What an important book! Every single page had revelations about how our minds and consciousness and focus are affected by everything from how we sleep, how we use our electronic devices, to diet, to basically everything in modern life.

Within the first few chapters I had already altered so much about how I go about my day and how I prepare to sleep and how I use my time (or not!) on social media.

Absolutely riveting book. A really fast and easy and utterly intriguing read, I feel this should be compulsory reading for absolutely everyone, and definitely for schools. An education that should be shared with young adults with no delay, so they can start out in life with an attitude and understanding that will enhance and improve rather than stultify and diminish their lives.

Such a good book. Can’t stress that enough.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I became a fan of Johann Hari following Lost Connections and this latest book by him did not disappoint. As always his work is well researched, compelling and holistic. This work is examining our diminishing ability to focus and what are the contributory factors surrounding this. Brutally honest, I loved the way that Hari avoids making false promises about individual responsibility and attempts to improve the situation. He also explains the concept of cruel optimism and explains how our environment has to change in order for us to really escape this problem. I hope that by reading this book many more people will be able to examine the world we live in and promote lasting change.
With thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

I have read previous works by Johann Hari, and I have loved them. But this may be the most important manifesto for change I have read so far. I am quite self-aware, and conscious of the insidious effect modern life has on our focus, and yet, I was stunned by some of the research. We cannot continue down this path of surveillance capitalism. We cannot deny our children the freedom to play and learn freely.

We must be the change we want to see.

Please read this book and take action, no matter how small.

This was an interesting book, and I was so keen to read it that having signed up for it on the Pigeonhole, I also requested a copy from Netgalley. Huge thanks to them and the publisher, Bloomsbury, for a free copy in return for my honest opinion, which follows.

Three stars from me means that I believe an author has done everything they intended. This would have been higher, but I really was not interested in Johann Hari's autobiographical account of his digital detox. I felt the book came alive when he was summarising the findings of the academics he met, and that it would have read better as a collection of interviews with them, without his first person ponderings.

I also was very disappointed in the referencing. Here's how the author describes it in his own words:

"Please note these are partial endnotes. There are more references, background, and extra explanatory material ... at www.stolenfocusbook.com"

Given the greatest value I found in the book was its signposting of research, this haphazard approach is a real let-down, and, to be frank, I find it unacceptable. The publishing world is full of digital graveyards and we have no assurance that stolenfocusbook.com will not become another. It's also extremely unwise, given the public shaming Johann Hari has received in the past for plagiarism (having had to hand back the prestigious Orwell prize). I would have expected the presentation of other people's work through his referencing to be nothing short of pristine in this new book.

That said, I did find it a useful, quick read, and I will definitely be recommending it to others.

A interesting, profoundly moving, and wonderfully written book about our very real and troubling attention deficit. The book not only made me realise how serious our collective lack of focus and attention is, but it also made me realise that I had lost more focus than I cared to acknowledge.

The experts/professors/people he meets along the way play an important role in the storey, but it is Johann's own experiences with attention struggles and the openness and objectivity of the solutions he encounters that really hit home.

Author Johann Hari tells us that this is a book that has not solved the problem of how to focus but there are tools and in his journey to find what is stealing our focus, Hari made six big changes in his life.
The chapter titles alone give an indication of what we face; increase in speed, flow states crippled, mental exhaustion, mind wandering - you get the picture. These are all the things fighting for our attention along with manipulating tech, stress, deteriorating diets, rising pollution and children being confined in their movements.
Talking with James Williams, former Google strategist, three layers of focus are identified. These are spotlight (immediate actions), starlight (longer-term goals) and daylight, which lets you know what your longer term goals are. When this is disrupted, the deepest form of distraction and we lose our daylight then we are in trouble. Deep distraction overwhelms our capacity to mange our thoughts.
Groups have been formed that are fighting for changes to help improve attention and the author is involved with building a movement to ban surveillance, campaign for a four-day week and campaigns to rebuild childhood.
From the sometimes drastic changes Hari made, the extent to which he became distracted is possibly to an addictive/ obsessive degree and nothing I have experienced or seen. But there is no doubt we have many distraction in our modern world and this interesting book brings these to our attention.

