Quick summary: Scrolling through social media while watching television is not multitasking but rapid task-switching, a process that drains cognitive resources and fragments attention in ways that accumulate over time. Research shows that average human attention spans on digital devices have fallen from 150 seconds in 2004 to just 47 seconds in 2024, a shift with serious implications for mental well-being, learning, and everyday functioning. Deliberately putting the phone away before watching television is a small but evidence-backed step towards reclaiming sustained attention and the capacity for deep engagement with storytelling.
The other day, I sat down to watch a new TV show I had been dying to see. I had a snack, felt completely relaxed, and could not wait for it to start.
But as soon as the show began, I automatically picked up my phone. I told myself I would just do a quick check, answer a couple of WhatsApp messages. Twenty minutes later, I looked up at the screen. The 45-minute episode was already more than halfway through. I had absolutely no idea what was happening in the story or who the characters even were.
I had just fallen into one of the most common traps of modern life.
The multitasking myth
Most of us believe we can watch TV and browse social media at the same time. We call it multitasking. Psychology tells us it is not real.
The human brain cannot process two separate streams of complex information at the same time. What we think of as multitasking is actually something psychologists call rapid task-switching: your brain forcefully stops one process and starts another, over and over again. Each switch carries a cognitive cost known as switch cost. Your brain temporarily freezes, dropping fragments of information during the transition. That is precisely why those 20 minutes of my show felt like a complete blank.
Research shows that 50% of people identify their phone as their primary source of distraction, even in contexts where they genuinely want to focus. Watching television is no exception.
Why your phone always wins
Back in the day, watching a film on television was an event. Families sat still, gripped by whatever was on the screen. So what changed?
It comes down to a battle of brain chemistry, and television is losing badly.
Apps like TikTok and Instagram are built around variable reward schedules, the exact same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines so difficult to walk away from. You scroll, and you might find a funny video, a notification, or a message from a friend. That unpredictability triggers a release of dopamine. Your brain learns to crave the next hit.
One controlled laboratory study found that after using TikTok, participants’ prospective memory, meaning the ability to remember and carry out intended actions, dropped so sharply that they performed only slightly above random guessing. Twitter and YouTube showed no such effect in the same study, suggesting something specific about short-form, algorithmically optimised content that uniquely disrupts cognition.
Meanwhile, psychologists use the term continuous partial attention to describe how most of us now move through the world. We no longer give anything our full focus. Instead, we scan constantly, alert to the next stimulation. A slow, tension-building dramatic scene simply cannot compete with a five-second viral video.
Research found that the average human attention span on a digital device was around 150 seconds in 2004. By 2024, that figure had fallen to just 47 seconds.
What we actually lose
When we split our attention between a screen and a phone, we lose more than the plot. We lose the ability to care about the characters. Storytelling works through sustained emotional investment: you need to sit with a character long enough to feel something for them. Every time we reach for our phone during a slow scene, we are training our brains to reject that kind of patience.
Research links frequent media multitasking to reduced sustained attention, poorer inhibitory control, and greater overall distractibility, with effects that accumulate over time. We are not simply missing episodes. We are gradually rewiring how our brains respond to anything that does not deliver immediate reward.
How to get lost in a story again
The fix is straightforward, even if it is not easy. Before your next show, put your phone in another room. When a scene slows down and you feel that familiar itch to scroll, sit with it. Let the discomfort pass. Your brain will resist at first because it has been conditioned to expect constant stimulation.
But if you push through, something shifts. The story starts to pull you in. The characters begin to matter. You remember what it felt like to be completely absorbed in something.
That feeling has not gone anywhere. It is just waiting for you to put the phone down long enough to find it again.
Bahati Kasibu Fiston is a psychologist and writer who dedicates his writing to demystifying the human brain, translating its complex mechanics into simple truths that allow us to understand our minds as deeply as we understand our own bodies.
