help with getting some of our attention and Humanity back let's get straight into it two truths No Lie distraction is not the opposite of
• 03:30 - 04:00 attention everyone who thinks it is secretly believes that they can be the exception to that rule in Psychology attention and distraction can mean very much the same thing as tempting as it is to see ourselves procrastinating and think that we're doing the opposite of work we're not in both cases we are still focusing we're just using different types of attention our obsession with trying to
• 04:00 - 04:30 find the will to work to force our focus on the task we need done fails because it misses the fact that our attention has always been there we just don't know what to look for so here's the first thing we need to retrace our attention change the source way back in 1980 the psychologist Michael Posner noticed something weird people could be equally attentive both actively and passively
• 04:30 - 05:00 both when writing or reading and when lying back and hearing someone speak he defined these two types of attention as endogenous and exogenous and they both work differently endogenous attention is what we use to execute and focus it comes from us internally it's how we get work done what we miss when it is not there this is also called the exploit mode where we can make ourselves sit
• 05:00 - 05:30 down and actively exploit work through a task get everything that we need from it exogenous attention is activated when something changes in our environment it's what makes us watch and react to something shiny loud or interesting this is called the explore mode and crucially it can capture our attention even against our wishes or at least against our better judgment both types of attention are important and naturally
• 05:30 - 06:00 exist in some sort of balance however Magnus Liber argued that when stimulating exogenous attention for prolonged periods of time as we often and easily can do we get an exploration bias where the spreading of our attention thinly amongst many attractive sources becomes a trait and we slowly lose the capacity to exploit to persist in sustaining attention on one task for
• 06:00 - 06:30 the prolonged periods of time that are often necessary for the effective completion of tasks this is where things went wrong for us screens are rich in artificial salients the ability to make engaging with them seem attractive and valuable where else in the natural world would we see the levels of visual acoustic mental emotional social stimulation we can find on any screen for Endless amounts of time and it's not just that exhaustion is sources of attention weaken our self-directed
• 06:30 - 07:00 endogenous attention they also can temporarily incapacitate our Focus think what would happen if you suddenly heard a loud bang behind you the snap neck reflex like attention you give something loud bright shiny new is called the orientation response you can probably see why having this might be useful for survival however our orientation response was never meant to be activated so much screens through the engaging images and sounds we mentioned earlier
• 07:00 - 07:30 can maintain an activated orientation response for unnaturally long periods of time this actually leads to a dizzying in our attention which describes screens as paradoxically making us more alert but less focused something that might sound familiar so how do we rebuild our healthy attention well what we've lost here is our ability to exploit to intentionally make the most of one thing without task switching in our
• 07:30 - 08:00 exploration bias we've lost the capacity to tolerate an unactivated orientation response As We crave the super stimulation of alertness what we need is to restore the balance in the two types of attention we need to learn to maintain an under stimulated exploit mode again we need to teach ourselves to tolerate intentional natural slowness the best solution I have for this in terms of it being the easiest the quickest and the most effective is through writing you can either just
• 08:00 - 08:30 naturally write about your thoughts and journal or you can use two Frameworks which I'm going to give you now and the reason these are so effective is because when you're write you force your attention to focus on one thing the thing in front of you and thinking about what you need to put there this generates mandatory endogenous attention it's the easiest way to get our brains into the exploit mode immediately writing on paper as opposed to an electronic device also will then reduce
• 08:30 - 09:00 our orientation response both because it is probably less bright than a screen and also much more physically engaging our brains also love to touch what they see and therefore for a change having an alignment in our senses helps also reward them so if you already feel comfortable with writing your thoughts and journaling you can definitely do that in a moment when you feel that you've completely lost this endogenous attention but if you find that this is a more long-term problem that you really struggle with the first exercise I would recommend is called the miracle question
• 09:00 - 09:30 exercise the purpose of this is to really try to generate and find these endogenous sources of motivation in order to get you to focus on something that you would like to do the miracle question is very simple all you need to do is to think of the task that you've been procrastinating on or something that you are really struggling to pay attention to especially this is good if it's a really long-term project or something that you've been struggling with for a while and what you will do is
• 09:30 - 10:00 start to write down the answer to the question if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and you would become the sort of person who has successfully completed this task while really enjoying it a professional in whatever this task is what kind of person would you be what would you look like and through trying to explore this so describing the characteristics of yourself so by me thinking for example of the type of person I would need to be in order to not procrastinate on scripting YouTube videos I could describe the kind of
