I Ruined My Ability To Focus, Here’s How I’m Getting It Back.
By: Favour Ayorinde
Tags: Goals, Focus, Distraction, Discipline

Hello there. I’m Favour.

The beginning: A problem arises.

Not to brag but . . . I’m a nerd.

I used to spend large amounts of time doing tasks that required long and sustained sessions of focus, for example, reading. I used to spend hours reading, and I typically would finish books with less than 250 pages in one sitting.

I did a bunch of other normal nerd stuff, but my point is the following; all of a sudden, I couldn’t do that anymore.

Just a few weeks ago, I started to realize, quite abruptly, that I would get distracted pretty easily when I tried to do any task that required long term sustained focus.

My mind just went blank and refused to cooperate when I tried to read a long book, or write a long article(such as this one)

Instead I spent all my time binging videos on Tiktok and all its copycats,(looking at you, YouTube shorts!) reading literally thousands of random YouTube comments every single day, and spending way too much time on reddit.

My sleeping patterns were ruined, I would sleep at 4AM, wake up by 8AM, sleep at random spots throughout the day and feel sluggish all around.

Something was wrong.

Reasons: What I did.

Actually it was all my fault.

For the past few months, I’ve had the displeasure of completing a degree in a course I was no longer passionate about. It wasn’t about the course, it was about me.

My goals and priorities had shifted immensely since I started the degree, and were no longer aligned with what I had to do, but I was already in final year, it would be kind of pointless to drop out by now, so I stuck with it, and distracted myself from my misery by burying myself in social media content, and gaming.

I also started to watch and read summaries of long form content. Summarized books, summarized movies, summarized everything. I thought that was making me productive, in fact I was training myself to prioritize short form content over long form.

While I was doing all this, something was changing in my brain.

Reasons: What my brain did.

Everyone likes to blame dopamine in cases like this, but actually it was simply a gradual shift in dominance between two discrete parts of the brain that are responsible for different responses to dopamine.

Get ready for some big words.

The mesolimbic pathway is the first big guy here and it’s mainly responsible for instant gratification.(not exactly because this is neuroscience and everything is crazy complicated, but it kind of does.)

The Mesocortical pathway is the other big guy here and it’s mainly responsible for delayed gratification.

Basically, what happens when we expose ourselves constantly to junk sources of dopamine that constantly supply us with cheap hits of dopamine is that the Mesocortical Pathway is less used. Hence the influence of the mesolimbic pathway increases in general.

This in turn affects our reward anticipation and effort calculation processes, which means we lose the ability to do long term tasks that provide delayed gratification.

The Strategic Solution

I had to get my mesocortical pathway in top shape again. We need both to function, but when we feed the mesolimbic pathway constantly, the mesocortical pathway literally just takes a sabbatical.

The way to fix this isn’t to actually directly do more long term tasks to boost the function of the mesocortical pathway, it’s to actually starve the mesolimbic.(not literally)

It’s called “dopamine detox” and unfortunately, it has nothing to do with actually removing dopamine from the body. if you actually succeeded in removing dopamine from your entire body, you would be a twitching mess incapable of further self development.

No, the goal here is to bore the brain to hell, so it begins to appreciate the mesocortical pathway again.

That meant I had to identify all the short term low effort tasks that were giving me junk dopamine . . . and get rid of them. Or at least reduce them significantly.

That wasn’t hard, I knew exactly how I was living my life. Here’s what I did:

The Tactical Solution

No more movies for a month.

No more games for the rest of the year.

No social media after 10PM

That’s where I started. And then I started to get more specific. I needed a habit builder. So I found This app and This app to do that, both of them help you to set and hit goals.

It’s kind of unfortunate that they don’t have unique names, they’re just “habit this” and “habit that”. Hire a brand naming specialist, people, jeez. Anyway, they work great, and I’m testing both of them to see which one I’ll stick with in the long run.

I needed an app to monitor how much time I was spending on screen. So for my phone I downloaded ActionDash for that and bruh, I was averaging 9 hours a day on screen.

That was ridiculous, it was unacceptable. Further investigation revealed that I was spending most of that time after 10PM when I should have been sleeping. No wonder I didn’t have any energy during the day! I was wasting it at night watching funny videos. Arrgh.

ActionDash had the extra benefit of being able to lock me out of specific apps based on a schedule I’d set, So I promptly locked myself out of all social media from 10PM to 5AM.

Now, whenever I try to get on the wrong app at the wrong time, I get greeted by a meme screen blocking my way and closing the screen closes the app too.

But I have another app(overkill?) that completely locks up my phone at 1:50AM. I mean, clearly, what am I still doing up at that time? of course, I have emergency numbers stored so I can quickly make calls even if my phone is locked.

On My PC I have an extension called unhook YouTube which removes all of YouTube’s recommendations and comments. My YouTube now is literally a dry desert.

All I have is the video I’m watching and the title. that’s all. Of course, you don’t have to go that extreme because Unhook YouTube has an incredible amount of control.

You can choose precisely what you want to block and what you want to allow. They have dozens of options, So feel free to choose.

I also have BlockSite extension which blocks me from up to six websites of my own choosing, as well as all adult content(automatically shipped with the extension) and I can choose which website to redirect me to, so now, when I try to log in to reddit for the memes in the middle of the night, I get blocked and redirected to Behance so I can stay sane and focused. hehehe.

I also realize that taking all these things away is going to lead to a lot of boredom, which is why I also made a list of Default actions, which are small but good tasks that I want to default when I have nothing else to do.

The brain often defaults to bad choices and decisions when we have nothing planned for that period, so planning the entire day with a set of default actions that I can do when I have nothing else to do is another way of preventing this from happening.

Some examples of what I have on my list are push ups and walks. I plan to add mediation later on.

Is this too much?

Nope. this is fine.

It’ll be boring, sure. but that’s the point. the point here is to get rid of all the time wasters so I can start to enjoy long form engagements like I used to.

Over time, I may consider relaxing these restrictions, but to be honest, I don’t see them as restrictions, I see them more as armor to protect me from all the attention suckers so I can focus it on things that matter.

If you’re also in a position where you constantly keep getting sucked into things that do not matter while your real goals languish, you may want to try this too. I have no guarantees that it’ll work, I’m not a medical professional after all, Just try it. Lemme know how it goes.

Thank you for reading.