We wake up and reach for the glow.
Before our feet touch the floor, we’ve already checked email, skimmed headlines, scrolled through a few feeds, maybe replied to a message or two. By the time we’re pouring coffee, we’ve consumed more information than people a generation ago might have seen before lunch.
It feels normal.
It feels productive.
It feels… necessary.
But underneath all of that is something quieter and much more uncomfortable:
We’re a society buried in our phones.
And it’s costing us our minds.
The chase, the surface, the feed
Digital life is a chase.
We chase:
- The next notification
- The next funny video
- The next DM
- The next tiny hit of “someone sees me”
Feeds are designed to never end. There’s always more—another story, another post, another suggested clip. That’s the point. If your attention were a body of water, the modern internet wants you skimming across the surface forever and never diving down.
And after a while, you start to feel that in your bones:
- You open a book and your brain twitches for something “easier.”
- You sit in silence and feel restless within seconds.
- You struggle to finish a thought without checking your phone “for a second.”
The chase becomes a habit.
The habit becomes a default.
The default becomes an identity: “I just have a terrible attention span.”
But what if the story is bigger than that?
The Shallows: when your brain learns to live on the surface
In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet isn’t just changing what we pay attention to. It’s changing how our brains are wired to pay attention at all.
- Every click, swipe, and jump from app to app trains your brain to expect constant stimulation.
- Deep reading and deep thinking feel harder not because you’re “weak,” but because your mind has been rewired for speed and fragments, not depth and focus.
- We become really good at skimming, and really bad at staying.
If you’ve noticed it’s harder to:
- Read more than a few pages without getting distracted
- Sit with a feeling for more than a moment
- Follow a single train of thought to the end
…it might not be a personal failure. It might be the predictable outcome of a brain marinating in the digital shallows all day.
That has consequences.
Because the places where healing, insight, and self-understanding live?
They’re not at the surface.
Stolen Focus: it’s not just you
If Carr zooms in on your brain, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus zooms out on the entire system.
He makes a simple but important point: our difficulty focusing is not just a “you problem.”
We live inside an attention economy where:
- Apps, platforms, and services are literally rewarded for keeping you distracted.
- Work culture expects constant responsiveness.
- Information comes at you faster than you can emotionally process.
- Rest is often just another form of scrolling.
So when you can’t concentrate, it’s easy to jump straight to shame:
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Why can’t I just focus like everyone else?”
“Why do I keep picking up this stupid phone?”
But Hari reminds us: you’re trying to stay present in a world perfectly engineered to pull you away from presence. Your attention is up against business models, cultural norms, and technologies designed to capture and keep it.
That doesn’t remove personal responsibility.
But it does remove a lot of self-blame.
The digital drug
“It’s like we can’t be present in the moment because the digital world is addictive. It’s a drug.”
Not in a dramatic, movie-of-the-week way—but in a calm, ordinary way:
- Tiny hits of novelty
- Tiny hits of validation
- Tiny hits of distraction from whatever you’re actually feeling
You feel bored → you open a feed.
You feel anxious → you check email.
You feel lonely → you scroll, hoping something will make you feel less alone.
Just like any drug, it offers relief without resolution.
It numbs the discomfort but doesn’t address its cause.
It fills the silence where insight might have appeared.
It drowns out the shaky, honest voice inside you that actually needs to be heard.
The mental health tab we’re running up
So what does all of this do to our mental health?
1. Anxiety and “mental static”
Shallow, fragmented attention creates a kind of mental static—lots of noise, very little clarity.
- Thoughts race.
- Your nervous system never fully lands.
- Quiet starts to feel unsafe.
You end up feeling “tired but wired”—exhausted, but unable to rest.
2. Emotional backlog
If every uncomfortable feeling is met with a quick hit of distraction, nothing ever gets fully processed.
- Grief gets scrolled away.
- Shame gets scrolled away.
- Loneliness gets scrolled away.
The emotion doesn’t disappear. It just sits there, unprocessed, stacking up over time. That backlog can slowly turn into burnout, numbness, or depression.
3. Comparison as daily ritual
Social feeds give you an endless stream of curated, polished glimpses into other people’s lives.
Your brain doesn’t register the context. It just quietly absorbs:
“They’re further ahead than me.”
“Their relationship looks happier.”
“Their career seems more impressive.”
“Their family seems more together.”
Shallow scrolling. Deep shame.
And because we rarely sit still long enough to question those stories, they harden into beliefs about our worth.
4. Loneliness in a crowd
Phones promise connection, but often deliver the opposite.
We’re in the same rooms, at the same tables, but our attention is miles apart. We’re surrounded by people and starving for connection.
That gap between proximity and true presence can be brutal.
Especially if you’re already struggling.
What gets lost when we live in the shallows
When our attention is stolen and our inner life is constantly interrupted, we lose access to:
- The ability to hear ourselves
- The space to notice, “This isn’t working for me anymore.”
- The clarity to ask, “What do I actually want?”
- The courage that often emerges after we’ve sat with discomfort long enough to understand it
The deeper, truer parts of us rarely scream.
They speak softly, over time.
They need slowness, boredom, and stillness to even register.
If life is a kind of instrument, we’ve tuned ourselves to only hear the high, shrill notes—the pings, alerts, dings, and dopamine hits. The low, rich, resonant tones—the ones that tell us who we are, what we value, what hurts, and what needs to change—get buried.
So what do we do? (Without throwing our phones in a lake.)
The point isn’t to become anti-technology or to perform some kind of moral purity test about screen time.
The point is to reclaim enough depth that your mental health has room to breathe.
You don’t need a 30-day digital detox to start. You can start where you are, with tiny experiments:
1. Notice the reach.
Catch the moment your hand goes to your phone automatically.
- What were you feeling one second before that?
- Bored? Lonely? Anxious? Overwhelmed?
Just naming it is powerful: “Oh, this is me escaping discomfort.”
2. Protect small pockets of depth.
Choose one or two parts of your day to keep sacred:
- First 15–30 minutes after you wake up
- A daily walk
- Time with someone you care about
- The last 30 minutes before bed
No scrolling, no feeds. Just you, your thoughts, your surroundings, your breath.
3. Do one thing all the way through.
Read one article from start to finish.
Listen to one song without touching your phone.
Have one conversation with your phone in another room.
Train your brain, gently, to remember what it feels like to stay.
4. Let one feeling stay a little longer.
The next time you feel the urge to escape into the glow, pause.
- Take three slow breaths.
- Ask, “What is this feeling trying to tell me?”
You don’t have to solve it on the spot. Just let it exist without instantly numbing it.
Relearning how to be here
We didn’t choose the architecture of the digital world we were handed.
We did not personally design the algorithms trying to hijack our attention.
But we do get to choose, in small ways, how much of our inner life we’re willing to lose to the scroll.
Our attention is not just a productivity resource.
It’s the way we touch our own lives.
When we live permanently in the shallows, our mental health pays the price: more anxiety, more numbness, more quiet despair that something precious is slipping away and we don’t quite know how to catch it.
Reclaiming our focus isn’t just about working better.
It’s about living deeper.
It’s about learning, again, how to be where we actually are—
with the people in front of us,
with the feelings inside us,
with the one life we’ve been given…
before the next notification pulls us under.