I requested a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I have to admit that I wanted to read this book for personal reasons. I know that I do not focus as well as I used to focus. I am particularly aware that I have lost reading stamina. As a librarian working with young people, I realise that many young people do not have the reading stamina that those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s had. I was looking for reasons and ideas for this loss of focus and I was not disappointed. Much as I was pretty sure that part of the problem is mobile phones and social media, it was interesting to have this confirmed with research that has been done. As a daydreamer, I found the mind wandering chapter interesting. During lockdown, I looked into nutrition and this was covered too as well as pollution. There were a lot of facts in the book but the autobiographical elements made this an easy and interesting book to read and absorb. Recommended.

I was really interested to read this book. For the sake of clarity my eldest son has ADHD and having lived with his struggles I perhaps am more sensitive than most to the topics raised.

The first3/4 of the book tell us nothing we don't already know (my grandma knows how to suck eggs, thank you) interspersed with the opinions of some scientists. The last 1/4 deals with ADHD and children and this is mostly where I take issue. Hari writes that there should be no judgement on parents for ADHD and then explains that it doesn't really exist its just how a child is raised that leads to it. Sounds like judgement to me. Did Hari take the time to ask those with ADHD how it affects them? Or the parents?

My main issue with this book is that it is very 1 sided. Hari has picked the facts and figures and experts that support his narrative. There is very little, if any, counter argument. I honestly wouldn't waste your time reading this.

This book covers a lot of the usual suspects that have helped us lose our concentration and ability to pay attention - sleep and the lack of it, social media inventors making sure we get addicted to constant small rewards, etc. - and works them into a whole, he then offers both individual and societal cures for this, most usefully linking to organisations working against various factors. I'd forgotten the plagiarism issues this author had got into a few years ago and there has been some criticism of this book (see references on his Wikipedia entry) so I can't recommend this book wholeheartedly but it certainly pulls together some useful information, if seen in conjunction with those sources.

What an amazing and engaging book this is. Whilst we are all aware of losing focus at various times during our life and even day to day, one might have thought, as a subject for a book, it would have been a very short book: not so. This book is crammed full of examples and the whys of our losses. For myself, when reading a book such as this it would usually produce maybe half a dozen places which I would bookmark for future reference. For the first time ever, I have almost more pages with a bookmark than pages without a bookmark!! The final tally was 137 bookmarks involving some 200 pages. Yes, the book is that good and that interesting and that thought provoking. I also found the book to be excellent exercise for my head and shoulders as I spent so much time nodding in agreement with everything that Johann Hari has written.

If you really want to know what we are being told is normal but which is in fact and reality ruining our lives, you really do need to read this book; it is a real eye and mind opener.

An interesting well writen book.

It was informative and I will definately be pciking up and looking at again.

I enjoyed it

“When I felt constantly distracted, I didn’t just feel irritated - I felt diminished."

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and indeed, listed it as one of my best reads of 2021 (even though it's not technically released until 2022.)

I have a thing for self-help books, how to be more productive, how to decrease screen time and so on. However, whilst this looks like yet another one of these on the surface, there is a difference. So many books are written from an expert's perspective, revealing to the reader a secret about the world - illuminating the reality of the Silicon Valley algorithms and such. This book felt like it could be yet another of these. Yet Hari writes from the perspective of one of us while being caught up in all these difficulties.

Hari is a journalist, so this text is written from his perspective. He details the decline of his own ability to focus, to concentrate, to be productive, and so speaks into the fears of so many of us at this stage of technological development, living lives dominated by screen time. (I am only four years younger than the author.) Was this lessened ability just a sign of ageing or an indication of something more sinister? Hari's frustration with a younger relative in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime experience, whose life remained dominated by screen time, was the moment the author realised that this was a profound issue in his own life. "Like all the most volcanic anger, my rage towards him - which had been spitting out throughout this trip - was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus, his constant distraction."

