An App to Improve Sustained Attention, Not Just Boredom Tolerance

Protocol for improving sustained attention (rather than just tolerance to low-stimuli). Additional advice is welcome

This is mostly a protocol that i'm developing so although i have an overall picture of how it works, any additional advice, tips or strategies that help with the goal of sustained attention is also welcome. Writing this post is a way for me to consolidate and pinpoint these techniques better and have them more present in my mind when putting them into practice A lot of times in social media i find this discourse that attention spans are "fried" because of scrolling short form content, therefore techniques involve staring at nothing and stopping "dopamine hits" (which, when you look at the neurochemistry involved doesn't really make much sense because dopamine works in anticipating a reward. The mere feeling of feeling compelled to start scrolling IS the dopamine hit, similar to how the reason you feel horny in the first place is because the brain releases dopamine in response to seeing something you personally find hot) from social media by limiting usage. I believe, however, that we are conflating 2 related but different skills. A lot of times the reason someone deems their attention span as "bad" happens as a result of constantly having a background itch of wanting to do something else that is less effortful, creating an impulse that you have to control when you have to put in work for something more effortful. So it's kind of an issue related to feeling restless and uncomfortable when in a low stimuli environment This is indeed an issue, but it has more to do with inhibitory control of competing compulsions and thoughts rather than actual raw capacity of sustaining focus towards something that requires you to process information, imo. Staring at nothing (aka mindfulness) and only doing one activity at a time train your ability to tolerate low-stimuli environments without feeling inherently restless, but while doing these things you are not actively paying attention to anything (unless it's object or body focused meditation) or processing informational knowledge. Many times this discourse also doesn't take into account the times in which you get distracted not by any external stimuli or compulsion but rather by your own inner mind, thoughts and wandering. This is completely fine, mindfulness actually aims not at preventing thought but at letting them happen and observe them, the problem arises when this mind-wander happens too constantly in situations where you have to actually pay attention to something or process information, and this is qualitatively distinct from losing focus due to the itch of checking social media yet gets ignored by a lot of discourse that treats phone, TV and games as the only distractors. You don't get an "itch" to mind-wander, it just happens. What i'm trying to convey is that training boredom tolerance (what people call "attention span" in social media, putting videos where you just simply stare at a dot as a form of training it) and controlling those compulsions doesn't necessarily translate into improving actual focus, rather it prevents focus from being disrupted when it is there by a competing stimuli. Personally I used to struggle way more with the actual focus part than the boredom tolerance part. I could sit in a room still for 30 minutes or more and not once would i feel the compulsion to check my phone, yet after doing that exercise it would still be possible for me to re-read the same page 3 or 4 times because i wasn't processing the information in the page because of mind-wandering. Sustained attention would be the ability to maintain for a certain period of time a focus on a certain stimuli in a way where you are processing information and maintaing some mental schemas about what is going on, the topic you're trying to process. For example, a college lecture where you listen to the whole class before writing your notes is a good example of this because you have to build up mental schemas about what you hear the topic is about, synthesize information so that you can delineate the most relevant parts of what the topic is about and constantly relate the newer information with previously known information, all of this to then write your notes at the end based on the mental model you made of the topic throughout the class. This requires active focus because you're actively processing information and finding relationships between different aspects of the same topic, so if you get distracted by mind-wandering then you potentially lose some important piece of the topic. Of course this is not the only way to process information from a class, or the only example of sustaining attention. Sustained attention goes both ways, for consuming information and for creating information, for example i am creating this post and with sustained attention i can come up with ideas on how to develop my points and my protocol before either finding myself mind-wandering or cognitively "fatigued". Sustained attention also depends on the type of stimuli you are trying to pay attention to, reading books visually and listening to audiobooks are both helpful in developing the skill but they are using different abilities to do it, visual vs auditory system. Someone may have a decent attention on visual information but struggle with following through a podcast without losing the thread In my experience, improving sustained attention is a more complex skill to develop than boredom tolerance because it requires more strategy, doing things (developing mental models for information synthesis) rather than not doing things (checking your phone) and ultimately more multifaceted, but I believe it is trainable and improvable. Now with some brainstorming i've worked on during these days: (This