How to Improve Your Attention Span: What Actually Trains It

You can improve your attention span, but probably not the way most apps promise. Brain games mostly make you better at brain games. What carries over into a book, a meeting or a long piece of work is practice that looks like those things, plus less competition from the phone in your pocket.

Here's what the trials support, how much of it you need and how to tell it's working. (Whether attention spans in general are shrinking is a separate question, covered in our guide to attention span. If yours feels short and you'd like the everyday causes first, start with short attention span.)

What a better attention span looks like

Attention wanders, and it always has. Researchers built an iPhone app that asked 2,250 adults, at random moments of their day, what they were doing and what they were thinking about. People were thinking about something other than what they were doing almost as often as they were thinking about it, and those moments tended to be unhappier ones ^[1].

So a better attention span isn't a mind that never drifts. It comes down to two skills you can train:

• Coming back. Noticing sooner that you've drifted, and returning without a fight.
• Staying. Holding one long thing, a chapter, a conversation, an hour of work, before the urge to switch wins.

Both improve with practice. The question is which practice.

Skip the brain games

In a study published in 2010, 11,430 adults recruited through a BBC science program trained online for six weeks, at least ten minutes a day, three times a week, on tasks of memory, attention, reasoning and planning. They got much better at the tasks they practiced. On a separate set of tests they hadn't trained on, though, they improved no more than a control group that had spent its sessions answering obscure general knowledge questions online ^[2].

A 2016 review by seven psychologists went through the published studies that leading brain-training companies cited as their evidence. It found plenty of evidence that training improves performance on the trained tasks, less that it improves closely related tasks, and little that it improves distantly related tasks or everyday thinking ^[3].

The one thing brain training reliably teaches is that you get better at exactly what you practice.

If you enjoy a puzzle app, keep enjoying it. Just don't count it as attention training. Use the lesson instead: if practice is that specific, practice the real thing.

Take away the competition first

Practice only works if you get to finish a repetition. If a notification, or the reflex to check, ends every stretch after a few minutes, you never get to train the long version.

The strongest evidence that attention recovers when the phone backs off comes from a randomized trial with 467 adults. People asked to block all mobile internet on their phones for two weeks, with calls and texts still working, improved on an objective test of sustained attention by about as much as attention typically declines over ten years of aging. It wasn't easy: only about a quarter of them kept the block on as fully as the study required ^[4].

You don't need to switch off the internet to use that. Give the feeds an end instead: a daily cap or a session limit on the apps that eat your time, with the tools already on your phone (here's how to lock apps on iPhone), or with a daily limit in Unrotten, whose shield has no "ignore limit" button. Then keep the phone out of the room for at least one block of reading or work a day.

Practice coming back

Meditation is the most direct workout for the first skill, because its one exercise is the skill itself: rest your attention on your breath, notice when it has wandered and bring it back. Each return is a repetition.

In a randomized trial, 48 undergraduates took either a mindfulness class or a nutrition class, 45 minutes four times a week for two weeks, and the mindfulness group also practiced for ten minutes a day at home. Afterward, their minds wandered less during testing, their working memory improved, and their scores on a reading-comprehension section of the GRE rose by the equivalent of about 16 percentile points ^[5].

Shorter doses help too, but take longer. Adults who had never meditated were randomly assigned to 13 minutes a day of guided meditation or 13 minutes of podcasts. After eight weeks, though not after four, the meditators did better on tests of attention and memory, and their mood had improved ^[6]. Only 42 people finished that trial, so treat it as a promising signal rather than proof.

Keep your expectations honest. A 2022 meta-analysis pooled 45 randomized trials with 2,238 adults and found that mindfulness programs beat their comparison groups on objective tests of thinking by a small margin, with the clearest gains in working memory and executive function. They did better than inactive comparison groups, but no better than active ones ^[7]. Meditation is a good tool, not a cure.

A practical start is ten minutes a day at the same time, counting each return to the breath as a success rather than a failure. Unrotten's Take a mindful pause goal tracks your mindful minutes each day, the app has Mindful breathing built in, and mindful minutes recharge your MindBattery.

Practice staying with long things

For the second skill, practice the long thing itself. For most people that means reading a book without reaching for the phone, working on one problem for an hour, or listening to someone all the way through.

1. Pick one long thing a day. A book is ideal: it asks for exactly the steady attention a feed never does.
2. Start just past your limit. If you usually reach for your phone after ten minutes, set a timer for twelve, and stop while it still feels doable.
3. Add five minutes a week. Slow growth is the kind that lasts.
4. Treat the urge to check like a wandering thought. Notice it, let it pass and go back to the page. Each urge you let go by is a repetition too.

If your hand keeps winning that fight, take the fight away. A Reading session in Unrotten, started from the + on Home, keeps the apps you chose locked until it ends, with a countdown on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island.

Move your body

Exercise helps attention, in modest ways. A meta-analysis of 79 studies found that a single session of exercise gives a small lift to mental performance during the exercise, right after it and after a delay ^[8]. Over months, a 2020 meta-analysis of 80 randomized trials in healthy people found a small overall benefit of regular exercise for thinking skills. In longer programs, longer sessions did more, and coordinative exercise, the kind that trains how your body coordinates its movements, did more than other types ^[9].

In practice: a brisk walk or a run before the work that needs you, and over time, an activity that keeps asking your body to learn new movements. Short nights work against all of this, so protect your sleep too; our guide to revenge bedtime procrastination covers the last hour of the day.

A four-week plan

The trials above measured change over two to eight weeks ^{[4, 5, 6]}, so give yourself a month before you judge.

• Week 1: clear the competition. Set a limit on the feeds that eat your time, and keep the phone out of the room for one block of reading or work a day.
• Week 2: add ten minutes of meditation at the same time every day.
• Week 3: add one long thing a day, starting just past your current limit.
• Week 4: add movement before your most demanding work.

Keep a simple record: how many pages you read before the first reach for your phone, or how long a work block lasted before you switched. If trouble focusing goes back to childhood and shows up in every part of your life, or comes with low mood, anxiety or sleep problems that don't lift, talk to a doctor: attention has causes that practice won't fix on its own.

For everyone else, expect small gains, which is what the studies found, and notice them. A page further today, a work block that held a few minutes longer: those add up to the attention span you were after.