Tech Thursday Smart Life

About the attention crisis, what the research actually says — and how two weeks without a phone can give you back 10 years of focus.

You open your eyes. Before you even sit up, you've checked your phone. Maybe not even because you decided to — it just happened. Your hand reached out. Like a reflex.

It's not your weakness. It's design.

For the past twenty years, our brains have been undergoing something like a silent experiment. No one asked our permission. No one presented studies in advance. Platforms were built with one goal in mind: to keep you around for as long as possible. And they succeeded, breathtakingly well.

5h 16m Average daily phone time. An increase of 14% in one year.

7.6 s Average attention span in 2026 — down from 12 seconds in 2000.

566× Number of times we change tasks during a workday. About once per minute.

There's a small, disturbing detail in these numbers. A goldfish — the clichéd yardstick for poor memory — has an attention span of about 9 seconds. We're at 7.6.

But that's not the whole picture. And that picture is important.

Part 01

What happens inside your brain when you scroll?

Imagine turning on a regular TV channel from 1995. A news broadcast. A man in a suit is reading from a piece of paper. The images change maybe once every two minutes. Calm. Methodical. A little boring.

Contrast that with the TikTok feed. Each clip is designed to grab your attention in under three seconds. What doesn’t gets scrolled away. The algorithms learn what you’re drawn to — and serve up more of it. More extreme. More stimulating. Your brain learns, in parallel, what ”interesting enough” means. And the threshold rises.

Prefrontal cortex

The rational, planning ”self.” Research shows that high digital stimulation slows down activity here — it’s the brain’s brake pedal on impulses.

The dopamine system

Every notification, every like, every swipe triggers a small dopamine boost. The brain is built to seek reward — platforms exploit this with precision.

Default network mode

Active when we are ”idle” — the foundation for creativity, problem solving, and daydreaming. Constant stimulation shuts it down.

Amygdala

The emotional center. Studies show 35% increased sensitivity in heavy social media users. We react more strongly. We feel worse about things we shouldn't really care about.

The neurological outcome is heavy: social media algorithms are basically dopamine loops. They are neither random nor neutral. They are tailor-made, by the world's most talented engineers, to create an addiction that is just subtle enough that we don't realize it until we've already been scrolling for an hour.

”The attention economy — valued at $400 billion — turns your focus into profit. AI is its engine.”

And now we’ve added AI to the equation. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Every response is immediate, seamless, perfect. It’s amazing — and that’s a problem. Every time a new type of stimulus is delivered without friction, we train our brains to expect just that. The things that require patience — a book, a long thought, a conversation without a phone in hand — start to feel unbearable.

Part 02

The study that changed everything we thought we knew

In February 2025, a group of American and Canadian researchers published a study in PNAS Nexus — one of the most prestigious scientific journals in multidisciplinary research. It was no small study, and the results were hard to ignore.

🔬 Study · PNAS Nexus, February 2025

Blocked mobile internet = 10 years younger brain

The researchers had 467 participants install an app that blocked all internet use on their mobile phones for two weeks. Calls and text messages worked just as usual. Computers and tablets were allowed.

Although the participants were motivated to participate in the study, it was overwhelmingly difficult: 75% canceled. But for the 25%s who completed, something astonishing awaited.

✔ 91% improved on at least one of the three measured outcomes
✔ 71% reported better mental health
✔ The improvement in depression symptoms was greater than the effect of antidepressants in most studies
✔ Attention span improved by an amount equivalent to reverse 10 years of cognitive aging
✔ The effect held on two weeks after the study ended

Castelo, N., Kushlev, K., Ward, AF, Esterman, M., Reiner, PB (2025). PNAS Nexus, 4(2). doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017

Perhaps the most important word in the study results is reversible. The concentration we lose is not permanent. The brain is neuroplastic — it can heal. Ten years of cognitive decline can be recovered in a fortnight. That's not motivational talk. It's scientifically measured.

What did the participants do when the phone was no longer an option? They exercised. They read books. They met people. And they slept — on average almost 20 minutes more per night. In a country where one in three adults reports suffering from a sleep disorder, this is not a trivial figure.

Think of it this way: Each notification you respond to takes an average of 23 minutes of concentration recovery to land from. If you check your phone 96 times a day — the average for an American, and hardly any different in Sweden — your brain is practically never deeply focused.

Part 03

Sweden turned around. And the world is watching.

From a global perspective, Sweden has done something remarkable. We were early to digitalize schools — and we were early to regret it.

In 2022, then-Minister of Education Lotta Edholm called the digitalization of schools ”an experiment that was not scientifically based and that harms children’s learning.” It was a political bombshell. And it started a movement.

🇸🇪 Sweden leads the way

The Public Health Agency's guidelines for 2024 — the first of their kind

• 0–2 years: Preferably no screen time at all, except for video calls with family
• 2–5 years: Maximum one hour per day of age-appropriate content
• Teenagers: Maximum three hours — compared to the current average of seven
• Schools: Proposal for a ban up to grade 9, including breaks

In 2024, Karolinska Institutet linked high screen use in young children with poorer sleep, depressive symptoms, reduced physical activity and delayed communication development — visible from the age of two.

