How to Improve Your Attention Span: 8 Steps Backed by Research

Why your attention span feels short

Attention span isn't one fixed number you're born with. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has tracked how long people stay on one screen before switching since her first study, published in 2004. It fell from about two and a half minutes then to about 47 seconds in recent studies, and her research found that people spend about 10.5 minutes on a project before switching and take about 25.5 minutes to get back to an interrupted one. The details are in what research says about the average attention span.

Those numbers describe behavior in busy, interrupt-heavy surroundings. The same person who checks their phone every few minutes at a desk can watch a two-hour film without trouble. That's good news: if the surroundings shape the habit, changing the surroundings can change it back.

Short videos are a big part of today's surroundings. A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 71 studies with 98,299 participants and found that heavier short-form video use went along with poorer attention and inhibitory control, the ability to stop an impulse. These were the strongest links among the cognitive measures. It is a correlation, so it can't show that the videos caused the weaker attention, but it points at an obvious place to start.

How to improve your attention span

Start with the steps that remove interruptions, because they work without any willpower once they're set up. Then add the ones that rest and train your attention.

1. Turn off most notifications. In a 2015 Florida State University study, phone notifications alone disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants didn't touch their phone. The distraction was about as large as actually taking a call or texting. Keep notifications only from people and apps that truly need you right away.
2. Use Focus mode for working hours. On Android, open Settings, then Digital Wellbeing, then Focus mode. Pick the apps that pull you away; while Focus mode is on you can't open them and they send no notifications. Tap Set a schedule so it turns on by itself, for example every weekday morning.
3. Run a two-week phone experiment. Cut what your phone can do for two weeks: remove or block the feeds and browsers you lose time in, and keep calls and messages. This copies the design of the 2025 study described below, where it measurably improved sustained attention.
4. Give endless feeds a stopping point. Infinite feeds and short-video swipes have no natural end, so every stop takes a decision. App timers, grayscale at night or a tool that stops the next swipe put an end back into the feed.
5. Notice the urge before you switch. Mark calls this meta-awareness: being aware of what you're doing as it unfolds. When you feel the pull to check something, ask yourself whether you really need to pay attention to it right now. The pause alone breaks many automatic switches.
6. Schedule hard work for your best hours. Mark's research found that most people's focus peaks in the mid to late morning and again around 2 to 3 p.m. Put demanding work there and save email and errands for the dips.
7. Sleep, move and get outside. Sleep deficiency causes problems with focusing and reacting, according to the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. A single bout of exercise gives a small boost to cognitive performance, and a walk in nature improved directed attention in a University of Michigan study.
8. Train focus in short sessions. Practice attention directly: a few minutes of mindfulness meditation, or reading a book with the phone in another room. Start small, add a few minutes each week, and take breaks when you feel tired instead of forcing it.

The two-week phone experiment: what the study found

The best evidence that attention span can be improved, not just protected, comes from a randomized trial published in PNAS Nexus in February 2025 by Castelo, Kushlev, Ward, Esterman and Reiner. 467 iPhone users in the US and Canada used the Freedom app to block all mobile internet on their phone for two weeks. Calls and texts still worked, and they could still use the internet on a laptop or tablet.

• Attention: sustained attention, measured with a computer task rather than a questionnaire, improved. The authors put the size of the change at about the same as 10 years of age-related decline, while noting the effect was small.
• Screen time: daily phone screen time in the first group fell from 314 to 161 minutes.
• Mood: mental health and well-being improved too.

The study has real limits. Many participants didn't keep the block on, most were already motivated to cut back, and everyone knew the study was about smartphones. Still, it is a causal test, not just a correlation, and the intervention was simple: less phone internet for two weeks.

You don't have to block everything to try a version of it. Removing the apps and feeds where your time goes, while keeping messages and maps, keeps most of the idea and is easier to stick to. Check your numbers before and after with Android's screen time dashboard.

Rest your attention: sleep, movement and nature

Attention is a limited resource that runs down during the day and recovers with rest. Mark puts it plainly: our attentional resources are limited and precious, and constant switching drains them faster.

• Sleep: the NHLBI lists problems with learning, focusing and reacting among the effects of sleep deficiency, and says sleep-deficient adults respond more slowly and make more errors. Scrolling in bed costs both sleep and attention, so the evening is a good place to start.
• Exercise: a 2012 meta-analysis of 79 studies found that a single session of exercise has a small positive effect on cognitive performance, during exercise, right after and after a delay. Small, but it adds up and costs nothing.
• Nature: in two experiments at the University of Michigan, published in 2008, walking in nature or even looking at pictures of nature improved performance on directed-attention tests compared with urban settings. The idea behind it, attention restoration theory, is that nature holds your attention gently and lets the effortful kind recover.

Mark also recommends real breaks instead of nonstop focus, and short, easy activities to recover between hard tasks, as long as you can stop them on time. A crossword or a walk has an end. A feed does not.

Train your attention

Mindfulness meditation is the most studied way to practice attention directly. In a 2010 study by Zeidan and colleagues, people with no meditation experience did four sessions of mindfulness training, while a control group listened to an audiobook. The meditation group improved on working memory and executive functioning tasks, and the authors concluded that four days of training can enhance the ability to sustain attention. It was one small study, so treat it as a reason to try, not a guarantee.

Other ways to practice are simpler: read a book for twenty minutes, listen to a full album, cook without a screen. The skill is staying with one thing after the first urge to switch, and it gets easier the more often you let the urge pass.

If short videos are the main problem

For many people the honest answer to why their attention span feels short is an hour of Shorts, Reels or TikTok a night. The built-in tools help: an app timer or Focus mode stops a whole app, and YouTube has its own Shorts time limit, compared in Dam It! vs YouTube's Shorts limit. Their weakness is that they lock everything at once, including messages and search, or only step in after the time is gone.

Dam It! is an Android app that blocks the swipe to the next video in YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok and TikTok Lite through Android's Accessibility Service. The video you're on keeps playing, and videos you open on purpose from a link, a notification or a thumbnail still play, so the rest of each app stays usable. You can pause it by holding the dashboard button; there is no strict mode.

Where it doesn't fit: it doesn't touch news sites, X, Reddit or your browser, it isn't available on iPhone, and it won't fix sleep or notifications. Use it as one step next to the others above. Other options are compared in the best apps to block Shorts, Reels and TikTok.

When to talk to a doctor

Trouble focusing that has lasted for years, shows up in every setting and doesn't improve when you cut screens and sleep better can have medical causes, including ADHD, depression, anxiety or sleep disorders. These steps are no substitute for a diagnosis. If focus problems get in the way of work, school or relationships, a doctor is the right next step.