Hari returns to his common theme - the issues that beset humanity at this juncture, climate change, the challenges to democracy, the shift in global politics, the pandemic - all demand concentration and effort, and we don't stand a chance if we're constantly wondering what's happening on Twitter. But, he ominously points out: "People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions - and less likely to see clearly when they fail."

Hari wants to show the reader that this isn't a personal failing or intellectual weakness but that as a global society, we are caught up in a greater system that works towards the diminishment of our focus and concentration. A fascinating part of the book is his illustration of how digital detoxing - literally locking up his phone and flying overseas to avoid internet distractions - is not only impractical but not as useful as one might think.

The part of the book that struck me most was his summary of the various social media networks, the psychological weakness they take advantage of, and the damage that they do. "Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego - it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now." He continues that Twitter encourages a lack of focus, with short, concise statements interpreted at speed that people will agree with immediately. As for Facebook, that your life exists to be broadcasted and edited. If these statements are liked and responded to, your primary connection to others is how much you interact with these various statements.

Hari rejects all these. "Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated."
I was struck by his comparison of offline and online communication, of how simple “conversations seemed to have a low social temperature compared to the web-based ones I had lost. No stranger is going to flood you with hearts and tell you you’re great.”

The book is more than just Hari's reflections. Having studied Social Sciences at Cambridge, he is clear that his reflections are all drawn from published sources and interviews. Whilst this adds authority to the text, I found that the quotes from the interviews interrupted my flow of reading the text - and the constant reminder that he then flew to this international destination to talk to this specialist - already dated the book considerably. How much useless and expensive flying could have been avoided, and a bit more video chat used, I regularly wondered?

Hari draws a variety of nuggets from available research. For example, that "people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities." The language of computers has been inappropriately applied to humans, such as processing, multitasking, bandwith.

Hari is concerned at what the rise in the narcissism that fuels social media means for our future as a society. He explores the research on the physical and impact of the loss of concentration on our minds and brains - that we are becoming people who are angrier, more irritable, less creative, more anxious, who read fiction far less than they once did, the less we take pauses and walk and sit and think, the fewer connections that we make; that the purpose of social media is not to connect us, but to keep our use continual. But, crucially, being exposed to other people's anger makes us angry ourselves.

If all this sounds familiar, yes, many others have written about many of these topics in recent years, especially the consequences of social media and the importance of finding a mental 'flow' that allows us to truly excel at work and creativity.

The responses to this may not work for everyone - avoid the distraction, measure out time and tasks beforehand, but most crucially to disable each and every notification that might distract us.
Hari looks at the wider picture of our society and why we are so vulnerable to these distractions - he offers whole chapters to the impact of parenting, familial and generational stress and trauma, diet, and pollution, on our minds and bodies. This is where the book becomes perhaps more novel and controversial than other responses to social media that have been written in previous years, but as someone about to start a family, I found it all quite sobering.

So much of the above is commonplace and has been said by authors and journalists beforehand. In his conclusions, Hari takes the reader in his own direction - that the dominance of big tech needs to be challenged, that world can be changed, that inertia and apathy are not our predestined future. He briefly touches on the concept of the four day week and the possibility that if we let go of economic growth as the "underlying force" in society, that so many of our stresses would slip away.

Obviously, these final conclusions may not find acceptance with every reader, but I found Hari's book a very readable wake-up call.

So this is a weird book on a couple of fronts. While it does clearly set out why you can't pay attention, I don't think it really fulfils the second part of the subtitle - in that it doesn't really provide a lot of solutions to the problems that it raises. There is a fighting chance that you come away from it feeling more hopeless about the state of the world today, but without any tools to use to try and improve your particular corner of the world, or in fact even just your life.

On top of that, I didn't love the way it was all set out - with the long introductory section about his trip to Graceland and then his escape to Provincetown, that then segued into the research and doom and gloom. It all felt a bit like the book of a not very well thought out documentary if that makes sense. Not for me.

