Attention Isn’t the Problem — Overstimulation Is

Over the last decade, in both my classrooms and my wellness work, I’ve watched a shift in how people focus. Students are intelligent, engaged, and often highly motivated. Many adults I talk to are the same. Yet a familiar pattern keeps showing up: they can start almost anything, but staying with one thing long enough to absorb it feels harder than it used to.

Person looking out of the window, quiet and pensive mood

This didn’t appear overnight, but the pandemic years of remote life accelerated it. When school, work, social connection, entertainment, and news all moved onto screens, daily life became dense with notifications, platforms, and parallel streams of information. That intensity has eased in some ways, but the habits didn’t fully reset. The mind got used to living in a high-input environment.

So when students returned to in-person classrooms, or adults went back to offices and routines, the structure of the day looked familiar, but their internal baseline had changed. A 50-minute discussion or a long, focused task now had to compete with a few years of training in rapid switching and constant digital stimulation.

When I started reading more formally about this, the research didn’t describe people who had “lost” attention. It described people who were operating under cognitive overload. Studies in psychology and neuroscience repeatedly point out that attention is a selective process: the brain has to filter a vast amount of incoming information because its processing capacity is limited.

One large survey study on children and adolescents, for example, found that heavy media and technology use was linked to higher levels of psychological issues and attention problems—even after accounting for exercise and diet. That doesn’t prove that screens cause every difficulty, but it does mirror what many of us see: when the volume of input rises, attention quality drops.

Adults experience their own version. Workdays stretch across email, messaging apps, project tools, and video calls. Social life is threaded through group chats and social media feeds. Even “down time” often involves scrolling. The brain rarely gets unstructured, low-stimulation space. Over time, that feels less like distraction and more like a permanent background hum.

Different cultures have developed their own ways of protecting mental bandwidth.

• In Japan, traditional aesthetics emphasize simplicity, negative space, and what some designers describe as kansō—the quiet power of restraint. Architecture, gardens, and some forms of interior design deliberately reduce visual clutter and use empty space as a design element, with the goal of creating calm, uncluttered environments that support rest and focus.

• In Scandinavian countries, silence is a social norm in many public settings. Trains in Norway and Denmark, for instance, often have designated “quiet zones” where phone calls and loud conversations are discouraged, and general low-volume behavior is expected. The idea is simple: people deserve at least some parts of the day where their senses are not constantly demanded.

• Around the Mediterranean, research on the Mediterranean diet now explicitly talks about conviviality and commensality—slow, shared meals, long conversations at the table, and eating as a social ritual rather than an isolated task. These long, communal meals are not just “nice traditions”; they create built-in pauses where life temporarily narrows to one activity.

None of these examples are framed as “attention strategies.” They are simply cultural structures that, almost as a side effect, give the brain periods of lower input and clearer focus.

By contrast, many of us now live in environments where almost every gap in the day can be filled—often by something digital—and we are individually responsible for saying no. That is a difficult position to be in, even for adults with self-awareness and resources. For young people who grew up inside this environment, it is the only reality they know.

From what I see semester after semester, attention itself has not disappeared. What’s missing are the conditions that allow it to show up consistently.

A Practical Direction (and a Personal One)

In my own life, the changes that help the most are small and repeatable.

I start my mornings without electronics, partly out of curiosity at first and now out of habit. On the days I keep that boundary, my mind feels less reactive and more available when I finally sit down to work. I try to be honest about how much passive scrolling drains me; I may still reach for my phone, but I notice the difference in how my brain feels afterward. When I teach, I sometimes ask students to leave their phones in their bags or in another part of the room. Many of them report, somewhat surprised, that the work feels easier without the constant pull of possibility in their hands.

I still live in the same world everyone else does. I’m not immune to overstimulation, and I don’t manage it perfectly. But paying attention to the conditions around my attention—how I start the day, how many channels are open at once, whether I give my mind honest breaks—has been more useful than blaming myself for getting distracted.

If there is one conclusion I keep returning to, it’s this: our attention is not failing us. It’s telling us, very clearly, that the volume of input has become too high. The work now is not to “fix” attention, but to design our days so that it has somewhere quieter to land.