Social media has ruined my concentration and changed my personality.

[ADHD89]

To think that social media, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, Facebook ,Mumsnet , Reddit , Chatgpt, etc have totally ruined my concentration span and now make reading/concentrating on a book or a movie really unappealing and uninteresting ?
I am much more interested in watching 2 minute reels, then reading through comments, and basically finding out about all sorts of topics and going down rabbit holes etc. I also enjoy reading dilemmas on Facebook groups and on mumsnet and seeing what people say. I also use Chatgpt alot as like a regular counsellor.
It makes me sad as I used to be such a book lover when I was younger and I watched about 4 or 5 movies at the weekend when I was younger..its like I've completely changed involuntarily.
Anyone else feel the same?

It's not a 'brick phone', it's a device called a Brick you can use to block apps and Internet on your phone

Yes, I too have been sucked into the same vortex. It seems almost impossible to get out of it once you're in there, sadly. It's a bit of a black hole.

I used to be a keen knitter, used to enjoy reading (always had a book on the go), used to enjoy gardening and walking, used to be more or less up to speed with housework.

But now? My house is usually a bit of a tip, some areas haven't been properly cleaned for years and it's full of clutter. I haven't knitted anything for 10 years. The garden is overgrown and I hardly ever spend any time in it, except when hanging out laundry or emptying bins. I still have a book on the go, but rarely read for more than about 10 minutes a day.

When I got my first smartphone, in 2012, I thought it was marvellous. But in the past few years I've come to regret ever getting one. I can't go back now. I rely on my phone for so many things (banking, communication with family and friends, paying for car parking etc, checking appointments and test results in the NHS app, listening to the radio on BBC sounds, setting up alarms and reminders, entering dates in the calendar, looking up information, navigating to unfamiliar places etc and so on.

I've tried setting up my phone to restrict access at certain times, but I almost always need to override it for some reason. And once overridden, I stay on it.

My "digital wellbeing" on the phone tells me that on average I use my phone for about 12.5 hours a day.

I realised last night also how I rush things, or have a false sense of urgency, when I do non screen stuff. This is two fold, say I am cleaning bathroom I rush it so that I can get back to a screen. Or it just makes me do stuff faster even when I have no intention of using a screen, like enjoying a walk - I suddenly find myself rushing for no reason. It has made my life urgent, do everything fast.

Same, it was my resolution this year to put my phone down and deliberately concentrate on my audible - which ive managed really well.
I audible for around 3 hours a day and my "screen" time has dropped a lot.

@ElleintheWoods the thing is AI is good at writing bland, slightly off sounding emails - yes it’s saving you time but I seriously doubt it’s improving your comms. Copilot is just so rubbish and fake-sounding - if you really need people to actually respond to your emails I would be wary about relying on it too much.

Just start reading again. Try different platforms- audiobooks, e-books, get them from charity shops and take them back, get a library ticket. Find books that you can't put down. Set yourself a reading challenge. Read series of books where you can't wait for the next one. Even if I've got a paperback version I find myself buying an audiobook when I'm really gripped so I can listen while walking the dog. I still go on social media but it doesn't take my attention for long, most of it is boring and repetitive as there are so many ads and forced content now rather than stuff from friends. Practice putting your phone down and staring into space. Notice what is around you when you walk, take one sense at a time.

I would say that this advice is well-meaning, but it is too gentle for the scale of the problem.

The issue is not that the original poster has simply forgotten how to enjoy books. The issue is that their brain has been trained, with industrial efficiency, to expect novelty, frictionless stimulation, intermittent rewards, and emotional hits on demand. That is not a minor habit problem. That is an environment problem.

So telling someone in that situation to “just start reading again” is a bit like telling someone living next to a slot machine that goes off every three minutes to “just learn to enjoy silence”. Reading will not reliably outcompete a device filled with apps engineered by large teams whose business model depends on capturing and holding attention.

The better advice is not to treat reading as a heroic act of will, but to first remove the machinery that is degrading attention. Delete the worst offenders. Log out. Put friction back in. Stop carrying an all-purpose dopamine dispenser everywhere you go. Create periods of the day where your mind is allowed to be bored again. Only then does reading have a fair chance to return.

