My attention span suffered a significant self-inflicted wound last year.

I’ve been using social media for nearly 20 years, so I’m well aware of the ongoing technological assault on my ability to focus. Companies compete aggressively for our attention -- a precious commodity in this economy. The entire media ecosystem is structured to fragment our attention, and the dopamine hits are difficult to resist.

Research has documented the effect of this digital distraction that has become a part of our daily lives, and studies show correlations between social media usage and shorter attention spans -- no big surprise.

I’ve known all this and figured the damage had already been done.

I didn’t realize that one small change in my habits would make my ability to focus that much harder.

As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to words on the internet. I’ve spent many years reading short-form text, like tweets and posts, along with long-form prose, like news stories, personal essays and magazine features. I subscribe to multiple news sources, including several Substack accounts, all of which send alerts directly to my inbox.

In 2025, receiving these alerts of terrible things happening here and around the world every time I opened my inbox or looked at my phone felt like an electric shock.

Rather than read the stories that provoked anxiety, I started clicking more on the short bits of video showing up prominently on my Facebook and Instagram feeds. I largely ignored the short-form video craze heightened by TikTok during the pandemic, but last year, Meta reeled me in.

I began watching the superficial and ridiculous content -- snippets of the show “Say Yes to the Dress,” viral video memes, even bits of interviews with loathsome reality TV celebrities whose shows I had never watched.

Once you start scrolling short-form videos, the algorithms have got you. They keep feeding more and more of this content, automatically showing one video after another. I knew I was using this mindless scrolling as escapism from the current events that felt frightening and out of my control. What I didn’t realize is how short-form video rewires our brain, degrading our attention and memory in a way distinct from other types of media.

It felt so easy to scroll for an hour before falling asleep instead of picking up one of the many books stacked on my nightstand. Somehow, the books felt more daunting.

I read fewer books last year than I have in my entire life.

To understand how and why this happened, I turned to Dr. Gloria Mark, author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” as well as a Substack newsletter called "The Future of Attention." She explained the cognitive drain caused by the constant “context switching” inherent in short-form video scrolling.

Depth of processing is a psychological concept that describes when people are actively engaged and working hard to understand something.

“That takes time, and you retain material better,” she said. With short-form video, “Our minds are whiplashed from one idea to another.”

We each have limited cognitive resources, and having to reorient every 30 seconds or minute is draining. Eventually, she said, it causes stress.

That’s the very thing I was trying to alleviate. I was relying on these high-dopamine rewards to deal with the constant exposure to stressful news, and instead I was compounding my problem. Beyond productivity, these digital dopamine addictions erode our discipline and motivation. They affect our ability to think deeply and to form and sustain meaningful relationships.

Short-form video provides a different type of gratification, Mark explained. We get a hit of dopamine when we anticipate a reward, and short-form videos always trigger that anticipation, Mark said.

Furthermore, we can develop a habit of seeking this type of media very quickly. One report from TikTok’s internal documents suggests it can take as little as 35 minutes of using the app, which equates to about 260 videos, to form an addictive habit. I watched thousands of Reels and Stories last year, to the detriment of my focus, memory and attention.

Mark reminded me of how the process of reading a book gives our brain time to make connections, to reflect, to develop cognitive patience as characters and plots unfold. She suggested setting a timer when I catch myself watching these short-form videos. I could schedule my reading time as a non-negotiable again.

A former colleague suggested removing the social media apps I still use, like Facebook, Instagram and BlueSky, from my phone entirely and only accessing them via my laptop. Another friend advised setting up a separate folder into which news alerts are automatically directed. That way it won’t feel like a deluge of alarming alerts all day long, disregulating my thoughts and nervous system.

More importantly, I finally recognized and understood how short-form videos had become an unwanted and self-destructive habit.

This year, I’m reclaiming my attention.

Years ago, Barbara Finch wanted to channel her anxiety about an upcoming presidential election into something useful.

She volunteered to knock on doors in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis. She talked to a number of people who didn’t understand the issues at stake or the backgrounds of the candidates running. It was eye-opening.

Her friend, Ruth Ann Cioci, of Webster Groves, Missouri, also started canvassing and met voters who were unsure which of the candidates were better on the environment, schools and gun control. She wondered: How did so many people not know?

Cioci reassured herself by looking at the polling data showing her favored candidate ahead.

On Election Day, the outcome the friends most feared came to pass: George W. Bush beat John Kerry.

“I was devastated,” said Ann Ruger of Webster Groves.

“We thought George Bush was bad,” Cioci added.

The octogenarian women sitting around her laughed ruefully.

“Twenty years ago, four St. Louis women got pissed off,” Finch, now 87, says about the roots of her political activism. She listed their concerns: Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. St. Louis public schools were failing the children. Women couldn’t obtain the Plan B contraceptive at the drugstore. The environment was threatened.

After weeks of worry and complaint, the group of friends, most of whom had met when their children were in elementary school, decided to do something. They formed a nonprofit organization, Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice. The group would invite experts and provide monthly educational talks on a variety of social and political issues. They planned to channel that knowledge into their advocacy.