• 10:00 - 10:30 Elizabeth that would wake up tomorrow feeling confident in herself and not overthinking every single element in every video or feeling very insecure or as though she's going to like scam people because she's saying the wrong thing or misquoting sources or saying things that are actually causing more damage than good or maybe just repeating things that people have said a thousand times and they for adding to the noise online and someone who just finds pleasure in writing and learning new things the point of this exercise is to Hope move you away from the blockers of
• 10:30 - 11:00 this endogenous resource and kind of see that well the sort of person who would enjoy scripting YouTube videos as opposed to someone who feels terrified by it is not too dissimilar to the person I currently am and therefore it kind of brings you one closer to who you want to be and two in that Hour 2 hours 3 hours 20 minutes 15 minutes that you've spent writing down this task you've for a change not used your exogenous attention but actually put in the time and the practice to use the endogenous one so this is extremely
• 11:00 - 11:30 helpful so the second framework is a very special one it's a bit of a once in a lifetime exercise and I'm aware that it's really going to sound crazy to a lot of people so um if it's whenever it starts feeling crazy just skip ahead if it's not for you but basically it's called a dialogue with works and I'm going to try to find the actual source of who came up with this because I think it's a bit unclear but what it involves is when you have a very big project or task that you are completely unable to pay attention to I'm really procrastinating on it can be your whole career so it can be as big of a thing as
• 11:30 - 12:00 you need so my YouTube channel can be a thing um a book I want to write might be a thing a my medical career might be a thing so it can be really really large tasks in the dialogue with bks what you do is that you picture the task as a human you write down their life story and you create a dialogue between yourselves and them if this sounds crazy let me try and break it down with an example on myself so let's say I'm journaling about my YouTube journey and I'm struggling with with doing YouTube so what I'm going to do is imagine that the task that that I'm procrastinating
• 12:00 - 12:30 on so my YouTube channel is a person a girl my age Elizabeth's YouTube channel and I told you this was going to sound crazy but it's extremely effective so bear with me and I am going to write down as if I am Elizabeth's YouTube channel person girl writing to myself and describing who I am so basically I would write down when I was born so I would say like oh Elizabeth like you first you know thought of me at this age and then you only got started with creating me at like stage the first
• 12:30 - 13:00 thing that happened was like this video that you published and you basically write down all the Milestones chronologically that have happened in the life of this task as though it's kind of like a history of their life and once you've done this and completely humanized the story you then have you write down a dialogue between yourself and this task as a person so it's kind of like coup therapy between these two things it's really abstract sorry if this doesn't come across clearly I'm really trying um so I would say for example as Elizabeth Channel I would tell myself that you've been really
• 13:00 - 13:30 unfair on me because every time you try to spend time with me you bring a really really shitty attitude and you um are really inconsistent and you kind of treat me extremely poorly and you think about me terribly and you have so much resentment and yet you don't just like end things but you're like this in this toxic relationship with me and by humanizing it both ways you kind of see how much of a toxic person you can be with the tasks that you need to do and
• 13:30 - 14:00 therefore what this helps is kind of like unblock a lot of the issues that you have or insecurities that you have around this task a lot of the things that are driving you towards not being able to sustain your focus and attention not being able to sit there reading and thinking about it and potentially can completely shift the way that you approach your life and this task it might lead you to actually think this was not right for me it was never right for me I knew this was never going to fit I need to like let this project go or let stream go on the other hand it
• 14:00 - 14:30 can let you think that oh my God if this was an actual person I'd be like the most toxic friend or partner ever and I can't be doing this I need to be a bit more rational and fair and so it sounds a bit ridiculous but I found it extremely helpful and as I said before it is a once in A- lifetime task it's not something that you journal on every week I think you can do it once maybe for each of your big life goals or projects and see how it goes from there before I continue the only reason I'm able to research for months to create videos like this are better help who is paid partner of this video therapy has
• 14:30 - 15:00 without exaggeration saved and changed my life since I started it 3 years ago almost counterintuitively I feel the best thing that we can do for others is learn to better deal with ourselves facing my issues insecurities anxieties helps me not externalize them react better depend Less on others for constant reassurance or confidence or happiness and instead be able to achieve the best thing in the world genu presence for human connection I cannot
• 15:00 - 15:30 imagine having to go without therapy for now and so I am extremely grateful to better help for creating a space to make it more accessible for everyone when signing up you are matched with a credential professional usually within 48 hours after which you can start talking to them I prefer video calls as I find seeing someone during these conversations very helpful and this is the next best thing to actually doing in-person therapy which if I had less time and money I would love to do I've