The premise is that many of us whether young/old rich/poor are suffering from a growing lack of focus - we are becoming unable to concentrate deeply on something other than our phones or tablets for longer than a few minutes. The author argues that this is not a personal failing, but a societal issue, & one that only society as a whole can solve. Don't worry, this isn't a complete bashing of msm saying that we need to throw away all of our electronic devices, the author argues that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with msm, but the way it has taken over our lives is a problem. We have become addicted to these sites for the feedback we get - whether it is likes, hearts, or any type of emoji - & we are like those rats constantly pressing the lever in the cage for treats. Look around you & see how many people are out with friends or family, or even just walking down the street, but are glued to their phones. I know I've been guilty of this.

Other interrelated topics are lack of sleep, pollution, climate change, & one that definitely rang a bell for me - the tendency of people to feel more negative emotions after being online. The reasons for all these issues & the problems they cause for our individual focus, happiness, & wellbeing are explained in an accessible way in the book. As someone who hasn't tackled this subject before, I found the arguments, both for & against, easy to follow. As said before, the solution isn't just individual, & we shouldn't throw out all our devices & live off grid somewhere, but there are small adjustments that people can make individually to perhaps enhance their own life. Societally though, there are big changes needed if these issues are not going to keep getting bigger. Everyone should read this.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

I was really keen to read this latest book by Johann Hari. As someone with a slightly addictive personality and as the parent of a teen I was keen to see whether this offered a different focus to other texts. In part it did, but ultimately, I think that in the quest to be different the outcome was a lesser book and, at times, a frustrating read.

I found myself unsure whether this was meant to be a personal journey of discovery with some side notes or an academic text with a side of personalisation. There was little new and more than a soupçon of repetition. There were good sections on manipulation (particularly by social media) but it would perhaps have been nice to see something on how better to co-exist. Take-aways were limited and as a result it was hard to take what is to be learned from this book and re-tell it to a younger audience in a way that will not immediately alienate.

This book will make you think, but, ultimately, you are unlikely to be surprised. Perhaps add it to the "read" pile rather than the "must-read" pile

With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy.

A very interesting and informative well-written book about mental health and society.

It's definitely a book I need and one I will be dipping in and out of over time.

I've found myself far too reliant on my smart phone. looking at one thing on social media, then coming out and then going straight back in. Not sure if that's force of habit or just wanting to see what'd happened in the 30 seconds I was off.

A very interesting and frightening look at how society is manipulated into believing one thing, depending on what the social media sites want us to believe, they show us what to read.

Very informative, would recommend! Thank you for providing an advance copy of this book for review!!

I've really enjoyed Johann Hari's previous books, particularly when the focus is on mental health. Unfortunately I just couldn't get on with this book.

I found Hari's writing to go around the houses a little bit, i didn't like how it just felt like a diary entry or memoir at the beginning. It took a long time, before the 'facts' started coming. I didn't like how Hari kept going back to the 'Graceland' story. I appreciate this was the idea that linked everything together, but I personally just found it really dull and it didn't work for me.

I wish the book had just been more straight to the point, and a little less about Hari's own life - I wanted to know about the topic, and not so much about the author. I switched off when this happened.

I didn't enjoy this book.

I greatly enjoyed one of Hari's earlier books, 'Lost Connections' about mental health, and a lot of his journalistic flair and focus is on show in this book.

In it, Hari looks at the various reasons underpinning the problems that many of us face with focus, especially given the last couple of years. He deftly avoids the obvious argument of 'it's all phones and social media!' and instead delves more deeply into the various societal problems (environmental collapse, pollution, political instability, growing anxiety, food deserts) that exacerbate the problem.

He does spend some time investigating phones and social media, but in a nuanced way that acknowledges that they are just tools, albeit ones that have been designed to mine data and be highly addictive.

The end of the book is where Hari comes into his own, drawing together the various strands and conclusions from across the book into something substantial and practical- outlining some ways that you can start to wrestle with the issue and bring your own focus back under control.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I haven't read anything on this subject before and found this book to be both fascinating and terrifying. It resonated greatly and is a text I will dip back into.

Definitely a book everyone should put down their smart phone and read.

Highly recommend.