point is particularly relevant for situations where you are consuming information since you're more likely to get distracted than when you are producing something) There is a theory that is more related to the debate of consciousness but relevant for our purposes) called the attention schema theory. This theory says that our brain has an attentional process that mechanically prioritizes certain data over others. We also have an awareness, which is our ability to maintain an internal model of our attentional process. This awareness allows us to realize about what data is it being prioritized by our mechanical attention. The meta-awareness of our attentional gating is an important skill because it helps us with knowing what are we paying attention to and to realize when it drifts. As someone with ADHD, i struggled with this quite a lot. There is research indicating that ADHD is not a disorder of sustained attention but a decreased meta-awareness of attention. Everyone's attention drifts, nobody can really sustain 1 hour of full attention straight without ever drifting towards anything else, and that's not what this protocol aims to achieve anyways. But generally speaking, there is a higher chance for someone with ADHD not to realize at all that their attention drifted compared to someone neurotypical. it's not necessary for you to have ADHD to struggle with this though. what we are trying to prevent is not for the drift to not happen at all but to increase our awareness to realize whenever that happens, so that we can shift our attention back to where it really matters. In my experience what helps with this: using an external anchor to remind you of what you are paying attention to. If it's possible you can use a (non loud) alarm clock or a reminder every 3 or 5 minutes, and associate the alarm clock with "hey, you are doing this right now" so that every time it catches you wandering it puts you back into whatever you are paying attention to. Implementing a physical action for every certain period of time is also a good idea, for example, clap every 5 minutes or just do something subtle, so that you have more chance of realizing you drifted by remembering "wait how long since i last clapped?" Putting a specific intention before doing it also helps, rather than a vague plan. Instead of just saying "i will pay attention to this class" write down "I will track what the lecturer says and keep the most relevant points to write them down at the end". 2. Before going to a certain class or reading something, if you have an idea of what is it about, something that aids in processing information more quickly is to have an established foundation, base, previous knowledge that you can base your initial assumptions on. Establish them, write them down or ask yourself some questions about "what do i already know about this?". The way this helps is that it allows you to make associations between previous information and the information you are about to learn, so that what you learn is not an isolated fact but something that at least vaguely connects to a more consolidated fact in your mind. I will write about making associations later on, but what it's important is that having present a previous knowledge allows you to reduce the cognitive load of the lecture, class, article or book you're about to read. 3. Using dopamine as your ally (this technique i find fascinating because it's more "advanced") Before the lecture or inbetween segments of the lecture or chapters of a book, make some predictions and inquiries about what's going to come and write them down or have them present: 1. What do you think will it talk or teach about? 2. What questions do you have that you don't know the answer to that you think could potentially be addressed in what you are about to process? 3. Try to answer those questions on your own, as wrong as you think you are gonna get them. Basically have something to expect or look for The reason this works and why I called it using dopamine is that dopamine is the prediction-error chemical. When you make an initial prediction or inquiry, your dopaminergic neurons establish an initial baseline firing rate in a brain area called the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA). This prediction will meet the actual feedback, and the discrepancy between the prediction and the feedback is called the error. This prediction is subjected to a couple of stakes that determine how meaningful it is: How confident are you of the prediction being true, how fast do you get the feedback about the prediction and how reliable is the feedback about the prediction. If the prediction happens to be accurate to the result, there is no error thus the firing of dopaminergic neurons remains the same. But if the error happens to be even better than the expected prediction, or the prediction happened to be the same but wasnt confident that it would be true, what happens is that your dopaminergic neurons in the VTA increase their firing rate, releasing more dopamine to signal the error was better than the prediction. One example of this process is solving a calculus problem on your own, being about 50% that you got it correct then getting feedback from a calculator that confirms you were indeed correct. The initial prediction is not very confident but you get the feedback fast and it's an accurate feedback (absolute even, given you are using a calculator). Therefore the error happens to be better than the prediction and you get a "dopamine hit" that will allow you to remember and encode that information better. Dopamine is then increased in release upon anticipation of doing that activity, making you slightly more motivated to repeat the process of doing calculus again. There are many ways in which you can make prediction errors that force you to expect something in specific and when you detect it happening you get a dopamine release increase, makes information more easily remembered because it is encoded as an important event. 