5 ways to reclaim your focus

May 26, 2026

In these modern times, we live in a state of constant interruption. We are endlessly distracted by our phones, notifications, and the endless doom-scrolling that goes on all day long. Our minds have been rewired so heavily that we struggle avoiding our secondary screens even as we’re busy watching a movie. Over dinner, we reach for our phone in the middle of conversation. Like a crutch. Invented to serve us, instead, our devices have taken over us. Our attention, it often feels, is no longer entirely our own.

Focus is no longer something we can take for granted. For many, it’s a daily struggle. But the good news is that our attention isn’t permanently gone—it’s just being pulled in too many directions at once. With the right strategies, it can be rebuilt and improved.

To better understand how, I asked a range of people for practical, real-world tips on how we can manage distractions and reclaim our focus in everyday life:

Lauren Henkin is the founder/CEO of The Humane Space, a wellness app focusing on curiosity, wonder, and awe as an alternative to the many attention-grabbing practices that are pushed incessantly.

She suggests trying an ‘Attention Audit’ for just one day:
“Track every time you check your phone, slip into mindless scrolling, or get pulled into low-quality content—and write down why it happened in that moment (maybe it was boredom, habit, stress, or a notification). Once you can see your patterns and triggers on paper, it stops feeling like a default behavior and starts looking like a solvable change.”
“The goal isn’t to ‘quit screens’—it’s to replace low-quality inputs with high-quality ones that actually feed curiosity and strengthen focus, like a great long-form article, a short learning challenge, or a skill you’re building. Pair that with tiny mindfulness breaks—just 30 seconds to breathe and notice what you’re about to do—so you’re back in the present long enough to choose intentionally, instead of defaulting to the scroll.”
Jay Vidyarthi is the award-winning author of Reclaim Your Mind and an accomplished designer, entrepreneur, a long-time meditation practitioner, and thought leader at the unique intersection of mindfulness and technology. As the founder of Still Ape, he’s been involved in over fifty technologies that have helped millions of people improve their well-being, including Muse, the Healthy Minds Program, Sonic Cradle, and many more. His work and ideas have been featured by Harvard, MIT, TED, Forbes, CNN, Fast Company, Psychology Today, and Mashable.

If you’re addicted to your notifications, he suggests looking for an underlying reason:
“Look at the healthy emotional needs underlying the tech that hooks you. If you’re stuck on social feeds, is the deeper reason that you’re lonely and seeking connection? If you’re stuck on work email, is the deeper reason that you only find self-worth when you’re productive? No need to be self-critical, these are natural emotional needs that tech is exploiting. Find healthier, more fulfilling ways to meet these needs, and the tech will feel less sticky.”
He also warns against what he refers to as ‘false urgency’:
One of the most pervasive patterns being used online to hook us is what I like to call ‘false urgency’. Look at your notifications, your news subscriptions, even your weather apps, and remove anything that is presenting an overblown level of urgency. Do you really need your work email to ‘ding’ at 9pm? Is that headline really “breaking news”? You get the idea.
Dr. John La Puma is a board-certified internist, two-time New York Times bestselling author, and the physician who pioneered Culinary Medicine. His recently released book, Indoor Epidemic, explores how our screen-saturated indoor lives deplete focus, sleep, and health - and offers evidence-based outdoor prescriptions to restore them.

Dr. La Puma prescribes a 10-minute, phone-free walk in a nearby park to help restore focus. Nature walks help improve attention and memory and are more effective than urban walks. Researchers believe that this is because natural environments engage ‘soft fascination’ — which is less taxing on the brain, allowing your depleted focus to recharge. The ideal time is 50 minutes for a boost, but even shorter 15-20 minute walks can offer benefits.
"Your attention is not broken. It is underfed. Your brain is asking for nourishment, not noise, and the Indoor Epidemic is starving it of the focus it was built to hold.”
Dr. Anthony Metivier is essentially a memory coach. He created the Magnetic Memory Method, a systematic, 21st Century approach to memorizing foreign language vocabulary, names, music, poetry and much more in ways that are easy, elegant, effective and fun. As a former Film Studies professor and story consultant, he particularly laments the facts that today’s movies have to be shaped in a way that’s able to deal with the audience’s failing focus.

He has some tips for dealing with ‘digital amnesia.’
- Learn a language offline (language learning also helps build what scientists call cognitive reserve).
- Play games with physical boards, cards, etc.
- Study a musical instrument that you use in your hands (not a digital instrument where other parts of the computer seduce you).
- Practice digital fasting, ideally getting out in nature with physical books, notebooks for journaling. Leave the devices at home.
- Take implementation-focused courses with activities, not just lectures.
Dr. Karl Sebire has spent 20 years in independent and tertiary education. Currently, he is the Director of Learning Design & Innovation at the University of Melbourne, where he leads strategic programs across workforce capability, AI implementation, inclusive learning, and academic development. His research and public commentary focuses on how screen-based technologies impact attention, behaviour, and learning, particularly in young people and he has written extensively on the shift from traditional media to user-generated content, and why platforms appeal to developing minds. From the neurological lure of novelty and para-social relationships, to the algorithmic design that rewards dopamine-driven loops. He is a non-executive director at ADHD Australia where he helps shape national guidance on screen use and regulation.

Dr. Sebire argues that the problem isn’t that we are weak-willed, but that we are up against highly engineered system design to capture our attention. So rather than rely on “heroic” self-control, he suggests re-arranging our environment by turning off non-essential notifications, removing the most tempting apps from our home screens, and create device-free rituals, such as over dinner, or after work. “Attention is shaped by environment,” he says, “If you redesign the environment, focus follows.”
“Focus is a finite cognitive resource. Every notification imposes a ‘switching cost’, which is the mental effort required to reorient back to a task. Protecting focus means creating deliberate boundaries: watch television without a second screen, schedule specific times to check messages, and keep your phone physically out of reach when working. The brain performs best when it can do one thing well, not five things poorly.”
⚠️ YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE…

Focus isn’t just being lost—it’s being actively pulled apart by systems designed to interrupt it. We know what the problem is. What we need now are solutions.
So I’m going to keep talking to people about how to fix this—through articles and podcast interviews. In the coming months, I’ll be exploring ways to push back against systems that aren’t designed with the best interests of humans in mind.
If you want to support that work, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber for the cost of a coffee cup. And if not, sharing this with someone else who’s trying to get their focus back helps just as much.

Do you have strategies of your own? If so, leave a comment to share the Random Minds community.

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