So yes, read again. But do not expect reading to win while TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Mumsnet and endless AI chat remain one thumb movement away. The problem is not a lack of effort. The problem is that modern attention economies are very good at what they do, and what they do is make everything slower, deeper and more meaningful feel initially dull.

That dullness is not proof you have changed forever. It is a withdrawal symptom.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing though, just spend a bit more time reading and a bit less on your phone to start with, even if you only read two pages it's a start. I read a fair bit and do all sorts of other things that require different kinds of attention or concentration. I don't buy it that social media etc reprogrammes your brain, you have simply become unusued to reading and will find a way to enjoy it again if you have in the past. Start with easy reading thrillers, anything that really grips you. Try different ways of enjoying books. Get over any school English Lit mentality than it must be "improving". Just enjoy it.

I would agree with one part of that, and strongly disagree with the rest.

Yes, of course two pages is better than no pages. Yes, easy, gripping books are a smart place to start. Yes, people should drop the idea that reading has to be worthy or educational. On that, we agree.

Where I part company is this comforting claim that nothing deeper is happening, that you have merely become “unused” to reading, as if the past fifteen years of attention engineering have had no meaningful effect on how people experience boredom, effort, and reward.

That is much too naïve.

These platforms are not neutral amusements. They are precision-built behavioural products. Their designers test, measure, optimise and refine every feature to increase engagement. Infinite scroll, variable rewards, autoplay, notifications, algorithmic novelty, social approval loops, outrage bait, parasocial intimacy, all of it is there for a reason. To say this does not reshape the texture of attention is like saying a diet of ultra-processed food does not affect appetite because, after all, you can still eat an apple if you try hard enough.

You can recover the capacity for deep reading, absolutely. I am not arguing for fatalism. I am arguing against minimisation. If someone says, “I used to read books and watch films, and now my mind keeps reaching for short bursts of stimulation instead”, the correct response is not to pretend this is merely a quaint lapse in habit. It is a predictable result of sustained exposure to powerful attention traps.

And this matters because the solution follows from the diagnosis.

If the problem is just that you are out of practice, then a few thrillers and a bit of self-discipline should sort it out.

If the problem is that your attentional environment has been systematically colonised, then the answer has to include environmental change. Less phone time is not just a nice idea. It is the central intervention. You do not beat an addiction to compulsive novelty simply by placing a paperback on the coffee table and hoping your better angels prevail.

So by all means, start small. Read two pages. Pick a thriller. Make it pleasurable. But do not let the language of moderation obscure the real issue: a great many people are not failing to read because they are lazy or out of practice. They are failing to read because they live in a machine designed to make reading feel intolerably slow.

But many people aren't failing to read or to do anything else other than go on their phones. 190 million books were sold in the UK last year, adult fiction is a really strong market as is audiobooks. Many of us are reading! And I often use my phone to read or listen to a book.

Not rft but I feel the same.

when it was only mn in the old days before fb etc that was fine. No ai and long detailed threads going into detail.

even fb in its early days was ok.

it was the move to pictures (insta) and esp short videos on fb/ tick tok that has melted our brains.

ai is the worst.

we need to see it as a major public health problem and tackle it as such

That is not actually a rebuttal.

Pointing out that many people still buy books does nothing to answer the original problem, which is that a great many people feel their capacity for sustained attention has degraded. Both things can be true at once. A society can still sell a lot of books while also normalising fragmented attention, compulsive checking, and an inability to tolerate depth.

This is a basic error of scale. I am talking about a broad attentional shift in the culture, not claiming that every single person has been reduced to a goldfish. Of course some people still read well. Of course some people use phones to read books or listen to audiobooks. That is not the point.

The point is that the dominant digital environment is built to erode the mental muscles required for deep concentration. Some people resist that better than others. Some build strong habits. Some use their devices in disciplined ways. Fine. But anecdotal exceptions do not disprove the structure of the system.

And reading on a phone is not some magic counterexample either. It depends entirely on the context. If the same device that delivers your novel also delivers notifications, messages, short-form video, headlines, group chats, outrage, shopping prompts, and algorithmic bait, then that reading experience sits inside a machine designed to interrupt it. Sometimes you can overcome that. Often you do not.

