Now imagine that these bear attacks happen a lot. Imagine if three times a week, an angry bear suddenly appeared on your street and swiped one of your neighbors. If this happened, you would likely develop a state known as “hypervigilance.” You would start to look out for danger all the time—whether there’s a bear right in front of you or not. Nadine explained to me: “Hypervigilance is essentially when you’re looking out for the bear around every corner. Your attention is focused on cues for potential danger, as opposed to being focused on being present with what’s going on, or the lesson you’re supposed to be learning, or doing the work you were supposed to be doing. It’s not that [people in this state are] not paying attention. It’s that they’re paying attention to any cues or signs of threat or danger in their environment. That is where their focus is.”

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Stolen Focus Johann Hari

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One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: “How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?” There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

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Stolen Focus Johann Hari

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“Distraction matters to me, because time is all we have in life…. Yet hours and hours can get mysteriously lost here.” He showed a picture of a Gmail inbox. “And [on] feeds that suck huge chunks of time away here.” He showed a Facebook feed. He said he was worried that the company—and others like it—was inadvertently “destroy[ing] our kids’ ability to focus,” pointing out that the average child between the ages of thirteen and seventeen in the U.S. was sending one text message every six minutes they were awake. People were, he warned, living “on a treadmill of continuous checking.”

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Stolen Focus Johann Hari