How to improve focus and attention

Three kinds of attention

When people say they cannot focus, they usually mean one of three different problems.

• Sustained attention is keeping your mind on one thing over time: reading a long report, driving a motorway at night, watching for a rare signal. It fades predictably, and the fade is faster when the task is monotonous.
• Selective attention is picking one thing out from competing input and ignoring the rest: following one voice at a party, reading while a television is on, not looking at the notification.
• Divided attention is handling two things at once. Strictly, people mostly cannot; what feels like doing two things is rapid switching between them, and every switch has a cost.

These overlap, but they fail differently and respond to different fixes. Someone who drifts off during long tasks has a different problem from someone who is fine until a message arrives. Diagnosing which one you actually have is most of the work.

Why phones fragment attention

A smartphone attacks all three kinds at once. It interrupts sustained attention with notifications timed by someone else. It undermines selective attention by being the most rewarding thing in any room. And it invites divided attention constantly, because every task on it sits one swipe from every other.

Two effects are worth knowing about. The first is the switch cost: after an interruption, part of your mind stays on the interrupted thing for a while, and the task you return to is done more slowly and with more errors until it clears. A two-second glance at a message is not a two-second cost. The second is that the phone does not have to be used to be a drain; some research finds that simply having it visible, or within reach, takes a measurable slice of available attention, presumably because part of you is monitoring it.

The consequence is that the most effective attention intervention most people can make costs nothing and trains nothing: put the phone in another room for the block of work.

Attention-training tasks, explained honestly

Most attention exercises in apps descend from a handful of laboratory tasks. They are worth understanding for what they measure, because that is also the limit of what they train.

• Go/no-go. Respond to most stimuli, withhold the response to a rare one (tap every shape except the square). It measures response inhibition — the ability to stop an action that is already loading. Errors are false alarms: tapping the square.
• Flanker. Indicate the direction of a central arrow while ignoring arrows on either side that point the same way (easy) or the opposite way (hard). The gap between the two conditions measures how well you filter irrelevant input beside the thing you are attending to.
• Stroop. Name the ink colour of a word that spells a different colour: the word red printed in blue. Reading is automatic and colour-naming is not, so the word interferes, and the delay measures how well you override an automatic response in favour of a deliberate one.
• Continuous performance and vigilance tasks. Watch a slow stream for a rare target for several minutes. These are the closest thing to a measure of sustained attention, and they are deliberately boring, because boredom is the condition being tested.

Practising these makes you faster and more accurate at them, and the improvement carries to close variants. What the well-controlled evidence does not show is that a smaller Stroop effect or a lower go/no-go error rate makes you better at reading a report with a phone on the desk. The tasks isolate one mechanism under clean conditions; daily life is many mechanisms under dirty ones. Braintide’s Stroop game is called Stroop and says on its first screen that it is the Stroop task, which is the level of candour to look for.

Habits that actually move it

The interventions with the strongest evidence are environmental and physiological, not exercises.

1. Single-task on purpose. Choose one thing, close everything else, and work on it for a fixed block. Switch costs vanish when there is nothing to switch to.
2. Work in blocks with real breaks. Sustained attention decays; short breaks partly reset it. A break means standing up and looking at something far away, not a different screen.
3. Sleep. Sustained attention is the cognitive function most sensitive to sleep loss. One short night produces lapses on vigilance tasks that look like intoxication, and most people underestimate the effect on themselves.
4. Move. A brisk walk before a demanding block improves attention for an hour or two afterwards in most studies, and regular aerobic exercise is associated with better attention over the long run.
5. Manage the phone, not your willpower. Notifications off by default, the phone out of sight during focused work, and a fixed time to check it. Willpower is a poor match for software designed by teams whose job is to defeat it.
6. Reduce speech in the background. Music without words or steady noise is fine for most people; other people’s conversation, radio talk and television are not, because language pulls selective attention whether you want it to or not.
7. Consider a mindfulness practice. Evidence for meditation improving attention is modest but reasonably consistent, particularly for sustained attention, and the cost is ten minutes a day.

What to expect, realistically

Attention improves quickly when its conditions improve and slowly, if at all, through training tasks alone. Fix sleep and remove the phone and the change is obvious within a week. Play a flanker task daily for a month and you will have an excellent flanker score. If you want both, do the first and enjoy the second for what it is. A routine that stays honest describes how to keep the numbers meaningful.

When poor attention warrants a doctor

Everyone’s attention is worse when tired, stressed, unwell or bored. Some patterns are different, and are worth raising with a doctor rather than treating with habits and apps:

• difficulty concentrating that has been present since childhood and consistently affects work, study or relationships;
• a clear, recent change in your ability to focus that has no obvious cause;
• attention problems accompanied by low mood, anxiety, persistent exhaustion or heavy snoring, each of which has its own treatable causes;
• lapses that are creating safety risks, for instance while driving.

Attention problems can be a symptom of many things, including some that are easy to treat once identified. A game cannot distinguish between them, and it should not try. See also working-memory exercises, since attention and working memory are close cousins and the two sets of problems often travel together.

Frequently asked questions

Do attention training games work?

They improve performance on the trained task and close variants, and they are a reasonable way to track your own attention over time at a fixed difficulty. There is little well-controlled evidence that they improve concentration in daily life. Sleep, single-tasking and keeping the phone out of reach have much stronger effects.

What is the fastest way to improve focus?

Remove the competition. Put the phone in another room, close everything unrelated, work in a fixed block and take a real break at the end. The effect is immediate. Over weeks, better sleep and regular exercise add to it.

What does the Stroop test measure?

How well you override an automatic response (reading a word) in favour of a deliberate one (naming its ink colour). The delay when the word and colour conflict is called the Stroop effect, and it is one of the most reliable findings in psychology. Practising it makes you better at it; it is not a measure of general intelligence.

Could my poor concentration be ADHD?

It might be, particularly if the difficulty has been lifelong and affects several areas of life, but many other things cause poor concentration, including sleep disorders, low mood, anxiety and stress. Only a clinician can tell them apart. If it is affecting your work, study or safety, that is reason enough to ask.

Not a medical tool: Braintide is a game, not a cognitive assessment or a treatment. These guides summarise published research for general interest and are not medical advice. If you are worried about your memory or thinking, talk to a doctor.