Emily McDonald argues that poor focus isn't a fixed trait but a skill you've trained yourself to be bad at. Every time you check your phone, you're practicing distraction and strengthening those neural pathways. To fix it, stop practicing the wrong thing and deliberately train your brain to focus instead.
A lot of people say that they can't focus and that they struggle to focus, but what if what people have is really just well-practiced distraction? Now the brain has this magical thing where it gets better at what you do more often. And so if you're constantly responding to that notification, if you're constantly picking up your phone, every time you, you sit down to focus, you're picking up your phone and you're allowing yourself to be distracted. Every time you give in To the distraction, you are practicing distraction. And every time you practice distraction, you get better at it because the brain strengthens the pathways that you repeatedly activate. Something that I always say is you are always practicing something. You're always activating some sort of pathways in the brain. Are you practicing the skill that you want to have, or are you practicing the skill that you don't? The brain doesn't know what you want versus what you don't want. It just gets better at whatever you repeat.
