The global pandemic of shortening attention spans
Mbongeni Mguni | Tuesday December 23, 2025 12:42
I had a moment of realisation the other day. In fact, it was my son who pointed it out. I was scrolling through social media on one phone and reading an article on my other phone. The television was on in the background and I was actually following the hilarious debates on Judge Judy!
Some decades ago, multitasking became the in-thing, the desirable corporate skill that would win you great jobs and earn promotions. From a purely capitalist point of view, multitasking sounds like the kind of efficiency and productivity that sets one corporate ahead of the other.
In reality, however, studies show that while the gospel of multitasking was preached to us, our overall efficiency suffered as we paid insufficient attention to each task and we also became poorer at making decisions about allocating priorities to tasks. We found that often we left tasks incomplete and were easily distracted. You sit down to type an email and the second the phone flashes with a message, you’re onto that and lose your train of thought. You’re keeping multiple tabs open on your browser and shift from one to the other depending on where your unfocussed mind leads you.
And on top of that, we feel more mentally and physically tired than ever, thanks to the fruits of multitasking.
At the heart of this issue, however, is the shortening of attention spans the world over. Think about it. If you, like me, can hold two phones, scroll through social media on one, read an article on the other and also follow a TV show in the background, just how much attention are you really paying to anything?
According to a Microsoft study released in 2015, the average human has an attention span of 8.25 seconds down from 12 seconds in 2000. By comparison, goldfish have average attention spans of nine seconds.
Researchers said the increasingly digital mindset and lifestyle offered by the Internet and social media was rewiring brains and not in a positive way. According to the study, 77% of people aged 18 to 24 responded “yes” when asked, “When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone”.
The leading causes of shortening attention spans globally, according to scientists, include smartphones, social media and endless notifications that rewire the brains to keep switching, or seeking a reward from finding out what the notification is about, instead of focusing on the present.
That’s what the scientists say and I agree. But as a journalist, I would add that the primary driver seems to the unquenchable thirst for immediacy in today’s world. With the 24-hour news cycle and social media of today, people’s brains are hardwired for the fast lane. They want information like they want their instant coffee ie instantly. They want to understand it at a glance, without having to go deeper.
For the media and advertising industry, these shortened attentions are a challenge. As a long-form or feature writer, capturing and retaining a reader’s attention across 2,000 words, is difficult in a time when attention spans are shrinking. That task is made even worse when one considers the ‘non-sexy’ subjects I frequently write about such as the macro-economy, environment, and at least on more than one occasion, taxes!
I would also argue that perhaps its not so much about people’s brains changing, but people’s brains being changed. There’s a definite ‘tik-tokification’ going on where powerful products are fighting for your attention span where attention span equals the possibility of a sale.
The bar actually is lower than that. For example, some content creators on certain platforms actually get paid simply for the amount of time unique visitors spend on their videos. This is why there’s has been explosion of clickbait on YouTube and Facebook with titles such as “You’ll Never Guess What He Did: Watch To The End”.
Some will ask, so what? So attention spans are getting shorter, so what? So we can’t seem to focus on one task in-depth for any amount of time, so what? So the social media giants are profiting off our goldfish-like attention spans, so what? Wait, what?!?
Yes, you read that right. Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook operate in the “attention economy”. They don’t sell their product to users but rather sell user attention to advertisers.
Every minute a user spends on the app is potentially monetised through ads or brand engagement. Algorithms are designed to keep users engaged by delivering more content that grabs attention quickly. And so, short-form videos, infinite scrolling, autoplay, and frequent notifications are all features that match shorter human attention spans and keep engagement high.
Even if you don’t care about that, psychologists who have been studying attention for decades, do. And they have warnings to make.
“First of all, we find in our research a correlation between frequency of attention switching and stress,” Gloria Mark, PhD in psychology and professor of informatics at the University of California said in a recent interview shared on the American Psychological Association website. “We know from decades of research in the laboratory that when people multitask, they experience stress, blood pressure rises.”
Mark said when people’s attentions keep shifting, they are more likely to make more errors.
“And that's been shown in studies in the real world with physicians, nurses, pilots. “We also know that performance slows. Why? Because there's something called a switch cost. “So every time you switch your attention, you have to reorient to that new activity, that new thing you're paying attention to, and it takes a little bit of time,” she said.
She continued: “So imagine if you're writing, let's say, say you're writing a chapter and you suddenly stop what you're doing and you switch and do something else, and then you come back to it, it's going to take you some time to reconstruct, what was I writing? “What was the topic I was thinking about? What were the words I was using? That takes a bit of time. ‘And so we incur these switch costs throughout the day as we're switching our attention, and this creates more effort. “It uses more of our very precious mental resources on top of the work that we actually need to do.”
The problem gets worse down the ages. With younger adults and children, the shortening of attention spans and tik-tokification means lower mental self-control, poor impulse management and generally weaker academic performances.
Psychologists urge everyone to retrain their brains towards focussing. Take breaks, be easy on your brain. Take a walk, put that phone down and ignore notifications. Do your level best to attend to one task at a time, understand it well and complete it.
Get good rest every night, drink plenty of water and for 2026, make focus your number one goal. Your mind will thank you for it.