You probably don't have ADHD. You have a phone.

Half the internet has decided they have ADHD. Can't focus, jump between tasks, forget what they were doing five minutes ago.

Most of them don't have ADHD. They have a phone.

You've also probably heard humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish - 8 seconds.

Well, the BBC tried to find the source of this statement. Every article traced back to a marketing site called Statistic Brain. No research behind it.
The whole goldfish comparison was made up!

Meanwhile, when people are genuinely engaged in something, their capacity to focus has stayed stable for decades. Nothing about your wiring has decayed.

So why does it feel like it has?

Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has tracked this since 2004. Back then, the average person stayed on one screen for about 2.5 minutes before switching. By 2016, it dropped to 47 seconds.

Forty-seven seconds. That's how long the average knowledge worker now stays on one screen before something pulls them elsewhere.

But notice what that's measuring. Not your brain's capacity. How often your environment interrupts you. Different thing.

Real ADHD exists, and the difference matters. But most people googling their symptoms are describing the room they're sitting in, not their brain.

You're not a goldfish, and you probably don't have ADHD. You're a person trying to focus inside a room that was designed to interrupt you.

Change the room and most of the problem disappears on its own.

#mind