• 15:30 - 16:00 had an incredible experience with my better health therapist and I think they make finding a practitioner and managing sessions the least stressful and most straightforward it can be if you are struggling with anything I encourage you to try betterhelp like I did if you use betterhelp.com Elizabeth Phillips or the code Elizabeth Phillips during sign up you'll get a special discount on your first month good luck if you get started there is unfortunately another huge reason we are likely to struggle with
• 16:00 - 16:30 paying attention it's very common for me to think about a task maybe even start it and very quickly switch onto something else a YouTube video a book a conversation the news my email food and not return for hours days weeks or until I absolutely have to for lots of us this abandonment of tasks and lack of attention is associated with high anxiety a panic about work that is is only relieved once I numb myself with
• 16:30 - 17:00 enough things to distract me from even the guilt of what I'm not doing so what's happening here did studied behavior in the 1990s Boston and found that our brains are always collecting and building a picture of our lives and experience which is called narrative flow this narrative storytelling can be conscious or subconscious verbal or non-verbal depending on the person and the particular moment in time we do this
• 17:00 - 17:30 because we have a thing called reflexive interiority a drive to reflect on our internal experience now as fun and noal as reflection usually is it can also be the source of our intentional downfall if a task is not engaging enough The Narrative flow which is going on subconsciously might start to become louder and louder increasingly taking over our Consciousness this is to say we become aware of ourselves we become fully immersed in our feelings and
• 17:30 - 18:00 previously subconscious reflection we come to a moment of awareness and for a lot of us this can be traumatizing byon Juan noted the tendency to task switch and not focus on work in students with higher levels of sadness pain or chaotic homes he describes that distraction overrides narrative flow when the narrative is boring cuts out time when the time is felt to be empty and suspense embodiment when one wants to be elsewhere where few adults manage to not accumulate enough
• 18:00 - 18:30 issues in our life such that if any task is not engaging enough our narrative flow becomes easily overwhelming this intolerance of the present this feeling of threat painful uneasiness is what we might call anxiety in the state a terribly strong drive to seek distraction numbing any other activity which is engaging enough to pull our conscious away again is created so we can lose track of ourselves time and this terrible Nar to flow for me this
• 18:30 - 19:00 tends to be strolling or browsing playing games while listening to sped up videos this time spent in the procrastinatory temporality reduces the painful uneasiness of having to be aware of myself so how do we overcome this unfortunately regaining attention and reducing anxiety requires actually processing it but fortunately there are ways to do that when you're feeling particularly anxious or unable to focus grab the notebook and just write down
• 19:00 - 19:30 what you're thinking as you're thinking it just start without deliberation the point is not to write what you know the point is to write to figure things out so you don't need to overthink anything if you've never done this before and would struggle with Bri to start a good way to think of it is the description in the learning journals book of trying to put a scream in a diary try to do that the goal here is to be able to progress with our thinking there are only so many thoughts and intelligible feelings that
• 19:30 - 20:00 we can keep in our mind at one time so if I start off flating them I always end up having for the first time maybe a 57th thought on the matter after being anxious for it for months and only holding the 56 messy thoughts and feelings in my mind the whole time the theory here is that you need to offload thoughts in a structured manner in order to give your brain the space to progress with its thinking and come up with new ideas you can of course do this with a very patient friend or a therapist but I
• 20:00 - 20:30 have lots less access to this exactly when I need them or how much I tend to need them for so there are days when I will Journal literally all day when I am particularly in a bad State what can also happen when doing this is that we might be able to activate what was called the Silver Lining voice which is a lot harder or even impossible to do in real life if you feel like me that you can be quite menad dramatic in your head or that your first feelings about something are quite negatively extreme
• 20:30 - 21:00 writing them out helps to bring out the more rational balanced side of you which can be very well hidden one of my favorite examples of this I'll link below for anyone curious is an extract from a very frustrated Freud's diary where you can see within one page his thinking about his frustration and pain with a patient shift from being entitled anger to questioning himself to considering to elements of reason and eventually getting to rationality and if I don't write I end up going from anger
• 21:00 - 21:30 to avoidance to fear and cycling in this joyous little cocktail of feelings forever but if I write within an hour just like Freud I can actually get to that point of rationality now because this Anxiety Relief writing doesn't really have a structure I understand that it can be quite stressful and you don't know where to start so here's my top tips after trying and failing to do it for literally two decades and suddenly kind of learning how to do it very recently so the first thing is a
• 21:30 - 22:00 big problem that we have is that we are usually only writing when we know what we want to write down so in an essay or in a school project or signing something or leaving a note for someone we actually know what we want and the only thing that we think about really is how to structure it better for example this is the opposite of this kind of anxiety writing Anxiety Relief writing is not about writing what you know as I said earlier it's about writing what you want to find out so you have to accept the fact that you might start a sentence and
• 22:00 - 22:30 you might start writing which you should do before you know what you're actually going to be writing down I don't mean this in a we we way of like a Ouija board of you know let your hand do things subconsciously but no in the sense that you don't really have a structured paragraph or an idea of where you might want to end and you might start a thought and then think oh this is terrible and you just stop that sentence there and kind of write the next thing that comes to mind that you prefer to focus on so in this kind of way it doesn't need to have any sort of structure the SEC the second point and it's TI to this is to not take break or stop writing as much as you can as I
• 22:30 - 23:00 mentioned there are days where I will literally journal for like 8 hours if I've really been struggling with something and have been blocked for like a week and um I'm feeling really really low and obviously in that case I do have to stop because my arm feels really numb and I have to eat but in general if you're doing like a short journaling session I would advise not to stop because in that sense you might be kind of impeding your thoughts and what might come up next and my top recommendation for this is if you're struggling and you don't have a coming up thought write that down and I usually do this in the
• 23:00 - 23:30 form of a question of I will start writing down I don't know why I'm so blocked or I write down I don't know why even though I'm so stressed I'm finding nothing to write and I promise you by the time you're done with that question you will have something to say and you'll have an answer for it and this has worked for me every single time and the very last thing if you have no idea what to write on um prompts might be the five hindrances sorry let me get my book oh no I think my is not one second okay so I finally found it so if you're really struggling with what to focus on or what to write about you can
• 23:30 - 24:00 use these prompts which are to focus on potentially one of the five hindrances which might be causing you anxiety or making you not work and those are doubt restlessness sleepiness craving and aversion and these were identified in an essay from John trash so um that might be a good thing to try to write about if you are really struggling with this like the free flow writing my third way to increase our attention is by increasing our motivation by saving it for later and increasing the worthiness of the goal what I mean by this is that there
• 24:00 - 24:30 are moments in my life where either because of a combination of recent events or things not going completely terribly for a brief period of time and for a change that I am super super inspired and excited to do something like there are times where I'm obsessed with this YouTube channel there are times that I am obsessed with being a doctor where just everything seems so beautiful in life and I am so excited I seem to have endless energy focus and motivation and attention to give something because I am convinced that
• 24:30 - 25:00 it's absolutely what I want to do and I feel amazing in that time and of course there are moments where I abely don't want to get out of bed and I think that everything is pointless and the world is you know so Bleak and I will fail at everything anyway so what is the point and therefore how to bring the amount of attention that you have when you love or hate something closer to one another is to kind of lend attention and motivation from that moment in time where you have so much of it and this is the only time that I would recommend that you actually
• 25:00 - 25:30 journal or write something down in a happy State because if you've noticed a lot of my journaling tends to be very depressive and it's kind of what I use to help myself get out of a bad state but if I'm extremely happy about something I will also capture my thoughts and feelings and this is where you be as descriptive as you are about how much you love something what you hope to accomplish from it the kind of life that you want to live potentially or why you just find this so beautiful and and you kind of capture your exact
• 25:30 - 26:00 perspective which if you're like me you can very very easily lose I can go from loving something to a week later going like oh my God why did I ever want to do this and there are these movements that I've seen that say things along the lines of me crying while I'm going to the job that I pray for which is absolutely how I feel so um I would recommend that the better you get at doing this you'll see what you need the next time that you don't have that motivation if that makes sense is it the perspective is it the future things that you might want to accomplish by doing this that you kind of forget about in the moment so capturing that self that
• 26:00 - 26:30 naive hopefulness is really really helpful to use kind of later on you have these then collected kind of in the bank these captured versions of your prior self that you can lean on when it's a rainy day and it's depressing and your motivation cannot come internally therefore you can redirect your attention by changing your mood and your perspective with things that are customized to you as opposed to kind of leaning on someone else and then them giving you advice and it kind of going like no no you cannot resuscitate me my feelings are completely negative so yeah
• 26:30 - 27:00 hopefully these helped with your indogen attention that was everything for me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and do not believe everything you think thanks bye