I’m sitting at my desk, a mountain of homework to do. AP Biology, AP Calculus, AP Lang and all I want to do is lay in bed and scroll on my phone. I try to push through, but after ten minutes I find myself throwing my head back and groaning. Why is it so hard to focus? This is the same brain that would sit down and read 500-page books back in middle school, so why can’t I get through a dozen pages of my textbook?

“[My attention span is] not super great,” said Edie Wright, a junior at Summit. “I think it was a lot better when I was younger, but the more I’m on my phone or watching TV while being on my phone, I think it’s getting lower. I constantly have to be stimulated by something.”

This is not an individual phenomenon. Dr. Gloria Marks, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has researched how attention spans have changed over the past two decades by measuring how long people stay on a tab or app before switching. She found that there was a 68.7% decrease in time spent per screen on average since 2004.

Dr. Marks’ research has also found that the average American picks up their phone around 228 times a day. Given that we’re not checking our phones while we sleep, that works out to picking up our phones about every 4.21 minutes.

By checking our phones so frequently, we’re damaging our productivity. Task switching takes 25 minutes. That means for the first 25 minutes of beginning a new task, our brains are still trying to transition to what we’re working on. During this shift we’re not fully focused, and our productivity suffers for it.

“It’s just so normal to be on your phone,” said Wright. “It’s very normalized to always be watching something and you just always have to have something in your hand or be doing something and I think we’re just not able to be bored anymore and just sit in our own thoughts.”

Instead of lying in bed gazing at the ceiling until you find something to do, people simply roll over and turn on their phones, entering the vast escape of the internet.

According to a Stanford article, the constant simulation of social media has caused our dopamine levels to be thrown off track. When you’re scrolling, it produces artificially high dopamine levels, much higher than what you would get from a typical source like working out or seeing a loved one. While higher dopamine might sound great initially, once we put our phones down, our dopamine levels descend far below their baseline, leaving people prone to experiencing depression, anxiety and an inability to focus.

These effects are mirrored in the classroom.

“I can see short-form video platforms being partly to blame [for students’ lack of focus],” said Kelsie Layana, an English teacher at Summit. “They provide a quick serotonin boost, a momentary escape that feels good in the moment. It’s easy to see why they’re so addictive and why people keep turning to them as a way to temporarily avoid life’s stressors.”

While many (myself included) attempt to justify that spending five minutes here and there scrolling is okay, the solution to our attention deficit is far more absolute.

That toxic cycle of dopamine highs and lows is best broken by cutting out scrolling entirely. This process is often referred to as “dopamine fasting,” but that’s not entirely accurate. You shouldn’t remove everything that brings you joy, just the things that mess with your brain chemistry.