Write your way to sharper focus
Attention is becoming a rare and valuable currency. As the 24-hour news cycle shrinks to 280-character bursts of madness on X and TL;DR is a default, it is harder and harder to pay attention.
Given how much attention we pay to attention, it’s clear we feel the need of it. Nobody wants to feel distracted and disjointed all the time.
But how do we find focus in a spinning, blinking, pinging world?
When I was eight or nine, I read Harriet the Spy, scared up a spiral-bound notebook, and started observing.
There wasn’t much to report in the tiny central Oregon coast village where we lived — weather, what time the neighbor got home from work, whether the adjacent holiday cottage was occupied for the weekend, a passing dog or cat.
Although I stopped ‘spying’ by the age of 11-12, I never stopped writing stuff down. It was compulsive, comforting, felt constructive.
The first time I read ‘Why I Write’, Orwell’s words rang familiar:
For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the inkpot…’. Although I had to search…for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will.
It wasn’t just me, then?
Like Orwell, I became a journalist and learned the critical relationship between attention and getting the telling detail, the quotable quote, the nuance. From reading the likes of Orwell, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Martha Gellhorn and Hunter Thompson I learned to attend not just to the immediate subject, but to the billboard visible through the window, the overheard remark, the weather. Anything might be the thing that illuminated a rote interview with a irony or insight.
Writing was such a reflexive way of relating to the world, that it took me a long time to consider the cognitive implications of my actions.
To complete my Master’s in Education, I had to write a research proposal. By then, I’d spent time in classrooms with ADHD-identified students and knew how challenging inattention could be.
I knew writing required attention. But could it cultivate attention?
This was my abstract:
This paper proposes a research study on the use of writing as an attention-building tool. The research problem is the reduction of adult attention spans in response to incessant digital stimuli, leading to difficulties in maintaining and controlling attention. It hypothesises that attention can be improved by guided writing exercises that require the subject to focus and report on objects, activities or relationships.
Since it was only an MA, I didn’t have a chance to conduct the experiment (one day!)
But there are researchers studying how writing can benefit neurodivergent learners.
Farida and Paramastri (2023) report:
“Writing as therapy can be included in sensory integration therapy because it emphasizes coordinating information to produce desired responses through sensory stimuli (Cornhill & Case-Smith, 1996; Tseng & Murray, 1994; Weil & Amundson, 1994). Coordinating the sensory system will be very beneficial for children with ADHD and autism for the reason of maximizing the development of the sensory system which…can reduce obstacles to cognitive development, especially executive functions… including working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility (Hughes & Graham, 2002)”
Makes sense, doesn’t it, that a task that draws on multiple parts of the brain and requires the integration of gross and fine motor skills, plus processing, reasoning, choosing, etc. would tend to make someone who did it regularly more attentive?
On a correlated note, Moliter, et al. (2016) investigated the relationship between writing skills and overall academic outcomes for students with ADHD.
“Students with ADHD exhibit greater deficits in written expression tasks requiring organization and attention to detail, especially in the context of a complex task,” the researchers noted. But, they found, “written expression abilities longitudinally predicted… academic outcomes.” That is, the better the student’s writing skills, the better their overall school achievement.
Did stronger writing indicate greater intellectual capacity, which translated into better grades down the road?
Or was the effort that had gone into cultivating writing skills (and writing must be cultivated: there is no writing center in the brain, at least seven key areas must work in concert to form written expression) responsible for the superior results?
Chicken. Egg. Whatever.
It’s safe to say that writing will not go amiss as means of cultivating attention.
Another crucial way writing can support attention relates to last week’s piece on Writing Emotion. Managing emotions is an oft-lost battle for individuals with ADHD.
In the words of Shaw, et al. (2015), “emotion dysregulation is prevalent in ADHD throughout the lifespan and is a major contributor to impairment.”
Emotional dysregulation is a “core, diagnostic feature of ADHD” and, per Shaw et al., does not necessarily improve with age — they report 34-70% of adults with ADHD suffer “impairing” emotional difficulties.
This raises the stakes. A child’s ADHD-sparked emotional meltdown may cause stress, or interfere with an activity, but it’s unlikely to get them arrested, or fired. An adult who struggles to manage their emotions could face life-altering ripple effects.
Writing offers a means to process emotions through the act of ordering and expressing, and a way to cultivate the attention that might allow a person to slow an emotional steam-train before it jumps the tracks.
What kind of writing might best serve attention-building?
I proposed that people “focus and report on objects, activities or relationships.”
Teaching writing has taught me that asking someone to “write about anything” is a great way to produce an instant block. Too many options = nothing on the page.
Prompts that can be adapted for any age group
Memories
your last birthday
the first time you did [x]
your favorite/least-favorite class at school
a story you loved as a kid
a family tradition
Objects
something you always carry with you (that’s not a smartphone)
a special gift
an item of clothing you wear frequently
what’s on your desk/bedside table
a favorite photograph
Relationships
your best friend
a teacher/colleague/boss you admire
someone who really annoys you
a sibling or family member
someone you got to know recently
Note: I avoid asking people to write about feelings directly (e.g., ‘a time you were sad’) because that can lead to abstraction. Emotions cannot be written about directly except by abstractions, and the idea of attention-building writing is to encourage the writer to focus on the concrete.
As students write about specific memories, objects, etc. the emotional resonance should emerge naturally as they tell the story (e.g., I liked/disliked this because…).
Challenge
Curious?
Why not give guided writing a spin for five days?
Use the prompts above, or generate your own, and spend 10-15 minutes each day writing. Be as concrete and precise as possible; don’t edit or self-censor.
Obviously, you’ll only have your subjective experience as ‘evidence’ in this experiment, but what is life but subjective experience?
If you find writing makes you more alert, attuned and engaged, the experiment is a success.
And if you feel no great difference, you’ll have still have invested time in building neural connections and attending to your inner life — that is also success.