Stolen Focus

If a child is raised in an environment where there is a lot of stress, they are significantly more likely to then develop attention problems and be diagnosed with ADHD

ADHD is not a diagnosis. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s just a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together

The brain gets built from foods. So there’s that very fundamental connection.” Your brain, he told me, can only grow and thrive if it gets a broad range of key nutrients

In a culture built on everincreasing speed, slowing down is hard, and most of us will feel guilty about doing it

problems with money are really not good for concentration.... If you have to worry about your financial situation...it takes a lot of the capacity of your brain. If you don’t have to worry, then it improves your capacity to think about other things

the inability to sleep, he explained, isn’t a malfunction—it’s “an adaptive trait, under circumstances of perceived threat.”

To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

The people who say stress is just a matter of changing your thoughts are, he says, talking “from a privileged position. It’s easy for them to say that

the tech companies want us to think about our attention problems. They can no longer deny the crisis, so they are doing something else: subtly urging us to see it as an individual problem that has to be solved with greater self-restraint on my part and yours, not theirs. That’s why they began to offer tools they argued would help you to strengthen your willpower

The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there’s some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself