The high price of distracted living
How you lost your concentration (and how to regain it)
🏷️ Categories: Attention, Time management.
Have you ever unlocked your phone to check a notification... and an hour later realized you couldn’t remember why you picked it up in the first place?
No, you're not the only one it happens to — we've all been there.
And yes, this is for you, the one who feels like your days vanish between notifications, open tabs, and half-finished tasks. For those who suspect, even if they can’t explain it, that something is off with the frantic pace of life that society has normalized.
Today, we’re going to talk about the high cost of living distracted.
We’ll explore what happens in your brain when you jump from task to task. Why this fragmented rhythm wears down your mind, sabotages your learning, and kills your productivity. And most importantly, what you can do to break free from this spiral of noise, lost focus, and wasted time.
You’ll see the true price of distraction — and how to reclaim your attention.
Attention: the most valuable resource of our era
It’s not time we’re lacking. It’s attention.
As Newport says in A World Without Email, you must treat your attention as a precious and scarce resource — because it is. The problem is, we treat it like a dumping ground. Anything can interrupt it, and we don’t even care. A WhatsApp message, an Instagram notification... any sound or vibration instantly makes us turn our heads and look at the screen.
Many will think: “I just check the notification and go back to what I was doing.”
But no.
The brain has something called an attentional filter. It’s the mechanism through which your brain constantly scans the environment using your senses and decides what to focus on. It follows two criteria: importance and change.
If it’s important, it grabs your attention.
If something changes in the environment, it grabs your attention.
The problem? Technology constantly triggers this attentional filter.
It keeps you in a constant state of alert because your phone has trained you through “intermittent reinforcement.” When a notification pops up, you don’t know if it’s important or not — but it might be. So, you live in a stressful state of constant alert.
I’ve seen it hundreds of times on the bus.
Sometimes, someone brings a book to read. They’re reading, then a notification goes off. They don’t know if it’s important, so they check it — just in case. After replying, they take a quick scroll through social media, and when they arrive at their stop… they haven’t read a single page.
That’s how easily distractions crush people’s intentions.
Working memory is overloaded
Working memory is like your mental workspace.
It’s the memory you use to think, solve problems, or make decisions. But it’s limited — it can only hold a few things at once, typically around 4. The more you add, the worse you perform. And if, on top of that, you’re bombarded with notifications, emails, half-finished tasks, and scattered thoughts… collapse is inevitable.
Ever started doing something, got distracted, and then couldn’t remember what you were doing?
That’s it. And the more it happens, the more drained you’ll feel.
The insula: the reason behind mental exhaustion
Shifting your focus has a cost. A big one.
Every time you switch focus, your brain has to work. That effort is made by a brain region called the insula. The problem is, this switching consumes a lot of energy — which leads to mental exhaustion, reduced concentration, and worse decision-making (Levitin, 2015).
That’s why we end the day exhausted even if we feel like we got nothing done.
In office environments, for instance, the average worker loses 2 hours and 10 minutes per day to distractions. Plus, it takes around 25 minutes to return to a state of flow after being interrupted (Mark et al., 2008). That’s if you’re not distracted again — which is likely, since 42% of people can’t go a single hour without distraction (Dropbox, 2023). Considering the average person checks their phone 5 times per hour (Andrews et al., 2015), most of us go through the day without tapping into our full potential — not even for a minute.
That’s how brutal the loss is.
One study showed how distractions directly hurt academic performance. Students who switched between studying and occasional distractions scored worse than those who focused solely on the task (Dontre, 2020).
Sounds obvious, right? But, how many people actually take care of their attention?
Almost no one seems to care about living in a state of permanent distraction.
The iPhone effect
Even if you ignore the notifications — it doesn’t matter.
Just a vibration, a sound, or simply having your phone in sight is enough to tank your performance. A notification activates your attentional filter, pulling you out of the flow state — with all the costs that entails.
Your phone grabs your attention so much that its mere presence affects you.
This is known as the iPhone effect.
Just having a phone on the table makes conversations seem less engaging and makes us feel less empathy toward the other person. And it’s not just in meetings. It happens when you talk to a friend, your partner, a family member.
If there’s a phone between you, the connection weakens (Misra et al., 2014).
Reclaim your attention
If you’ve made it this far, maybe you feel the same way I do: enough of living distracted.
I’ve written other articles that dive deeper into how to break out of this spiral of noise, interruptions, and empty distractions. If you want to take the next step and rebuild your focus so you can move forward with intention, here’s a personal selection:
Read them, save what resonates with you — and most importantly: start today.
Don’t wait for the world to get quieter. Turn the volume down yourself and focus.
✍️ Your turn: What’s one thing you could do today to change the dynamic and step away from this lifestyle that seems designed to constantly interrupt you?
💭 Quote of the day: “Your reality is created by what you focus on.”
— Jen Sincero, You Are a Badass
See you next time! 👋
References 📚
Andrews, S., Ellis, D. A., Shaw, H., & Piwek, L. (2015). Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use.
Dontre, A. J. (2020). The influence of technology on academic distraction: A review. Human Behavior And Emerging Technologies, 3(3), 379–390.
Dropbox. (2023). Th1e modern workday is full of distractions — and it’s costing businesses big. Dropbox Blog.
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work.
Misra, S., Cheng, L., Genevie, J., & Yuan, M. (2014). The iPhone effect. Environment and Behavior, 48(2), 275–298.
Newport, C. (2021). A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever.
Levitin, D. (2015). The Organized Mind: The Science of Preventing Overload, Increasing Productivity, and Restoring Your Focus.
I needed to see/read this as it has been on my mind for sometime. Excellent article!
excellent advice, alvaro. thank you. it's the damn smartphone, every time. manipulating us. telling us we are loved, we are important, we have agency. when it's all hollow noise and data harvesting. keep reporting, alvaro. we are with you. ur fan, j.