By Vendi Havlucu Levi

Illustration by Taylor Brunnschweiler

Are you unable to focus on a full-length movie or find yourself constantly reaching out to your phone to scroll? Sometimes your screen time might shock or even scare you. While it is easy to blame yourself as the user many other dynamics are at play that cause this behaviour. Over the past century, technologies have changed as your attention has become their priority. 

Profiting from Distraction: The Attention Economy 

Human attention has always been important for media companies. The more people watch or read their content, the more profit the company earns. Over the past two decades, digital developments have changed how we interact with the world, leading to a shift in value placed on human attention. In the current world where companies profit from their average users’ attention, there is little discussion that we live in an “attention economy”. The driving elements of an attention economy are simple: attention is a limited resource. Social media platforms and websites profit from how much you stay on their platforms. Every second you stay on their platform is potential revenue to them through ads, data collection, or purchases. As a result, they would do anything to keep you on their platform (Simon et al., 2001).  

The possibilities such platforms provide are vast and beneficial, such as connecting with your friends through social media, keeping up with the latest news, or watching your favourite show. When you are capable of doing so much with technological advancements so comes the problem of overstimulation. 

Overstimulation: The More of Everything  

Imagine you are walking on a windy day. Your hair gets in your eyes, your hand is itchy and your phone starts ringing all at the same time. Overstimulation is very similar to this state, where one feels overwhelmed by stimuli from their senses and finds it hard to navigate this situation. The human brain adapts to the sensory input it receives by adjusting the level of attention you need to process the input (Staats et al., 2024). Constant exposure to notifications, flashing lights, and changing visuals makes it harder for the brain to perceive subtle stimuli, such as soft sounds and gentle tones (Robson, 2016).  

As the constant stimuli exposure provides gratification to our brains, this pushes the user to seek increasingly intense stimuli to feel more engaged (Dalley & Roiser, 2012). This means more scrolling and clicking in order to achieve the dopamine rush. Every click and scroll creates endless stimulation becoming an endless cycle of overstimulation (Rixen et al., 2023).  

Many features integrated into social media platforms further encourage overstimulation.  One feature is the “infinite scroll”, where content is never-ending as the user navigates and scrolls through social media. This prevents the user from reaching a natural stopping point where the gratification point is never reached as the user wants to scroll more and more (Rixen et al., 2023). This is an example of the Zeigarnik effect. The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember tasks they do not finish rather than finished tasks (Savitsky et al., 1997). The never-ending scrolling leaves the task of going through all the content unfinished luring users to keep scrolling. Since there is no end, users can not satisfy their gratification by finishing the task of scrolling which creates a never-ending cycle. 

What Happens if You Are Overstimulated?  

Let’s compare a TikTok video with a movie. A TikTok video lasts only a few minutes and is accompanied by effects, audios, and texts on the screen. In contrast, a movie is typically more than an hour long and based on a steadier storyline. After scrolling and overstimulating yourself on TikTok, it can be surprisingly difficult to shift your focus to a slower-paced movie with fewer stimuli. As a result of overstimulation, people find it harder to focus on quieter and slower-paced activities like reading a book. Overstimulation does not only affect media habits but is present in daily interactions. For example, paying attention in a lecture or even reading this article can be difficult since it lacks the stimulating sensory input that is present in many social media platforms (Thierbach-McLean, 2024). 

In fact, a TikTok trend is a great example of reflecting the relationship between overstimulation and attention. Many people share tragic or funny anecdotes of their life on TikTok which is called ‘story time’. However, many users have complained that the videos were so long they could not focus. Therefore, many accounts started reposting story time videos accompanied by a sensory video like someone playing with slime or playing a game. Users state that the added visual stimuli increase their focus on the story since there is more stimulation to pay attention to.  

A Look into Overstimulation in the Younger Generation 

Overstimulation not only affects adults but can have long-lasting effects that build up from the early stages of childhood (Staats et al., 2024). This has raised concerns for parents as stimulating content has been shown to decrease the attention span of kids and alter their behaviour. This notion has been present for many years as the classic and ongoing children’s show SpongeBob Square Pants has been named to “rot kid’s brains” (CBC, 2011). 

Screen time can be classified into two groups: passive and communicative. The viewer actively participates in communicative screen time and has no role other than watching in passive screen time. Stimulating shows cause kids to watch the show passively, which causes a potential decrease in their creativity in the long run. Therefore, parents are advised to expose their children to content with less sensory input to avoid the unwanted effects of overstimulation (Lillard & Peterson, 2011). This turns heads to slower-paced shows from the 90’s such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood where special effects, flashing lights, and loud noise are not present (The Blade, 2023). However, more research is needed in this area to research how omitting overly stimulating content from kids’ lives affects them. 

Who is Responsible and How Do We Stop the Scrolling? 

Overstimulation, especially in a media context, has negative impacts on users. In the age of attention economy, it is no wonder media companies do affect how overstimulated you get, with features like infinite scroll and notifications. However, as users, we also have free will to a degree of choice in how much time we spend on these platforms and which content we engage with. Due to these facts, attributing the blame to one party seems impossible. Rather than blaming one side, we can explore ways to decrease the effects of over-stimulation by focusing on what can be done. 

Although it is easy to stay in a feedback loop where we crave more sensory input to stay engaged, there are many ways to pause this loop.  

1. Set Limits and Boundaries on Media Use/ Choose Slower-Paced Content 

The most effective way one can limit overstimulation and possibly increase attention span is by limiting the viewing of overstimulating content. This is similar to what parents did to limit the effects of overstimulation on their kids. This can be achieved by setting reminders or time limits when accessing social media and spending time off-screen or with more slow-paced activities such as reading. Human attention is a trainable resource; thus, it is possible to increase our attention spans through these strategies (Levy et al., 2012). 

1. Enable “Do Not Disturb” mode or Disable Notifications 

Another strategy could be to turn on the non-disturb mode on your phone to limit notifications or enable notifications for certain apps. A study has shown that after disabling notifications for a certain time period in a day, smartphone users felt less stressed (APA, 2017). 

For media companies, it is important that they are well-informed about the effects of overstimulation and take measures to decrease certain effects. On the other hand, certain regulations or disclaimers could be applied especially for children’s content. Some experts have proposed applications like TikTok to add ‘digital well-being’ features like screen time reminders (Hutchinson, 2022). Until regulatory changes are put into action it is important for users to be aware of their media consumption and have control over it.