The Hidden Costs of Smart Phones: Executive Functioning Challenges

Let’s talk about attention and smartphones. Daily, we hear horror stories about how phones are destroying our lives. The tales are so familiar that I think many of us have started to ignore the “sky is falling” reporting on smartphone usage. 

 I am not naturally hyperbolic or reactionary. So, even if I think cell phones have negatively affected me and my loved ones, I don’t think they have ruined any of our lives. AND I cannot see a future without them—even if I never set foot on social media’s soil. So, setting the alarmists aside and going about business as usual can be easy. But lately, I am starting to pay attention.

I began to suspect that smartphones might be a trickier issue than I realized when my executive functioning practice grew after the pandemic. At first, it was no surprise that executive functioning in older adolescents would take a hit during the pandemic. Much of the workload expected of a junior or senior in high school was scaled back to accommodate Zoom education and to protect the fragile mental health of teens living through a very uncertain time. With less demanding work, students didn’t have to stretch their executive functioning skills, and they came out of high school unprepared for the long-term assignments that are so common to college courses. Middle school students experienced that same lag. Instead of working up to high school level expectations, they stagnated for a couple of years and were slammed by the independence required of high school coursework. 

But as I spent more and more time with my students, giving them practical skills for breaking down large assignments, forecasting challenges, anticipating expectations, and learning to time block, I noticed something else at play. Many of my very high-performing students were reporting a struggle to focus. I started asking better questions and listening more carefully. 

One of my favorite stories is of a high school student struggling in biology, and when I asked her what she was doing in biology to take notes and engage with the material, she rather innocently offered that she should stop having her phone out during class. I burst out laughing and readily agreed. Her performance improved by simply putting away her phone. While this is an obvious case of phones distracting students, it speaks to how students don’t always realize how distracted they are by their phones.

But the problem is more extensive than simply putting away the phone.  Day after day, my students reported their struggles to put down their phones to study, eat, and sleep. I often asked students to experiment with leaving their phones in another room while working or setting app limits. This takes a level of discipline that is not inherent to many teens. And even with these workarounds in place, my students reported fractured focus.

Of course, ADD could be the culprit for all of these attentional issues, but the phones seemed way more likely - and not as a symptom of a lack of focus, but as a cause. Of course, my teens did not agree. They saw their phones as a way to “take a break” when they were tired from schoolwork. I knew, however, that screens are not a good way of taking a break. These students were taxing their cognitive load before they picked up their phones, and the constant scrolling and clicking wasn’t a break for their tired brains. They would be better off staring at a blank white wall in the distance and listening to Tibetan singing bowls. But convincing them of this would be hard. 

It takes a village and a multifaceted approach to getting students to develop a new relationship with their technology—one that doesn’t tax their brains when they need a break. 

It can also be hard to convince parents that it is worth the effort to peel their teens away from their technology. Every parent wants to do it, but they don’t like the fight. But new research from the journal Nature underscores the importance of this fight. The article summarizes past research on cellphone distraction and reports on new findings, which show that the mere presence of a smartphone turned off reduces focus. Additionally, it doesn’t just look at higher-order thinking but rather the simplest of attentional tasks, such as switching focus. Using college students, the research tests whether “attention is used because it is directed to the smartphone”  and whether “cognitive resources are depleted…and performance to complete tasks will be negatively affected.” Lo and behold, they found that “If attention is used because it is directed to the smartphone and cognitive resources are depleted,” task performance suffers. In essence, the mere presence of a phone (turned off) siphons off cognitive resources and/or takes up mental space, leaving students with less to work with. And the worst part is that loss is invisible. Students can look focused and are still slower at tasks and less efficient.

The implication for all of us, not just our students, is to pay attention to the ways we are taxing our brain. When we want a break, we should not be picking up our phones. As annoying as the mindful movement has gotten - and I say that as the Mindful Tutor - this research shows we need to embrace the small practices of focusing on our breathing, closing our eyes, and clearing out cache!

Photo by Zachary Olson on Unsplash