Latest / Spacious Success / O25 | Fragmented Focus: Why Your Attention Is a Design Problem, Not a Discipline Problem

Transcript

O25 | Fragmented Focus: Why Your Attention Is a Design Problem, Not a Discipline Problem · Spacious Success

• 0:05
  Hi, it's Dr. Christy Goodwin. Welcome back to Spacious Success. I want to start with a statistic today that absolutely stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it.
• 0:16
  Six in 10 women aged 18 to 24 reported concerns about their attention span. 60% of young women are worried about their capacity to focus. I call this our FQ, our focus quotient. That is the highest of any age group. Higher than women in their 40s, higher than women in their 50s, higher even than women in their 60s and 70s.
• 0:43
  Young women are reporting the steepest cognitive concern of any demographic. And if you are sitting with a version of this, if you open a document and you lose the thread within a couple of seconds, if you scroll for 40 minutes and feel somehow more depleted than when you started, if you read the same paragraph over and over again, and it still does not stick, I want you to know something. Okay.
• 1:11
  This is not necessarily a focus problem. This may not be ADHD, although for some of you it may be. Check out episode number 023 for more details on perimenopause, menopause and ADHD. This is a design problem. And today we're going to name it. I'm going to explain it and I'm going to give you a way back. So let's dive in.
• 1:34
  Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro-performance scientist, speaker and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost. After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
• 1:55
  On Spacious Success, I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
• 2:14
  A couple of weeks ago, I was on a flight to Cairns. I know those of you who have heard episode one will know flights feature heavily in my stories. And yes, that is where I do most of my best thinking. And I found myself unable to read on the flight. Not physically unable to read. I hadn't left my glasses at home. I had a book. I had three and a half hours of uninterrupted time. I also had no phone signal, no Wi-Fi. The service wasn't available on this flight. And I had coffee.
• 2:43
  I was traveling to deliver a keynote, so there was absolutely no one to interrupt me to ask for a snack or to ask, are we there yet?
• 2:50
  If you know, you know. And I could not get past the third page in my book without my attention sliding off the paragraph like water off a windscreen. My mind kept meandering. Now, I'm someone who reads voraciously. I have a PhD. I have spent the better part of two decades studying how the brain processes information. And I sat there on that plane, genuinely alarmed at what I was experiencing in my own head.
• 3:19
  I started paying attention, pardon the pun, in my coaching clients saying this too, in the women that I was seeing after keynotes. And I started noticing a pattern that I now think is one of the most significant yet least discussed performance risks of our time.
• 3:38
  These are women who don't lack intelligence. They have drive. They are some of the most accomplished people that I've worked with. And yet they often describe to me a creeping inability to do the thing that they've always done that defines them. To think deeply for sustained periods without interruption.
• 3:59
  They report feeling constantly distracted and focused work feels like a relic from the past. One client described it as, "'My brain has become a browser with 47 tabs open all the time, and I cannot find the tab that I actually need.'"
• 4:16
  Now, this is not a stress response, although stress can often present and can diminish our capacity to focus. This is what I call our focus quotient being depleted. Your brain's ability to commit to sustained directed attention is being worn down by years of tech design. The digital tools that have been deliberately engineered to be distracting and disruptive. And here's the confronting part. It's not accidental.
• 4:46
  The technology we use the most is engineered to fracture our focus. For many years, we've wagged the finger at social media as a chief source of distraction. We've often overlooked the very workplace technologies that were meant to make us more efficient are actually the culprits at distracting us. The constant ping of team or Slack chats, email pings, meeting reminders. The digital deluge is adding to our fractured focus.
• 5:16
  And we're only now starting to measure what that engineering is really costing us. In 2025, Jean Hallis conducted, Hales conducted a study. And this particular study called the Women's Health, National Women's Health Survey, was one of the most comprehensive surveys of women's health in Australia.
• 5:41
  and they published their findings on attention and memory that I think could be making the front page of the news. Six in 10 women, as I said at the beginning, aged 18 to 24, reported concerns about their attention span, compared to just two in 10 women aged over 65.
• 5:59
  Four in 10 young women reported short-term memory concerns, double the rate of older women. Young women are worried about their brain health, and rightly so. Now, this study was based on women's self-reporting concerns. It was not a study to measure their actual diminished cognitive performance. I need to make that clear. Okay.
