Our Shrinking Attention Span
Transcript:
Hello everyone and welcome to Christian speaks to you. On this podcast, we’re going be going over, decreasing attention spans and sharing some helpful tips that you can help Implement in your own life to hopefully improve your concentration. So a little of background on the topic, technology, particularly social media, texting, smartphones and other forms of short form content can give a greater number of distractions. Not allowing to focus on a singular thing at one time. And this is a very big issue because it takes longer for to do things like, completing assignments, and other tasks, and you have an increase of stress level, when focused on multiple different things and you have the tendency to make more errors, if you’re working on multiple things and not focused. So, your first tip to help increase your attention span. This comes from George Washington University, is reading. Reading a book, can help increase your attention span. It helps to train the mind to concentrate on the task. That being reading the words that on page, a tip is when starting out is to mute phone or your computer, depending on how you read or maybe even your tablet, this avoids distractions, like notification dings and other things like that, and try to focus reading for 20 to 30 minutes straight without losing concentration. Another helpful tip you can Implement is to do what’s called the spider technique. This is essentially just training yourself to ignore different notifications every time they ding just train yourself to not look and eventually it’ll become second nature to ignore those kind of things while you’re focusing on something. Another thing you could do is constantly repeat the phrase be here now, to remind yourself to focus on what you’re doing in moment and not worrying about something else. So the final tip of this podcast is going be to tell you to out and some exercise. It’s good for your physical health. It’s good for your mental health, but can also help to improve your brain function, by ensuring that the blood circulates properly. I recommend walking outside, you get some of the fresh air, you get some of the sights and you get some of the sounds, it’s very relaxing. It’s helpful. And it’s much more enjoyable than walking inside. Thanks for listening. I hope these tips were helpful.
Behind the Scenes
Creating this podcast was a fun experience, and getting to play around with different recording and editing tools was very fun as well. To create this podcast I recorded the main monologue with a Sennheiser headset’s built in microphone. To record the book page turning sound effects and the walking over leaves sound, I utilized my iPhone and the voice memos app to record close to the subject. My MacBook was utilized to edit the audio using Sountrap and to export it. The only part of this podcast that was assisted by A.I. was that of the image posted above, as I am better at speaking than drawing.
Attributions
This podcast topic was based on personal interest into attention span and the effects technology has on it. But the research on attention spans and tips for overcoming a shortened attention span are courtesy of: CBS News, George Washington University, and Kansas State University. Music is “Moonlight Drive” by Yunior Arrante downloaded via bensound.com.