Do you find yourself unable to focus on things that matter?
Tasks that you know, without a doubt, will benefit your life. Things you’ve promised yourself you’d do, goals that could reshape your future… Yet, somehow, you don’t do them.
I do.
And I’ve tried to understand why.
I’ve dipped into the science of focus, from the neurological mechanisms that help us stay on task to the conditions needed for deep, uninterrupted work. But the deeper I dig, the more confused I become. The research contains contradictions, and what the media says about focus rarely aligns with what actual cognitive scientists are discovering.
And with the rise of self-improvement culture, a mythology has formed around the idea of discipline. We’re told that successful people are just more focused, more motivated, more driven. And if we’re not like them, the implication is that we’re simply not trying hard enough.
But that’s as far from the truth as you can get.
I’m not an expert (though I’d like to become one), but here’s the clearest conclusion I’ve come to:
The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of systems.
It’s not that you’re unwilling to do the work that needs to be done. It’s just that your environment, your habits, and the mental scaffolding you’ve built around your day-to-day life aren’t optimized to support focus.
Everything in nature requires activation energy (hi, chemistry class)—a certain threshold that must be met before a reaction can occur. The same applies to our behavior. Starting something hard, like studying, exercising, or writing, takes far more energy than continuing once you’ve begun. That beginning stage is the hardest part. And modern life is constantly raising the cost of starting.
Unfortunately, every time we reach for our phones, scroll social media, or binge a few episodes of something “harmless,” we’re not just wasting time, we’re retraining our brains (and I, more than anyone, wish this wasn’t true). We’re conditioning it to seek high-reward, low-effort stimulation. And the more we feed it, the more it resists anything else.
And that’s what’s scary. We think that these things are just distractions, but those early hits of false stimuli are actually inoculations that blunt our ability to focus later. They raise our brain’s threshold for engagement. So when we finally try to sit down and do the important stuff (stuff that takes time, patience, and effort) our mind rejects it. Not because we’re lazy, not because we’re unmotivated, but because we’ve already taught our brain what to crave.
Small actions have big outcomes. That innocent scroll in the morning may seem like nothing, but it creates ripples throughout your entire day. By the afternoon, your ability to focus has been quietly, but significantly, eroded. And no amount of “trying harder” can change that, because by then, the system is already working against you.
Mason Lai 