“We couldn’t find anyone else doing what we were doing,” Finch says.

Their programs began attracting a large crowd -- up to a hundred people for some topics. For 20 years running, the organization has hosted a monthly speaker. They have worked on initiatives like getting formerly incarcerated people's records expunged so they can get jobs. They have given away more than 10,000 gun locks in the city and county to help with gun violence prevention. They have fought against plans that would hurt the local environment.

Joanne Kelly, 84, of Webster Groves, served as president of the organization for several years. Now living at a senior facility, she says she is horrified by the current political situation. Recently, she started Seniors for Democracy at the facility and recruited her longtime friend, Cioci, to join. They meet on Wednesdays. They write and send postcards to elected officials. They make phone calls to their representatives relying on the FiveCalls.org site. They attend protests together.

“Are we making a big difference? No,” Kelly says. “But it’s not just sitting around and bitching to our neighbors, which does absolutely no good.”

The women, all in their 80s, expressed frustration and anger that they are unable to do more to fight what they see as the current administration’s authoritarian actions and attacks on democracy.

Among the original four women who started the organization, two are now widowed. Three live in independent living retirement communities. They are battling significant health challenges from osteoporosis to end-stage renal disease and macular degeneration. But they’ve maintained their friendships bound by a fire for social justice and a feisty sense of humor.

“The organization has aged better than we have individually,” Cioci jokes.

Beyond their life changes and health issues, they have something even stronger in common.

“We are still pissed off,” Finch says. “Things are so much worse today than they were 20 years ago.”

She said that age may have forced them to slow down, but it hasn’t stopped them.

"We are still determined, to the best of our now-limited ability," Finch said, "to continue to work, to educate, to raise our voices and strive for a fairer, kinder, more compassionate community.”

When a shooter burst into a study group and murdered two Brown University students and injured nine others, I was roasting a chicken, waiting for my son to return home from college.

My heart immediately ached for the parents of those terrorized on campus. Earlier that same day, their parents may have been thinking about their kids’ final exams, just like I had been. They would have been making holiday plans for their reunited family, just like I had been. The victims had been studying for an economics final; my son is an econ major.

When he walked into the house from the airport, I hugged him tightly. My thoughts kept drifting to those parents.

When a tragedy strikes, even if it's far away, our brains respond the way they have evolved to for our survival. We scan the situation for similarities, whether cultural, social, religious or experiential. Evolutionary biology suggests we are subconsciously assessing our own risk: Was this victim like me?

Human brains respond emotionally to a tragedy before processing it logically. When those whom we feel are like us -- part of our tribe -- are attacked, our built-in human need for belonging makes this emotional response more intense and visceral. We can’t help but think, “That could have been me or my loved ones.”

It’s human nature to feel faster empathy, deeper grief and a greater sense of moral urgency when one of our “own” has been hurt.

This is the instinctive work of our heart. The problem arises when we ignore the work of our brain and the moral ethics that should come next.

Those of us who believe all human life has equal value and that all humans are worthy of basic rights and freedoms have to expand our circle of care if we want to be morally consistent. Otherwise, we risk falling in the trap of hypocrites: claiming to have moral standards that we don’t actually live by.

An incident in the aftermath of the Brown attack illustrated this dynamic. Vice President J.D. Vance reacted to the news of the Brown university murders with a post on X. He shared a photo of Ella Cook, vice president of the campus College Republicans group, and wrote, “This beautiful young girl was one of the murdered students at Brown University. It takes special courage to lead an organization of conservatives on a left-wing campus, and I am very sorry our country has lost one of its bright young stars.

"Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord."

People immediately pointed out that another student had also been murdered: Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an aspiring neurosurgeon whose family immigrated from Uzbekistan when he was a young child.

Why was he not worthy of mention or grief?

Vance followed up an hour later with a post about the loss of Umurzokov.

His initial reaction -- to express grief about the victim to whom he felt connected -- reveals our human emotional bias. But the next step involves examining whether our sense of identity is overriding our morality and ethics. Is our loyalty to our in-group more important than our commitment to the truth?

While emotion is automatic, morality is based on cognition: our ability to think and reason.

For the past year, I repeatedly saw this emotional bias, selective empathy and brazen hypocrisy play out in my own social circles. Muslim friends who had expressed horror about the hate-crime killings of Palestinian Americans, but silence about the murder of Jewish Australians celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. Jewish friends who shared deep grief about the 38 children killed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but never a word about more than 17,000 children killed in Gaza since.

I watched the local reaction to a Jewish leader who posted that there are “no civilians” in Gaza, and thought about how different it would be if an imam would have uttered the exact same words about Israeli civilians.

Whose hate do we excuse and minimize? When does our empathy turn into action? Are we able to resist dehumanizing narratives pushed from our own side?

Moral consistency and integrity often compete with our sense of belonging.

It’s up to us to recognize this tension between instinct and ethics and choose our higher selves.