In 2024, University of Utah found that ADHD rates among adults had doubled in the last 10 years, why the sudden increase in diagnoses and why all the social media buzz, is it just a fad or is something actually happening. Let me disclaimer all of this by saying I am not a doctor, take all of this with a 3x3 block of salt and if you think you have ADHD, go see your doctor. According to Mayo Clinic, ADHD is a nurodevelopmental disorder (meaning it affects how your brain works) that leads to hyperactivity, having a hard time paying attention, and being impulsive. These are things all people can struggle with but people with ADHD have a significantly larger fight with these symptoms.
If you grew up anything like me, you though ADHD was a made up mental health disorder invented by big Pharma to make money off vulnerable children, while the pharmaceutical industry isn’t exactly know for it’s upstanding good samaritan values, ADHD is a real medical phenomenon that effects people young and old alike. ADHD is a condition that affects your brain that you can be born with, however there’s also a behavioral component to a lot of these symptoms that overlap with ADHD, patterns of behavior that we train ourselves to do that affect the way our brains work and are training us to exhibit ADHD like symptoms.
I recently started re-reading two different books that laid the foundation of my thought process in this video, that’s Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves To Death, and Cal Newport’s book: Deepwork and a lot of the insights I was able to glean about how our culture is engineered to have fragmented attention spans and fundamentally alter the way we think really punched me in the face.
In the twentieth anniversary edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Andrew Postman who is the author’s son, writes an introduction to the book, and he references two books that should sound familiar from your high school English class, 1984 and Brave New World. When I took AP English in High School, the two books were laid out like two prophets harolding in the streets, with two opposing visions of the future. In 1984, George Orwell lays out a dystopian future where Big Brother is always watching, the authoritarian government rules with an iron fist and controls it’s subjects through lies, deception, fear, and raw power. Any dissent is targeted and quickly snuffed out to maintain control. It’s every freedom loving citizens worst nightmare of what could go wrong when the state goes power hungry puts its boot on the neck of its citizens.
Brave New World set’s out a different vision for the future, one where the population is controlled not through brute strength and overt tyranny, but through pleasure and distraction. In an interview with [insert publication here], Huxley is quotes as saying:
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
In Brave New World, there is no Big Brother to watch and terrify you into submission, you voluntarily give it up. Their society had engineered human pleasure through sex, media consumption, and distraction, to such a degree that people stop thinking critically and being disciplined to do the hard work for becoming stronger, more competent, they would rather settle for artificial pleasures and be lulled into submission.
In my English class in high school, I didn’t understand it at the time, but my teacher told us that she believed Huxley prediction of the future was right, and I agree with her.
[Perhaps make this the hook?] Pull out your phone right now, go to your settings and check your screen time, how many hours a day do you average on your phone? According to HarmonyHit.com, the average Gen Z American spends over 6 hours a day on their phone, whit Millinials, Gen X, and Baby. Boomers not fairing much better. If we looked at a person’s day, let’s say you sleep 8 hours, and have 16 waking hours left. Event if we only subtract another 3 hours for things like eating, using the bathroom, taking a shower, and your commute to work, that means Gen Z alone consumes about half of their remaining waking hours on their phones, with the other generations following fast in their footsteps.
I hear the objections, “We live in a technological society, you can’t survive without your phone, and I do productive things on my phone like checking work email, and watching this video.”. Listen, I’m a software engineer, I am very grateful for technology and I believe it is a blessing for humanity to have all the wonderful innovations from the internet, to smartphones, and even ai. The answer is not to go Amish, what is a problem, is allowing for profit tech companies who’s primary goal is to make as much money as possible to dictate your daily habits and thought patterns without and careful considerations on behalf of the us, the consumers of these products. Be honest, we’ve all had days where we pulled out our phone or computer, went on YouTube shorts, or Instagram Reels down the infinite scroll of doom, and realized we’d spent 2, 3, or even more hours just mindlessly watching content online. Most people don’t feel joy after that experience, they feel regret, but it’s addicting and all of us have done it. I’m not trying to shame you, I’m trying to make you more aware of the problem that we all face.
If the time waste wasn’t bad enough, Postman argues in his book that technology not just changing the amount of time we have, but even our ability to think and focus. In Chapter 4 The Typographic Mind, Postman starts the chapter with a story about one of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential debates with Stephen A. Douglas, which lasted over 6 hours, where the audience sat intently listening through the entire thing. This kind of long sessions of concentration and focused attention to think deeply about ideas are normal with either written media or when listening to a speaker. Visual media is drastically different, he explores this idea in other chapters of the book, that consuming visual media like TV or YouTube changes the way that we process information. To see an image can be a much more passive experience that does not require deep thought on the part of the audience, written media does require more deep thought because you have to follow and comprehend words, sentences, paragraphs, and connecting ideas, a much more active engagement is required on behalf of the audience.
