My friend Chuck is a pararescueman (or PJ) in the US Air Force. He is as talented as he is humble. His responsibilities require him to master many different skills, ranging from combat operations to saving lives and aiding the injured, often in very austere and challenging environments. His profession requires constant training and, at any given moment, he might need to recall critical information like specific tactical procedures or complex medical techniques.

One day, he was telling me how he was trained to dig a snow cave to survive overnight in the cold. Another time he was telling me about different types of parachute equipment. Knowing how frequently he is in training, preparing for new missions and different scenarios, I asked him how he can focus on it all.

He said, “Joe, it’s like penguins on an iceberg. You can only fit a certain number of them on there at a time. As I learn something new, a fat penguin falls off the other side. That’s the way it goes.”

Chuck’s ability to focus, to learn—and relearn—critical information is essential for him to be prepared at all times, living up to the PJ motto, “That others may live.”

Our Brains Are Changing

Whether he knew it or not, he described what happens to our brains with all of this noise and infobesity. It turns out that our brains aren’t just being affected but are changing, especially in the young, who are exposed to infobesity from birth.

The human brain, which on average weighs about three pounds, contains about 100 billion nerve cells that work like a big computer.¹

The brain has three sections: the cerebrum, which controls things like our conscious and unconscious thoughts and our speech and hearing; the brain stem, which transmits information to the spinal cord and controls eye movement and facial expressions; and the cerebellum, which controls complex motor functions like walking.

The cerebrum is responsible for our ability to focus and remember things. We have three types of memory—long-term, short-term, and working memory. It’s our memory, particularly our short-term and working memories, that are changing in this age of infobesity.

Short-term and working memory are closely linked. It’s what we rely upon every day to focus on a presentation at work or on what our boss is telling us, to remember what time to pick up our kids from soccer or where we put our wallets. It’s also what is disrupted by things like text messages, e-mail and social media alerts, and other common interruptions we face on a daily basis.

Working Memory in Decline

I want to focus on working memory because it’s like the brain’s version of random-access memory (RAM) in a computer. It is simply defined as the part of our short-term memory responsible for holding and managing information for mental processing, reasoning, and decision-making. Like RAM, it can decline when overtasked.

An easy way to understand it is to consider how many numbers you can temporarily store and recall. Years ago, people could easily retain many digits, but nowadays we struggle to remember phone numbers and addresses. When our focus is interrupted, research shows that that memory is wiped out. This function of the brain comes from the days when we had to react to immediate danger with a fight-or-flight response.

Imagine using a computer and opening numerous software applications, each demanding lots of processing power. The RAM won’t be enough to handle all of it, and the speed will slow. The same is true for a mental task that requires focus. Interruptions are the equivalent of opening a new application as they create an attention deficit as the brain slows down to do two or more things at once.

In the workplace, interruptions are the norm. They can cause employees to take increased time to complete a task. A study by CBS News found that even a three-second interruption can cause twice as many errors—and twice the anxiety—for the workforce.² Author Kristin Wong from Lifehacker.com reports it takes about 25 minutes to get back into the swing of things after you’ve been interrupted.³

Years ago, I worked closely on a marketing assignment for a Swedish software company, Cogmed, that conducted extensive research to prove one could train the brain and regain lost working memory capacity. Its program and studies were encouraging because they helped people regain lost capacity to focus, a critical skill to be successful.

In an attempt to get more done in an environment of constant e-mails, text messages, social media, and 24-hour news, we attempt to excel at multitasking, thinking we can juggle many things at once. Our smartphones are always with us so the interruptions are right there as we switch rapidly from one task to another with little focus and declining efficiency.

A strong or weak working memory can spell the difference.

Brains Are Like Computers

If we look at the brain like a computer, we realize that when we try to process more information than our working memory can handle, our minds slow down. We become forgetful, inefficient, and we feel as if a fog is clouding our minds.

My kids laugh at me because when they look at my smartphone, they remark, “Dad, look at how many apps you have open.” My reply is always the same—I forget to close them. I fail to recognize that my phone slows down, sometimes to a stop. It’s no surprise that when I close them, my phone works better and faster. It’s the same with our brain.

Another way to show what is happening to our working memory is to consider our ability to hold a string of numbers, such as phone numbers, in our heads. Typically, phone numbers are 10 or 11 digits long.

Research shows that our working memory can retain only 7 items at a time.⁴ As my Air Force friend would put it, penguins are being bumped off the iceberg all day long.

