Can 'friction-maxxing' fix your focus?

With technology offering instant gratification and quick thrills, experts explain how adding friction to our day-to-day can help heal our attention span and deepen our sense of self.

In 2022, Stuart Semple was struggling with a common phenomenon: he couldn't focus. A 45-year-old artist living in Bournemouth, in the UK, Semple found himself unable to paint for more than a half-hour without reaching for his phone and its infinite distractions.

While modern technology can streamline day-to-day life, making everything from dating to food delivery more efficient, it may come at a cost: early data suggests that our attention span may be shortening, critical thinking capabilities weakening, emotional intelligence fading, and spatial memory getting worse as we offload human tasks to our devices. The technological optimisation doesn't seem to be making us happier, either: despite the continual digital assists and enhanced communication of social networks, people still report high levels of stress and loneliness.

That's why a growing number of people are restoring to the hottest new trend: "friction-maxxing", or rebuilding tolerance for inconveniences. The idea is to find tasks or ways of doing things involve a level of difficulty, time or patience. This could, for example, involve going "old school" and swapping digital tech tools for analogue solutions, such as reading rather than watching YouTube, navigating by road signs in place of Google Maps or calling a friend for advice instead of consulting ChatGPT.

Three years ago, Semple began by simply taking technology breaks and locking his phone away. "I wanted to build my muscle for being able to sit in discomfort or even experience boredom to connect with creativity," he says. "I'm getting some of the best ideas I've had for years."

Thrilled by his initial success, the artist has now traded the instant gratification of Instagram for longer and more meaningful interactions on Substack, takeaways for home-cooked meals and emails for handwritten letters.

"I find the rewards for doing difficult things are absolutely massive," says Semple. "I grow, I get better at things and I expand."

Semple and others may be onto something. According to some of the leading experts on the psychology of technology, there is an upside to inconvenience – if it's harnessed correctly. Strategically adding friction back into our lives by reducing our reliance on technology can retrain our brains for better focus, cultivate resilience and create a positive sense of autonomy.    

"We have been letting technology take control of our behaviour," says Larry Rosen, a research psychologist and professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills in the US, and author of the 2016 book The Distracted Mind. "We have to take back control of ourselves."

Do our attention spans really need healing?

Awake and asleep, the brain's attention system hums with activity. When attention is internally directed, toward your emotions, memories and thoughts, the brain's default mode network is activated. When it's attuned to the outside world toward what you see, smell, hear, taste, touch and perceive in the environment around you, the brain's frontoparietal attention network is involved instead. Sometimes attention works automatically, like the way a loud noise might instinctually whip your focus into one direction, while other times it's voluntary, like the concentrated effort you're making to read this article.

According to one band of experts, the features of our digitised existence – constant notifications, 24-hour news and endless social feeds – can hijack this attention system, resulting in cognitive overload, mental fatigue and trouble focusing.

Attention span has undergone an "alarming and shocking" decline over the last two decades, says Gloria Mark, a psychologist who studies human-computer interaction at the University of California, Irvine, in the US, and author of the 2023 book, Attention Span.

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