In Gloria Marks’ new book, “Attention Span” she and her fellow researchers have spent the last 20 years delving into the nuances of how the brain focuses on tasks, how it processes information, what it requires for success and how damage can occur. To be perfectly transparent, many of our enterprise customers come to us for help with their employee’s attention span, due to issues with productivity. American workers are experiencing the highest level of burnout ever recorded, which is truly remarkable when you consider 90% of all jobs required manual labor only 70 years ago. Now people are experiencing crippling burnout from sitting at a desk at a computer screen. Are we weaker than we used to be or is there something deeper occurring?

Mark clearly explains why this is phenomena.

Our brain has a set of requirements to function optimally, much like a muscle. It requires proper nutrition, it requires conditions to learn, it requires rest to recover and can even be damaged from overuse. This damage is called ‘burnout’, which is actually a medical term recognized by the WHO. Burnout refers to the lack of ability to focus, the sensation of listlessness, apathy and intense exhaustion. Burnout is a physical state of depletion. This is also the #1 issue we are seeing in the tech, medical and education industries.

We have built our society values around education being its highest achievement and the sole pathway to secure a specific form of a career. These opportunities require rigor of our minds and came with the concept that intellectual labor protected our bodies. Manual labor can be dangerous, taxing and is based on a financial exchange of 1:1. Yet, we are seeing cases of burnout that rival workplace injuries in even the most challenging of environments. This is because we considered the mind to be an unlimited and non-exhaustive resource separate from the pitfalls of the body. 

We were wrong. 

Attention sits at the crossroads of burnout. We are living in a time where the average American worker in any form of an ‘office’ job, including remote work, has an attention span of 40 seconds. You read that right, 40 seconds. You probably have taken a pause reading these few paragraphs. A 40 second attention span simply means the length of time we can hold a thought. When we switch our attention, even while performing the same task, but flitting between several different requirements nestled in that task, each break is a break in attention. Each of these attention disruptions, whether intentional or required, comes with its own cost to which I will refer to as your own ‘mental bank account of capacity’.  

This mental bank account is filled with skills, experiences, education, hobbies, family, community, religious practices, required schedules for yourself and dependants, pets, personal security, food requirements, exercise/movement, transportation, personal hygiene requirements and housing all before we discuss work. For many knowledge workers, work is a fluid activity with loose boundaries around beginning and end. Emails can be checked and answered 24 hours a day, tasks are never-ending and work requires several forms of communication; meaning you will have to flip in-between several forms of communication/organization/documentation channels per task. Modern day work requires attention-breakage and unrelenting readiness. 

The mental bank account of capacity is drawn down every instance your attention span breaks.

The amount of the withdrawal is dependent on the type of attention break. An example being : if you need to flip from email to slack on the same topic, the withdrawal is small. If you need to flip from email into a meeting on an entirely different topic, the withdrawal is large. What is made clear in Mark’s book is that we grossly underestimated how many withdrawals a person can make before they are operating at a deficit and how quickly that can turn into low-grade burnout. 

Like I mentioned earlier, most of our enterprise partners contact us as the ‘fixer’ to this issue, their goal being to stop burn out while increasing productivity.  Attention span and nervous system balance are interconnected. When you are experiencing a state of stress, like having to break your focus over 200 times a day while achieving on average of 243 micro tasks, your brain is exhausted. This form of exhaustion requires mental rest while rebalancing the nervous system. To achieve a state of brain exhaustion, you must pull at other resources in your body to do this; the nervous system. The result requires the body to lean drastically towards the Sympathetic State, which is the state of extreme alertness, otherwise known as the ‘stress state’. Though the sympathetic state gets a bad rap, which I will address in a future article, the way we are living is taxing the brain and body to reinforce a loop of stress that is unbreakable by sleep alone. We live in an exhausted state of connection that requires alertness while maintaining hyper-productivity. 

A weekend of rest can not repair burnout or near-burnout states. 

This is why people experiencing burnout say that they can sleep all weekend and not feel recovered by monday. Their nervous system is locked in the stress state which blocks the mental bank account of capacity from refilling. 80% of American workers report feeling stressed on Monday’s due to exhaustion. Overtime, this reduces your ability to access critical thinking skills, reduces communication skills including a reduction in language skills. Your mind begins to work slower with the ability to accomplish less tasks. We also experience heightened states of depression and anxiety. 

There is no reason to fear, there are many resources and ways to rebalance the nervous system and create conscious patterns to care for your mind like the magical muscle it is. We can understand that the current system we work in is not beneficial for us while also recognizing there are ways to support our mental health, physical health and expand our attention spans. Tuning is one of those ways, it not only rebalances your nervous system in 15 minutes, if used as the practice it was designed to, 3x a week, it has been proven to increase attention span. We even have a frequency setting called focus

Learn more and listen in to Gloria Mark’s Book and an interview with her about it on the Ezra Klein Podcast.