When was the last time you tried to recall a phone number instead of using speed dial or your phone’s contacts or call records? What happens when you meet someone and they tell you their name, but you instantly forget it?

Our minds seem to be weakening as we rely more and more on technology to manage these tasks.

Back in the day, we used to handle all those details minute to minute with sharper attention. Though that ability naturally declines as people get older, researchers have found that, because our brains are so saturated with information coming at us, our ability to retain a string of digits in the moment, like phone numbers, social security numbers, or a friend’s address, is shrinking.

Our focus is in decline.

We’re Losing Impulse Control

Not only is our attention altering, but so is our ability to control our impulses.

Studies cited by Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, show that multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop that rewards us for our inattention.⁵ In essence, you’re getting rewarded for losing focus because you’re looking for new stimulation, new dopamine releases.

A way to understand this better is to consider what happens to babies when we try to distract them from crying by waving a bright or shiny object in front of them.

Glenn Wilson, a former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College in London, England, found that multitasking reduces IQ by 10 points. In an article entitled “Info-mania Dents IQ More Than Marijuana,” he asserts that the cognitive loss in multitasking is greater than what is lost when a person smokes marijuana.⁶

Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and a leading authority in divided attention, in an NPR article entitled “Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again!,” says, “People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.”⁷

Levitin echoes their observations, stating, “make no mistake: e-mail, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.”⁸

Over time, all these interruptions make it harder for us to focus our attention or think about something for a sustained amount of time.

Our Brains Get Hooked

What makes it hard to change these habits and to improve our focus is that our brains have become, in many ways, addicted to these interruptions. In some instances, as was the case in the creation of many popular social media apps and video games, companies have designed applications and technology to get us hooked.

They are tapping into a chemical in our brains called dopamine. Psychology Today defines it as “a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but also to take action to move toward them.”⁹

Dopamine is at the root of all feelings of pleasure and is what increases when a person is addicted to something. Our smartphones feed into what behavioral scientist Susan Weinschenk calls a “dopamine loop.”

“When you bring up the feed on one of your favorite apps, the dopamine loop has become engaged. With every photo you scroll through, headline you read, or link you go to, you are feeding the loop, which just makes you want more. It takes a lot to reach satiation, and in fact you might never be satisfied,” she says.¹⁰

According to the American Psychiatric Association, addiction is defined as an excessive use of a substance—in this case, we’re talking about the Internet, social media, news feeds, texting—that leads to impairment of everyday life, sleep, and relationships. Statistically, it’s pretty staggering. Up to 18% of people, according to some research are actually addicted to the Internet.¹¹

Sean Parker, who was one of the early founders of Facebook, infamously said, “God only knows what this is doing to our brains.” Many popular apps and games are exploiting the psychological vulnerabilities within us by offering instant gratification through this feedback loop—this addictive feedback loop of dopamine—to get these releases.”¹²

How Often Do We Check Our Smartphones?

Smartphone usage is staggering. Seventy percent of young smartphone users check their phone three or more times an hour. Twenty-two percent of them are checking it every few minutes.¹³ According to Dscout’s “Putting a Finger on Our Phone Obsession,” on average, people tap, swipe, and click their phones 2,617 times per day; the heaviest users do so 5,427 times per day.¹⁴ If you are looking at certain groups of people, certainly college–aged and high school–aged people, the phone in the hand is a constant. They’ve learned to live with it because that’s all they’ve known. But even people who have not used smartphones all their lives have difficulty resisting the urge to frequently check them throughout the day. A TechTalk survey recorded that 6% checked their work e-mail while their spouse was in labor and another 6% had checked e-mail at a funeral!¹⁵

We did a research study at The BRIEF Lab and found that 70% of people check their phones as soon as they wake up in the morning and right before they go to bed.¹⁶

Here are five questions to ask yourself if you think you might be addicted to your phone:

1. Am I glued to my phone?
2. Can I put my phone down—even for a bit?
3. Do I feel withdrawal symptoms if I’m not using it?
4. Am I sneaking use of my phone?
5. Do I use my phone when bored or depressed?

Why is all of this important?

Our ability to focus and concentrate is critical to the things that we need to do well every day. Say, for example, you’re in a meeting and somebody’s talking to you but your mind doesn’t focus on what they are saying because you are thinking of several other things. Or you are on the phone talking to a family member and you start watching a bird eat a worm, rather than listening to the caller. Or you have to concentrate to prepare an important presentation and you keep getting up to do other things. You aren’t paying attention to those things completely so you do them poorly, they take longer to do, and doing them tires you out.

This divided attention can have disastrous results both professionally and personally.