The results are measurable. Statistics from the Swedish Media Authority 2025 show that average daily screen use among 9–12 year olds reduced by 40 minutes since 2022. The proportion of 9-year-olds without a mobile phone has almost doubled. Sales of ”dumb phones” — simple phones without internet — tripled at Sweden’s largest electronics chain between 2022 and 2024.

Sweden had looked into the abyss and decided to step back.

Part 04

Children and young people: a different kind of vulnerability

For adults, it's about lost focus, poorer sleep, increased anxiety. For children and teens, it's about something potentially deeper: how the brain to be shaped.

A brain under the age of 25 is still undergoing rapid development. The prefrontal cortex — the part that handles impulse control, planning, and long-term thinking — is not fully developed until around 25. Exposing the brain to constant dopamine reward without friction during these years is like building a house while sawing through the supporting beams.

Research published in 2025 shows a consistent link: teens who consume a lot of short-form digital content have systematically more difficult to focus on tasks that require sustained cognitive investment. It’s not just screens themselves — the platform’s format plays a role. The TikTok trend is particularly clear here: fast pace, constant stimulation, no friction, endless variety. The brain is trained for exactly that — and when something else is required, like reading a chapter in a book or writing a coherent text, it feels unbearable.

The Karolinska researchers' conclusion is harsh but clear: the effects of high screen use are visible from the age of two.

”We teach children to be impatient. Then we expect them to be able to sit still for 40 minutes and listen.”

It's important to point out: this isn't about technology being evil. It's about design. There's a big difference between a child watching an educational film about sea creatures and a child stuck in a TikTok loop. Content, context, and quantity are three separate variables — and we tend to treat them as if they were one.

Part 05

AI: tool or new villain?

The inevitable topic. AI.

We are in a historic moment. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and their siblings have changed what it means to think, write, and solve problems. It is seriously impressive. And it raises a question that has barely been asked yet, despite its urgency:

What happens to the ability to think when we stop practicing it?

The short answer is the same as for muscles: they atrophy. A brain that is never confronted with friction — having to look up an answer, hold a thought in its head long enough to form it, endure uncertainty — learns that friction is unnecessary. AI tools that respond immediately and accurately are great for productivity. But they are, if used uncritically, potentially devastating for deep, slow thinking.

There is a word that Oxford named as the word of the year 2024: brain rot. From a humorous concept, it has become a subject of actual scientific investigation — a catch-all term for the cognitive impairment that seems to result from too much uncritical digital consumption.

AI is not the culprit. Passive, frictionless, unreflective use is the culprit. A hammer is used to drive nails — but a hammer leaves marks if you hit it with the wrong end. AI is an exceptionally powerful tool. The question is whether we learn to use it wisely.

Part 06

What do we do now? Practice without preaching.

I'm not here to lecture. I do the same thing you do — check my phone a little too often, open Instagram without any real intention, feel like an email needs to be answered immediately even though it absolutely doesn't need to be.

But the PNAS study gave me something concrete to hold onto. Not a moral boot. A data point.

And the DI column by Anders Hansen (which probably led you here) sums it up best: take a weekend. Turn off your mobile's internet connection. Check in on Monday morning: how are you feeling? How did you sleep? How is your concentration?

It's an experiment you can do yourself, without waiting for the research to become even more convincing.

01

Digital weekend fasting

Turn off your mobile internet from Friday evening to Monday morning. Leave wifi and data off. Calling and texting will work just as usual. Note how you feel on Monday morning.

02

Notification audit

Go through all your apps. Turn off all push notifications except those that actually require an immediate response. How many apps send you notifications about things you didn't ask for?

03

One hour a day without screens

Choose an hour — preferably the morning — when you don't touch your phone. Take a walk. Write by hand. Drink coffee without scrolling. Build focus muscle methodically.

04

Replace short format with long format

If you find yourself scrolling — replace it with a book, a podcast, a longer article. Train your brain to pay sustained attention instead of constantly switching.

05

Use AI with intention

Ask yourself the question before you ask AI: what happens to my ability if I never practice this myself? Use AI to augment thinking, not replace it.

Termination

It's about reconquest. Not resistance.

It is a mistake to read this as an argument against technology. It is an argument for awareness. To own your own focus instead of lending it, for free, to those companies who — as Anders Hansen writes — ”couldn’t care less about how you feel and function cognitively.”

Your brain is not broken. It responds exactly as it should to the incentives it is exposed to. Change the incentives, and the brain follows. That is the promise of neuroplasticity—and the studies confirm it.

Ten years of focus loss in a fortnight. That's not magical thinking. That's biology.

And perhaps most liberating of all: you don't have to break with technology. You just have to decide that you are the one in charge of your attention. Not the app.

”Attention is the only resource you can't buy back. You can only decide to stop selling it.”

-Mary

Amaelle Life · Tech Thursday · Smart Life

amaelle.life

Sources: PNAS Nexus (Castelo et al., 2025) · Swedish Media Authority (2025) · YouGov USA (2025) · Harmony Healthcare IT (2025) · Karolinska Institutet (2024) · Swedish Public Health Agency (2024) · Oxford Languages Word of the Year 2024