• 6:19
  Nor did this research aim to explore reasons why there were these distinct differences across the age span. What I think is interesting and what I want to explore in this episode is that it's young women's focus and memory concerns are higher than older women who often blame baby brain or brain fog for their impaired cognitive skills.
• 6:41
  And if you're interested in hearing more about why these neuromyths have been perpetuated, listen to the episode I did with Dr. Sarah Mackay, episode number 008. There'll be a link in the show notes.
• 6:53
  Now, let me explain what is happening in the brain, because this is where the HOS framing, our human operating system, really matters. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for sustained focus, your working memory, your impulse control center, and your higher order thinking, well, it developed hundreds of thousands of years ago.
• 7:15
  It was designed to operate in a relatively stable sensory environment. You were designed to forage for information, not to have huge and often unsolicited amounts of information constantly being thrust at you. The attention economy, which is where we're now living and operating, is a business model that powers most of the technology that we use. And it's built on a single insight. Your human attention is finite.
• 7:43
  And whoever captures more of it makes the most money, to be frank. Every notification, every algorithmically selected image, every red bubble on an app is a micro-interruption designed by engineers to maximize the time your eyes and your attention stay on a platform.
• 8:02
  Each of these interruptions has a distinct neurobiological cost. Research on attention residue, it's a term that researcher Sophie Leroy coined, shows that when we switch tasks, a portion of our cognitive resources remains attached to the previous task, meaning that we're never fully present with what we're doing. We're always mentally trialing or rehearsing something. Okay.
• 8:26
  Microsoft Research says that the average knowledge worker is interrupted roughly every two minutes by meetings, messages, or mail, email, pings. Stack those constant interruptions across an eight-hour workday, if you're lucky enough to work eight hours, and the cumulative cognitive cost isn't minor. It's the difference between a thinking day and just a processing day, between deep work and just constant busyness.
• 8:52
  For young women, this pattern begins before their attention systems are fully mature. The prefrontal cortex, research suggests, is not fully developed until somewhere in our mid-20s, perhaps later for earlier for females than males. Sustained immersion in a digital environment that has been designed to be distracting continues.
• 9:14
  under develops our attentional systems in ways that we're only beginning to measure. Given that our kids and teens are being dumped in the digital stream at earlier and earlier ages, it's little wonder that we have reduced focus and attention spans.
• 9:30
  There's even a name for it. It's called popcorn brain. Researcher David Levi in 2011 coined this term to describe the state of fragmented attention caused by constant digital multitasking and overstimulation. It's not a medical diagnosis, but it's a colloquial term used to describe how many of us are feeling day to day.
• 9:52
  I want to address something directly because I often hear people say, but I can multitask. I'm good at it. No, no, you cannot. I'm sorry, but the neuroscience is unambiguous here. What feels like multitasking is rapid task switching and task switching is expensive. Every switch costs, burns through glucose, releases cortisol, and prevents your brain from activating your hippocampus, which is your brain's memory center. It's a hard drive.
• 10:20
  So when you check Slack notifications during a deep work sprint, and then you try to return to your document, you're not picking up where you left off. You're actually restarting every time. And in fact, the research has studied this. It's called the resumption lag.
• 10:38
  it is believed that it takes the average adult 23 minutes and 15 seconds to reorient their attention after it has been diverted from the original task at hand. Now, I'm not saying it takes you 23 minutes to restart the task. Hopefully it doesn't. But the ping of an email or the chat from a colleague is disruptive. What we know is that to get back into that deep focus state, it takes you around 23 minutes.
• 11:05
  The digital dementia framing is important here and I want to use it carefully. I am not claiming it's a clinical condition. It's not. But I am naming a functional pattern. The sustained fragmentation of our attention through chronic constant digital stimulation has reduced our ability to sustain deep focus thought. It's impairing our memory. Now, it's not irreversible because we know the brain is plastic.
• 11:32
  Our attentional capacity responds to training in both directions. It can degrade it or it can support it. But you really have to understand what is happening to your brain before you can ever begin to design against it. And here is the organizational story because this matters for anyone who is listening, for anyone who's leading a team, making decisions about how work gets done.
