Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

This book is really great except for a couple of big points. It talks about how our ability to focus is less a personal failing (ie “I'm not disciplined enough to focus”) and more of a systemic problem. The author talks about a basic problem that leads to difficulty focusing, such as looking at your phone too much, and then talks about there are hundreds or thousands of people working against you, trying to make you fail. Are you poorly disciplined for looking at your phone too much, or does it totally make sense that you do when apps are engineered from top to bottom to be distracting and addicting? Do those people have a vested interest in telling you it's your fault and not to look elsewhere? Absolutely.

I think one of my favorite things about it is how he talks about the basic mantras most self-help and health books do - you need to eat healthy, sleep the right amount, and exercise regularly - and then talks about how this is incredibly difficult and the system is stacked against us. It's hard to eat healthy when as a child, you've been conditioned to eat foods that are terrible for you, and as an adult, you may not have the time to eat well. It's hard to get the right amount of sleep when our work obligations are high and cause stress, which keeps you awake. It's hard to get the right amount of exercise when the world around us has been made into the space for cars and there isn't a natural reason we would walk. This is such a vastly fresh take because I've never read a book where these things are offered as solutions and then the author admits they're really hard, and often a point of privilege to meet properly.

This book explains why it's hard to focus and it's true goal is to convince you that we need societal changes to fix them. We need the government to get involved and ban food additives in the US that are banned in other countries. We need infrastructure changes so walking is safe again and pollution is cut down. We need to push for a four day work week. These need to become big issues.

There's a couple of things that bother me though. The ADHD section is by far the worst of the book. It feels like he let his bias get the hold of him here and he feels bitter that he very well could have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child and put on medication for it. He only talks about ADHD as a thing that makes it hard to focus for kids in schools - nevermind that a really common aspect of it is that you can hyper focus, which is to focus intensely on something you enjoy. Hyper focus can lead to not paying enough attention to the things you need to do, but it's still a form of focus that's completely ignored by this book on focus. It's really frustrating that he talks about this whole privileged private school where kids structure their lesson plans themselves and concludes that ADHD is basically not real because it doesn't show up in kids when they have the freedom to make their own choices. The school sounds great, don't get me wrong, but they literally are all focusing on things they enjoy. No one would have the chance to be diagnosed in the first place because you're just hiding the symptoms. (TW: He also brings up a case where a kid was misdiagnosed with ADHD when the problem was that he was sexually abused, which is gross negligence to add to this discussion.)
He ignores that adults can be diagnosed with ADHD late in life, and the fact that they can throws a lot of what his assumptions are out the window. He wants to assume ADHD is a symptom that's almost always misdiagnosed, and that's simply not true. And while he doesn't directly say that, that is exactly what he's implying.

In the final chapter, he admits that this isn't a self help book and that he hasn't entirely solved the issue. Which... Look at your subtitle? It's different from a lot of self help books (ie: better) in that it's more of a journalistic research of the subject, but he gives a lot of general information on how we can get back to focusing. Turn off notifications on your phone, do the eat/sleep/exercise thing, spend less time on screens in general, etc. It just struck me as really disingenuous to say “this isn't a self help book” at the very end when it's absolutely set up to look like one. Maybe he said it in the introduction also and I've just forgotten.

Overall the book is really great. The ADHD parts made me pause and question if I should really buy into what he'd said before that section, which I was more ready to accept what he'd said. But I feel the rest of the book was better researched and backed up with things I knew from outside the book, whereas the ADHD section is contradicted for the same reasons.