If we’re following culture’s prevailing train of thought, we’ve grown accustomed to considering our failing attention spans as the product of our brains. Our culture constantly prompts mental hyperactivity, and our brains are slowly being rewired to crave the instant dopamine hits that online platforms can give.

Indeed, the conversation around attention focuses heavily on the science and physiology of our failing focus. One video on the subject makes liberal references to things like “emotional triggers,” “habit loops,” and the addictive “variable reward system” that social media or other instant-gratification platforms use. Another references the “habit loop” of distraction, especially as regards social media, and the way our brains are acclimated to that loop. Yet another speaks of how “your brain is being secretly programmed hundreds of times a day,” using neuroscience as a key way to explain our world’s increasingly divided attention spans.

Amidst this craze around physiology and the mechanics of the human brain, Reagan Rose, founder of Redeeming Productivity, has a helpful take. Though he acknowledges the reality of physical processes and their effect on the way we act – God did, after all, create us with bodies, and those bodies do have bearing on our lives – he suggests that there may be something else involved. That “something else” is our hearts.

Here’s Rose’s take, in his own words:

Dopamine loops, or reward pathways – all that stuff, that’s real. … But it’s downstream of something deeper. You are more than just your brain. And so when we deal with questions even as practical as ‘How do I help retrain my attention so I can focus better?’ they’re not purely brain questions. They’re not purely physical questions. … The question that is rarely asked, and that Christians really need to ask themselves is ‘When I am running toward distraction, why am I doing that?’

Rose emphasizes that, when it comes to our attention, our hearts, ultimately, are at the root.

To make this point, he guides his audience to two passages of Scripture, both of which deal with the core reality of our heart. The first passage is Proverbs 4:23. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” This verse, Rose points out, highlights the heart as core to our being – the entity that gives rise to everything else. Because of this, he says, “A fragmented attention is often evidence of a fragmented heart.” This is because, when we give something our attention, it signals that we are, in some way, invested in it. “Attention follows affection,” Rose says.

And indeed, we see this idea at work in our own lives. If we take an inventory of what takes up most of our time, it will, invariably, reflect what we care about, whether that be our families, our churches, our reputations, or otherwise.

“But I don’t care that much about half the YouTube shorts I watch!” you protest. Certainly, with social media, our affection is not often for the videos itself. Usually, our affection is for what the videos represent.

This leads us to the second passage Rose cites, Jeremiah 2:13. “For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

In this verse, the speaker is God; the audience is the wayward Israelites. The Israelites here are sinning against God in two ways. First, they’re pushing away what will truly satisfy them – God, “the fountain of living waters” – and they’re chasing what will never ultimately satisfy – “broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

And like the Israelites, what we’re doing when we chase social media, video games, or other forms of attention-stealing entertainment is seeking satisfaction in something that is not God. We think that another Instagram post, YouTube reel, or video game will satisfy us – or, at the least, distract us from other, more painful realities. But ultimately, our hearts won’t find satisfaction in the constant distractions of online life. For that, we need to depend on and find satisfaction in God.

In sum? Though the centrality of our hearts in the fight for focus isn’t a theme in the broad cultural conversation, Rose’s ideas are worth some careful consideration. It may well be that our short attention spans are not simply a result of faltering physiology. They may, too, come from the faltering of our hearts.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. 

Image credit: GHCassel, CC0