What I find frustrating in responses like yours is the eagerness to reduce a systemic problem to a matter of personal preference. “Many of us are reading” is beside the point. Many people also manage to eat sensibly in a world full of junk food. That does not mean the food environment is healthy.

So yes, some people still read a lot. Good. They should protect that. But the original poster is describing something real, common, and predictable. It is not explained away by saying that the book market exists.

Fair point but they work great for me as I work in a very formal and rigid language environment. I literally send emails in French that start with ‘Dear Sir, Madam’ and have to follow a strict structure and copy-paste phrases, so it’s perfect for that. I imagine in the future this communication will be between bots with limited human input.

I wouldn’t use it for anything that requires an actual personality 🤣

190 million books is actually not all that many when there are ca. 70 million people in the UK. It's 2.7 books per person per year and that's actually very few. I've bought 20 books since January. So some people are buying a lot of books and a lot of people are buying none at all.

The fact that 2.7 books per person per year are sold in the UK and that some people love reading does not mean that there isn't a real issue with phone use and as the other poster who has replied to you in detail has said, these apps and social media are designed to grab and keep attention and there is a lot of research which goes into this.

Sweden is now bringing back books in schools after replacing them with laptops and ipads in the 2000s and 2010s. Pisa scores plummeted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cx24mw7r9glo
The same has happened in Norway and they are now banning ipads in schools after catastrophic reading scores.

I agree with your comment about people expecting an instant response to messages, because they assume that everyone is looking at their phones all the time. I’ve seen posts on MN with these complaints - I messaged two hours ago and haven’t had a response; they’ve read my WhatsApp message but haven’t replied yet, etc. It just adds to the general rush of modern life. People are more impatient about everything.

After reading and commenting on this thread, over the weekend I made an effort not to just reach for my phone whenever I had a few free minutes, and was surprised to see how much effort that took - picking up the phone seems to be my default. I also took the advice from someone up thread about using the phone mindfully - deciding to have 30 minutes for scrolling and catching up on FB/ Insta/ MN etc, as opposed to scrolling but not really paying attention.

It’s definitely affected my focus at work as well. I was WFH today and just kept reaching for my phone, sometimes in the middle of doing something like writing an email. It’s shocking! One of the reasons that I work in the office for most of the week is that I’m less likely to waste time on my phone when I should be working.

Carry a book with you if you are that way inclined. I always have a lightweight book in my bag.

When having to wait for something, say at the GP, try to sit in silence and just think. If that fails, reach for the book.

I’m now much more present in spaces than say, 5 years ago. And I notice how I’m nearly the only person on a train, in a waiting room, in a cafe, that isn’t on their phone. Often I just look out of the window. Or talk to a stranger.

It also drives me nuts when I’m with someone and they use their phone without a pressing reason. Think it’s so rude. However I realise that it’s largely normal now.

That's only new books. There are also many books bought second hand, shared around, passed on to a friend and borrowed from libraries. I agree with kids doing homework in exercise books instead of on apps though.

Agree, I find it hard to read a book and watch a film now

Thank you all I thought it was only me, I hate my dependence on my phone

This thread I followed from the beginning. I'm reading again and putting my phone down. Thanks @ADHD89 for the kick up the backside I needed.

It’s all of us. Worldwide. It’s like the “OMG cigarettes cause Cancer?!?!” Moment in the sixties.

we can fix it.

watch this and tell us what you think?

Thank you for this thread.

Completely agree. I’ve noticed in myself that if I’m not doing something the default is being on my phone and I don’t like that. I think it’s becoming hard to just sit with your own thoughts. I worry about kids not being able to have an internal dialogue as I at least grew up without a phone. I’m really glad for this thread. Worry is one thing but I have to take action!

Not personality exactly but yes, it's made my concentration worse. I sometimes catch myself scrolling past something I actually want to read.

Ring-fence half an hour a day which is book-reading time, put the phone in another room and read.

Thanks to Mumsnet, freezing, mad scrolling. I'm pretty much cured on here. Way too many chatgpt threads being invented every day now.

Too many sites have advert interruptions popping up, now I just cancel.

If you want to sell me a dress just bloody let me look at dresses.