Zoë’s Reviews > Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again > Status Update
Zoë
is on page 64 of 357
"One day I woke up w/o any alarms after sleeping for nine hours and realized that I didn't want any coffee. This was such an alien sensation.... Then it finally occurred to me what I was feeling—I had awoken from my sleep feeling fully refreshed. My body didn't feel heavy. I was alert. As the weeks passed, I realized that I felt like this every day. The last time I remembered feeling like this was when I was a child"
— 12 hours, 2 min ago
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Zoë’s Previous Updates
Zoë
is on page 61 of 357
"After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn't care.... I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace.... I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back!"
— Jan 18, 2026 08:44AM
Zoë
is on page 60 of 357
"It was hard. I didn't particularly enjoy it. But the next day, conscious that I had to retrain my habits, I made myself do the same. And so it went on, day after day. I struggled. I disciplined myself.
By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come... and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it."
— Jan 18, 2026 07:52AM
By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come... and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it."
Zoë
is on page 58 of 357
"Once I knew [about flow], I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been."
Oof. A bit harsh for those of us with young children.
— Jan 16, 2026 04:37PM
Oof. A bit harsh for those of us with young children.
Zoë
is on page 57 of 357
"We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner's vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—"
— Jan 16, 2026 03:29PM
Zoë
is on page 56 of 357
"Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she's not going to get into flow bc it's too easy. If she's suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won't get into flow either because she'll freak out."
Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.
— Jan 16, 2026 02:11PM
Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.
Zoë
is on page 51 of 357
"After the war, he + his parents ended up in a refugee camp, which he found squalid, + lacking in hope. One day, in these ruins of a life, Mihaly was told that he was going to join a Scout troop for boys in the camp, + he started going out into the wilderness with them. He discovered that he felt most alive when he was doing something difficult, like navigating a steep ascent.... He thinks this experience saved him."
— Jan 14, 2026 01:14PM
Zoë
is on page 47 of 357
"I turned to my piles of books, thinking idly of how, all through my teens and twenties, I would spend days on end lying in bed, doing nothing but reading in one great gulp. But [now]... I had been reading in a rushed, hyperactive way...."
— Jan 12, 2026 10:33AM
Zoë
is on page 42 of 357
"The study found that 'technological distraction'—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points.... in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot." (p. 39)
— Jan 10, 2026 07:18PM
