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The skip ten-second button on Netflix and I have become fast friends lately. Every time I settle in and try to watch a TV show, I get this urge to skip through it a bit. Oh, the characters are taking a little too long to reach a conclusion? Skip. Why won’t they just kiss already?! Skip. I’m bored, let me just go a little ahead. Skip. Skip. Skip. The length of the average teenager’s attention span is rapidly shortening and it’s caused by numerous reasons.
There’s the most apparent one: social media. The new shortened forms of content such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Snapchat Spotlight utilize compact little videos designed to grab teenagers’ attention for all of thirty seconds before they scroll to the next. The infinite stream of content gives the apps their addicting quality and coincidentally shortens teens’ attention span and ability to remain interested. This makes long forms of content such as TV shows, movies or lecture-type videos difficult to watch to the end without getting distracted.
It also makes simply listening more difficult. It happens all the time where I’m sitting in class hearing the teacher talk and then suddenly my mind drifts and I start thinking about something else. By the time I snap out of it either the teacher has stopped lecturing or I missed valuable instructions. It’s not necessarily zoning out, it’s more like being easily distracted and having a hard time focusing.
Besides social media, the entire concept of always having a screen within your reach contributes to making teens reach boredom faster. Why would you need to know how to entertain yourself when you could have an iPad to keep you company supplying you with a vast array of games, shows and music? Why would you look through a textbook when you could just Google it and get the answer right away?
Spotify premium sales have soared with “the majority of Spotify’s revenue comes from its paying subscribers in the Premium segment, which makes up approximately 87% of its revenue” according to Yahoo Finance. This is because of the simple fact that people don’t have the patience the sit through ads anymore and can’t wait the necessary thirty seconds before getting bored and giving up.
When I was younger, I was addicted to reading and could read for hours on end without even lifting my head. Now, even though I still love to read, I have a hard time sitting down and starting a book without getting distracted. A single notification could lead to a fifteen-minute distraction, derailing my plans.
Even without technology, I find myself becoming increasingly scatterbrained where I hop from one task to another forgetting to finish something before starting another. My thought process goes seemingly like this: “I should probably start doing my math homework. Oh look my friend texted me, she wants to hang out on Saturday, so I should check my work schedule. Wow, those flowers look really dry let me go water them. Ugh why is the kitchen such a mess I should wash some of the dishes. Oh look here’s the jacket I’ve been trying to find for forever, let me go hang it up in the closet. My nails look so chipped I need to redo them. Wait if I want to wear a good outfit tomorrow I should do the laundry right now.” On and on and on until it’s time to go to bed and my math homework remains undone.
Today, the average person’s attention span is forty-seven seconds and decreased by one hundred and three seconds from 2004, according to, Gloria Mark, Ph.D. One of the bigger causes is a notion called sleep debt.
“If you need eight hours of sleep a night but you’re only getting six hours a night, that difference is called a sleep debt. And we know that the greater the sleep debt, the shorter the attention spans. And what do people do when they have a lot of sleep debt? We found that they tend to do more lightweight activities like social media. They just don’t have the resources to be able to focus and do hard work, so they do what’s easy based on the amount of resources that they have available,” Mark said.
Even with the drastic setbacks in our ability to focus, I believe we still have the ability to improve and with effort, we can slow down the teen time warp. Shortened content intake, less time with screens and more sleep are just some of the ways you can take back the time lost and finally focus.
