An Experiment in Healing Attention

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts Of all the potential effects of using smartphones, the one that seems to inspire the most anxiety is what scrolling could be doing to people’s attention.

On social media (ironically), many people express a desire to “heal” their attention spans from the damage they feel technology has done.

They’re picking up on something real.

In one 2025 study , researchers found that blocking the internet on people’s phones for two weeks led to improvements in sustained attention equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline.

In this final episode of How to Touch Grass , host Julie Beck embarks on an experiment to see if she can heal her own attention span.

Beck and co-host Natalie Brennan also hear from Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time , about how Odell’s antagonism for her phone actually helped her make peace with it, and how nature can teach us to pay deeper attention to the world around us.

The following is a transcript of the episode: [ Music ] Julie Beck: Are you happy with your relationship with your phone, or are you not happy with it? Person 1: I wish I could reduce some of the Instagram Reel-ing, particularly at night, where I kind of go down the rabbit hole and it’s like, Oh my God, it’s midnight.

Beck: Oh, yeah.

I’ve been there.

It’s like lost time.

You know like when the aliens come and they get you, and then they put you back down, and it’s just lost time.

Person 2: It has impacted my attention span.

I get bored after half a paragraph of reading.

Beck: Do you have a sense in your mind of when you noticed that you feel like your attention span was getting worse? Person 2: Probably been, like, since the start of COVID, probably in the last five years.