How to pay attention 

Whether they’re peeking at text messages during work meetings or doomscrolling long into the night, a majority of American adults — and 81 percent of adults under 30 — say they use their phones too much. The Gazette spoke with three experts across Harvard — in education, psychology, and ministry — on strategies to cultivate focus and attention in a world full of captivating screens.

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Cultivating attention 

Monica Sanford is the assistant dean for multireligious ministry and a lecturer on ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is trained as a Buddhist chaplain. 

I struggle with devices; I think everybody does. I think of my cellphone, but also the way I use my computer. I can have a Zoom meeting and have my email open at the same time, and that can create distractions. 

But what I notice is, when I look up from scrolling on my phone, when I look out the window and appreciate the sunlight and the trees, or when I pet my cat or my dogs, that feels better, that feels more real. It feels like I’m in my life again. And even still, that desire to go back and pick up the phone and start scrolling is still there, even though I know what I’m doing feels better than that. It’s a constant habit that I notice in myself, and I’m working to overcome it. 

One practice that I find helpful is that my partner and I have agreed not to have our phones when we’re eating dinner together. We’re both old enough that we remember a time without phones, so we know what that’s like. But for younger folks who grew up digitally native, that might be a little more revolutionary. I also don’t keep a lot of social media on my phone; I can look at that stuff on the computer. 

But the reality is, the only things we can actually control in our lives are our attention, and some of the muscles in our body some of the time. That’s it. 

Attention is one of the things that the Buddhist tradition has selected to train like a muscle and put to good use. Buddhism focuses on the cultivation of the mind so that we can place our attention on useful projects, but it’s not dissimilar from any other religious project. St. Teresa of Ávila, a female Christian medieval mystic, trained her attention to listen for the movement of God. When I go to a Jewish Shabbat service, the singing of prayers is a ritual where they’re training their attention to turn towards the content of what those prayers are telling them is important in their lives. When you go to Jum’ah prayers in the Muslim tradition, you’re using your body to tell you what to pay attention to. 

We’re not doomed. We have the mental equipment we need to deal with this, just like we have the mental equipment to deal with all the other manifold suffering in the world. There’s a lot of suffering we’re protected from — famine, disease, war, natural disaster. OK, we have a new suffering: screen addiction on our phones. That’s a new one. It’s not addressed in the Buddhist scriptures. But the solution, I think, is pretty similar.  

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Modeling behavior 

Bettina Hoeppner is an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at the Mass General Research Institute. 

As a mental health researcher, I love that technology enables us to connect with people easily and widely to share health information and support health behavior changes. But as a positive psychologist, I want to cultivate the experience of flow, where you are fully immersed in what you are doing in an energized, joyful manner. I worry about technologies interfering with that, where alerts cut into the creative process and disrupt the flow. And as a mom, I love that technology allows us to foster curiosity and worry about how best to guide my kids in using technology for its perks without getting driven by the algorithms that are deliberately deployed to keep people engaged with their phones and other devices. 

My personal tech practices are pretty simple. Most importantly, I do not have my work email on my smartphone. So, when I’m not at my desk (or on my laptop when traveling), I’m not at work. That can be tricky at times — for example, when I am submitting a grant and there is some last-minute administrative back-and-forth. To account for my inability to respond instantaneously at certain times, I plan in extra lead time. The perk is that even during crunch times, I experience real breaks, because I do not know what is happening in my inbox when I step away from my desk.

When I am at my desk, I do my best not to use my phone. At times, I might even turn off my email for one to two hours to focus on what I am doing. I find that I feel better at the end of a day when I had a good uninterrupted stretch of diving into an analysis, designing a piece of my study, and/or writing a paper or grant. 

When I am not working, I do my best to role-model low phone usage for my kids. I check my text and social media messages when my kids are off doing their thing, not when we are bustling around together after school or getting ready to do homework. Even when I watch their hockey games, I spend my time snapping photos of them rather than checking my messages. I like being present in that moment, rather than attempting to be in multiple places at once. 

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Noticing the good

Beck Tench is co-founder and senior researcher at the Center for Digital Thriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

Ten years ago, having just moved to Seattle, I saw a little heart-shaped charm lying on the sidewalk as I was leaving my apartment one day. I took a photo of it, and hashtagged it #seattleloves. I didn’t know at the time that the instinct would become a lifelong practice, a part of my pedagogy, a source of comfort and wisdom.

As it happened, I started seeing hearts everywhere — in a cloud, a bare patch of dirt, a chewed up and discarded piece of gum. For my first few years in Seattle, I took it as a little wink from the universe, a sign that I was on the right track, where I was supposed to be. Then, one day four years later, as I was revisiting my old neighborhood, I came upon another heart and it struck me — everywhere I am is the right place to be.

My research explores how we can support digital agency — meaningful choice and control over how technology fits into our lives. And while I’ve tried many experiments over the years, the one that strikes me as the easiest and most rewarding is noticing hearts. This simple act of choosing what to pay attention to is itself a form of agency, a small daily practice of directing my own focus rather than having it directed for me. You don’t have to notice hearts, of course. I assign this to my students and suggest they notice anything that is a little bit rare and would feel a little bit delightful upon discovery. 

It keeps my attention occupied just enough that I’m present to where I am. And in the moments where I snap a photo and share it, my phone becomes a tool for focus and connection instead of a distraction from it.