Newport in Deepwork, begins with the premise that mastery at a craft comes from repeated sessions of deliberate practice and intense, undistracted focus. He opens up with the examples of Carl Jung, a contemporary of Sigmong Frued, who would regularly take retreats into a secluded building he had acquired for his reading, thinking and writing. Bill Guests, founder of Microsoft, was famous for his “think weeks”, that he would perform twice a year, where he would retreat to a secluded area and undistractedly think on new and innovative ideas for the company. Newport cites examples from neurological science about how our the plasticity of our minds, he’s not talking about the spoon worth of micro plastics in your head, it refers to the fact that our minds physically change based upon our actions, when you practice a skill, the neurons that form in your mind through practice and learning a skill change the way your brain is wired. When you repeatedly break focus, by constantly checking your phone throughout the day, or never allowing yourself to become bored, so you have to scroll when your in the grocery store line, these seemingly harmless habits actually train your mind to seek instant gratification the moment you feel boredom, and they reward your brain through short form content online. As you continue to train your mind in this way, you will start to exhibit the ADHD like symptoms we mentioned earlier.
You can even see this when it comes to content creator strategies to increase viewer retention on their videos, a lot of popular creators like Mr. Beast and PewDiePie have figured out that if you put in a bunch of edits and animations and attention grabbing things into your video, it keeps people’s attention. Just look at the evolution of social media platforms in the last 10 years, I’m old enough to remember Instagram before they had Reels or Stories, it was just a feed of all the pictures your friends posted. Then we added stories so you could see snippets of peoples lives and what they are doing right now, and then we fractured it even more with Reels, so that you have a steady stream of short form, attention grabbing, highly edited content that’s exciting, but notice the attention timespan that’s required on behalf of the audience keeps getting shorter, and shorter, and shorter. We complain about their being brain rot and ai slop online, but I think that’s just the natural progression of technology we’ve already been using for over a decade at this point. There was a trend within the last year, where people started going to the gym, or riding a plane without headphones to listen to music and doomscrolling, and the concept that you would simply be along with your own thoughts, and think, for even an 30 minute to an hour is so foreign to us, that they called it raw dogging life. I think it’s pretty hilarious, but you get my point, our culture is horrified of bordem and critical thinking. This is why books like Brave New World, and Deepwork, and Postman punched me in the face so hard when I re-read them, because the ideas they are talking about are more relevant than ever.
Now that I’ve throughly indoctrinated you, how do we go about this problem? The answer is not to throw away all technology. I said at the start I believe technology is a good thing, we just need to be more in control. In Deepwork, Newport lays out some guiding principles you can follow to help take back control, one is having scheduled deep work time and scheduled internet time. You can still scroll Facebook, and Instagram, and all your favorite platforms, but doing in during a time that you schedule, and be ruthless about not doing it outside of the time blocks that you schedule so that you are controlling your internet time and not the other way around. The second thing, is turn off your notifications, contrary to popular belief, multitasking is a lie, and task switching actually has a cost on your capacity to work. If you’ve ever sat down to study hard for a test, or you got really into a work project, you’ll notice you hit this point where your in this hyper focused state of mind, people will often call it entering into a flow state, this isn’t a made up thing, your mind is designed to focus on the task at hand and get to work. When you get interrupted by checking an email, or you hear a ding on your phone, or you stop to check social media, your mind has to “burn” mental willpower to slowdown from the task you were doing, re-focus on the new task, and then switch back. Newport actually demonstrates this with the example of high performing students that got better grades in less time studying than their peers, by taking advantage of deep work session where they worked undistracted on the task at hand. He shows the same results with high performing consultants who removed their email checking habits and instant messaging apps from their computers and phones, and showed an increase in productivity.
I’ve since integrated these habits into my own life and the return has been more than worth it, when I sit down to work, the office I work at actually has these really cool deep work rooms, where you can lock in and just work. I also invested in noise canceling headphones, so I can work without any noise in the background distracting me. I wake up, get some exercise in because exercise is one of the most underrated forms of medicine you can give your body both physically andy and mentally, working out releases a lot of the feel good chemicals into your brain and prepares it for intense work as well as acting as a stress reliever. Then I will normally take some form of nootropic like caffeine to help keep my mind alert, turn off my phone and place it in another room, there was a study done that showed were so addicted to our phones, that the researches observed this phenomenon they called ghost notifications where people would check their phones thinking they heard it ding or felt a buzz even if the phone was off and in the same room as them, so I will place my phone in another room and turn it off normally. Then from their I get to work, I also try to keep a journal by me so that I can time block and record what I intend to get done for the day and what I actually do during specific hours of the day to help keep myself accountable.
There is also software like Opal or Brick that you can use to lock your computer or smartphone, or even just block certain websites or applications during certain times of the day to kind of force you to have to work on the task at hand. This is a skill just like anything else and as you practice it, it gets easier over time.
Let me know what your experience with this has been in the comments.