• 12:02
  If your people are operating in a constant state of attentional fragmentation, you're not getting their best thinking. You are getting their most persistent thinking. You're getting a low-res version of themselves. Now, the ideas that require sustained, uninterrupted cognition, the strategic insight, the creative synthesis, the gentleness,
• 12:24
  the genuinely novel solution are the first casualties when we're constantly interrupted. This is performance architecture, and it's a problem. But the good news is that we also have a solution. Today, I want to give you three things that you can do that are grounded in science in terms of restoring your memory and your attention. These aren't hacks. I don't like hacks. I think they're
• 12:50
  performance protocols built on how your brain and biology work. The first one is to protect what I call your power zone hours. Your brain doesn't perform the same way evenly across the day. Research on circadian rhythms tells us that most of us have different peaks and troughs, and this depends on our chronotype. We're going to do a lot of work.
• 13:10
  We have a unique peak performance window each day or night, often for around two to four hours. This is when our working memory is robust, where we are able to hold complex ideas, when we can do deep work.
• 13:26
  There's a link in the resources if you want to access my chronotype assessment and report so you can learn more about the science and the strategies to leverage so that you can work with rather than against your chronotype. This window is too valuable to spend in meetings, being distracted in your Slack channel. Your power zone hours should be defended for your most dense work, what Cal Newport calls your deep work.
• 13:56
  Everything else needs to wait. I call this building a fortress around your focus because research confirms that we are 55% more productive when we actually do our deep work in our peak performance window. This is about working smarter, not harder.
• 14:15
  The second is to use what neuroscience calls ultradian rhythms to structure your focus blocks. Your brain naturally cycles through periods of higher and lower alertness, roughly every 90 minutes. It's also while we sleep for roughly 90 minute cycles.
• 14:31
  Rather than fighting your low points, reaching for more caffeine, pushing through, scrolling social media, use those troughs as recovery windows. 90 minutes roughly of focused work followed by a deliberate break of 2 to 10 minutes, ideally 20 minutes if you can.
• 14:50
  This is where we do something restorative. Hopefully not another screen, not an email, not triaging our inbox. Something that allows your prefrontal cortex to rest. I sometimes close my eyes for 30 seconds. Not necessarily meditation, but as a visual break. Why?
• 15:08
  Our occipital lobe, which processes our visual input, gets fatigued when we are spending hours and hours on our screens. Video calls, we need time to restore. 30 seconds with your eyes closed does huge things to that part of your brain.
• 15:24
  The third is what I call a digital audit of your attention environment. This is not a digital detox. I don't believe in them. They don't work. But this is a deliberate audit. For one week, notice which apps do you check reflexively rather than intentionally.
• 15:41
  Which notifications are the ones that are hard to resist? Which ones are habitual? How many times a day does something external interrupt your thinking versus how many times are you interrupting your own thinking? The notifications with the red bubbles, they're not neutral. Red signals danger, urgency, importance. Psychologically, before you've even had a chance to open the notification, every red notification is a small cortisol trigger.
• 16:11
  Not large enough to feel it, but significant enough to accumulate. Turn off your non-essential notifications. It is critical to your performance. Or batch or bundle them. I also want to name something for the perfectionist listening in. You may be hearing this and thinking, but I need to be responsive. My job requires me to be available. That is true for some of you.
• 16:35
  But for some of you, some of the time. It's not true for most of you, most of the time. Constantly being available creates a time pressure that most of us feel around email and messaging. And it's usually self-imposed and often inaccurate. Most things that feel urgent are not. And the cost of treating everything as if it's urgent is fragmenting our focus.
• 17:01
  As I often remind my coaching clients, your urgency is not my emergency. Reclaiming your FQ is not about doing less. It's about doing the right things at the right time under the right conditions, which means protecting your focus. So I want to wrap up with a reframe. If your focus and your memory feels worse than it used to,
• 17:29
  It's a biological response to a digital world that has been engineered to be distracting and disruptive. Your attention system isn't broken, but it's responding perfectly to irrational conditions. The question isn't what's wrong with me. The question should really be is what is wrong with my environment? What am I willing to change? How can I change my ways of working?
• 17:52
  And so this week's power up is to identify your power zone hours, block them in your calendar, label them as non-negotiable, then actually protect them. Turn off the notifications, block meetings, get that deep work done and see what happens to your thinking.
• 18:10
  Next episode, we have another guest interview with an ambitious woman. Then the next solo episode is I'm going to explore something personal. We're going to talk about the trade-offs that I see ambitious women make, the ones we don't post about, the ones we don't often name, and it is one of the most honest conversations that I am planning on having with you.
• 18:33
  I can't wait to share it with you. Until then, guard your FQ like the asset that it is. I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin. Thank you for listening to Spacious Success.