4. When during the lesson, reading a book or whatever you are paying attention to, after certain periods of time or segments of information try to actively retrieve what you just heard or learned. If it seems effortful, that's exactly the point, forced retrieval sustains stronger memory traces than just passive consumption with no active element, and it also allows your mind to be more actively engaging in it thus improving your attention. A mini-protocol that i developed for this retrieval, especially for when reading books: 4.1. Paraphrasis: Explain the full concept or what you remember on your own words, and explain some thoughts about it as well as your interpretations of the information (you can skip this step if time doesn't allow it, this is more for studying at home stuff or reading a book than for a lecture) 4.2. Synthesize the paraphrasis into something shorter with only the core concepts 4.3. compress the synthesis and explain everything compressed in 1 sentence. 4.4. Make an analogy about one important concept of the lecture, useful especially if it's something abstract Or if you prefer it, you can make a mindmap instead ;). I recommend the GRINDE method of mindmapping if you want to make it efficient 5. This is a model for making associations (improving sustained attention indirectly by making you more engaged). You want concepts to be grouped into bigger categories so that each fact isn't stored as an individual, isolated fact (which is more effortful and drains your attention more quickly, because you are holding more elements in your working memory). Let's assume that in the chapter you've read, you are left confused because you don't understand why they addressed concept Y whe they were addressing concept X and you don't find how they relate to each other. For this and keeping yourself paying attention, you might use the inventory of relational taxonomy: - Hierarchical: Y is a component of X, where X is the whole and Y a part of it - Relatedness: Y and X are commonly spoken of or seen together in similar contexts, but neither is necessary for the other (eg: Toilet and toothbrush) - Cause and effect - Common cause: Y and X are both effects of the same cause - Sequential: Y follows X - Opposites: Y and X are extremes in the opposite or contradict each other (Eg: Crest and trough of a wave) - Correlative: Alteration of Y affects X, whether it is proportional or not and whether is it the only factor or not Attempt to think about what kind of association could fit the 2 concepts that you didn't understand why were they related and make your hypotheses or initial predictions. This helps attention and memory because if you happen to drift when reading something, you may notice that you lost the thread so you don't get how is Y associated to X. You can use these associations as an opportunity to get back in track and make predictions that again, are subjected to dopamine increases if the error happens to be that your prediction got it right. Those associations can also be made between the new information and previous knowledge of yours, for example if you already knew about limits how does it relate to derivatives? 6. After a while, you might notice that you start to get "mentally heavy". new information gets processed less, you find yourself having more trouble trying to remember what you just learned and attention becomes more effortful. This is when you start reaching the ceiling of your cognitive load, which is basically your current capacity for sustained attention. When this begins to happen you might notice that there is a restless quality to it, where you just don't want to keep doing it or you feel like you are getting irritable, not because of wanting to scroll but because you are reaching the limit of how long you can pay attention to it. Whenever that happens, it's time to take a break. The reason there is a subjective feeling of irritability and restlessness is because after a certain amount of time focusing on something, the brain becomes gradually unable to clear the neurotransmitter Glutamate, which accumulates in the prefrontal cortex synapses and disrupts the firing rates that would normally allow you to process information correctly. Those mini-breaks (5-10 minutes or longer, depending on what suits you best) should be non-stimulating if you are planning on keeping going, therefore now it's time to actually apply the techniques that are commonly used for boredom tolerance: Don't check your phone because the break is supposed to be non-stimulating to allow your brain to clear the excess Glutamate, you don't need to be processing things in that moment because that way you allow your brain to rest a little bit. There is also a benefit of not doing anything stimulating during those breaks as it allows your brain to complete informational patterns in the background, which improves memory consolidation Walking during those breaks is even better because it provides a fresh shift of environment and increases Norepinephrine release, which is important for focusing as well. Once you feel refreshed, get back on track and repeat the techniques, but before getting into it if you are still on the same topic or a related one, a warm-up where you write 3 bullet points of compressed points is useful to remember the concepts. Saying those bullet points out loud further helps with building momentum back into paying attention Applying strategy 4 to this text: In general: External anchor reminder Previous to: Foundational knowledge, Predictions and inquiries During: Paraphrasis and compression, association inventory Inbetween: Non-stimulating break, walk preferable. Bullet points and reading out loud when getting back to it