Does everyone have ADHD now? Why focus is collapsing — and how to rebuild it

“I think I have ADHD.” A lot of people have said — or thought — that sentence in the last three years. On social platforms, in office conversations, in psychiatrists’ waiting rooms. The diagnosis has become a convenient label for a state most connected adults now share: the inability to hold a long task without drifting away.

But conflating difficulty concentrating with a neurodevelopmental disorder mixes up cause and effect. This article looks at what researchers actually measure — and at what you can concretely do to recover a focus span longer than five minutes.

What the studies actually measure

The collapse of attention span

The current reference in the field is Gloria Mark, professor at UC Irvine, who has been measuring since 2004 how long adults spend on a single object of attention (a window, a document, a tab) before switching.

In 2004, her measurements average 2 minutes 30 seconds per object.
In 2012, this drops to 75 seconds.
Since 2020, it has stabilized around 47 seconds (Mark, Attention Span, Hanover Square Press, 2023).

These figures are not survey responses. They come from eye-tracking and active-window logging on participants’ screens. The methodology is rigorous, peer-reviewed, and replicated.

“It’s not that people have become stupid or lost their will. It’s that their attentional environment has changed.” — Gloria Mark, interview with The Guardian, January 2023.

The “8-second” myth and the 2015 Microsoft report

The much-repeated “goldfish, 8 seconds of attention” claim, often attributed to a 2015 Microsoft report, should be set aside. The actual source (Statistic Brain) never published verifiable methodology, and the metric conflates several phenomena (critical analysis from the BBC, 2017).

The solid data are Mark’s, and those of the CHI 2008 paper “The Cost of Interrupted Work” (Mark, Gudith & Klocke, 2008), which shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to baseline focus after an interruption.

The French case: what the numbers say

Screen time among adults

According to the Esteban 2014-2016 study, extended by the 2024-2025 waves from Santé publique France, French adults 18–64 spend an average of 5 h 07 a day on leisure screens (smartphone, TV, personal computer), on top of work screen time (Santé publique France, Physical Activity and Sedentariness in the French Population).

The ARCOM 2024 report on digital usage confirms daily smartphone time above 3 h 30 among 16–34 year-olds, with short, fragmented, multi-app sessions (ARCOM, The French and Digital Usage).

The explosion of adult ADHD diagnoses

The French High Authority for Health (HAS) published in February 2024 a formal recommendation on adult ADHD diagnosis (HAS, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Adults, 2024). It explicitly notes the strong rise in diagnostic requests since 2020 and the difficulty of separating genuine ADHD (a neurodevelopmental disorder present since childhood) from secondary attention problems linked to environment, sleep, anxiety, or intensive screen use.

INSERM, the French biomedical research institute, places the true prevalence of adult ADHD around 3 % of the population (INSERM, ADHD dossier). Yet on social-media surveys, 20–30 % of young adults declare themselves concerned. The gap doesn’t measure an epidemic — it measures a confusion of vocabulary.

What is actually happening in a “modern” adult’s brain

Three documented mechanisms explain reduced focus in people without ADHD:

Switching cost. Going from one task to another leaves a residual trace: a part of the brain stays hooked on the previous task. Reference study: Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, Executive Control of Cognitive Processes, JEP 2001.
The intermittent reward effect of notifications. Every notification activates the dopaminergic circuit the same way a slot machine does (Schultz, Neuronal Reward and Decision Signals, Physiological Reviews, 2015). The brain learns to check compulsively, regardless of content.
Voluntary fragmentation. Mark observes that 44 % of task switches are self-initiated: it’s no longer a notification that interrupts you, it’s you going to look for one.

None of these are disorders. They are rational adaptations to an environment that rewards dispersion. And by definition, they unwind in a different environment.

Deep focus can be rebuilt

The concept of deep work (Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Grand Central, 2016) describes sustained cognitive work, without interruption, on a demanding task. Newport, a CS professor at Georgetown, makes a simple case: the ability to focus deeply is rare, valuable, and — most importantly — trainable.

Research on adult neuroplasticity (Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself, 2007; functional studies including Lazar et al., 2005 on meditation and cortical thickness) confirms that sustained attention physically modifies the prefrontal cortex and insula in regular practitioners. In other words: you don’t lose your focus, you stop training it.

Three concrete levers

60–90 minute sessions, with zero notifications and no assistants. That’s the floor below which the prefrontal cortex doesn’t enter sustained mode. Not a magic number — it’s the ultradian cycle described by Nathaniel Kleitman.
A low-stimulus environment. One window, one document, one objective. No AI suggesting, no autocomplete, no parallel tab. If the environment allows it, the brain eventually settles in — this is the logic of an editor like Draft_.
Short, regular practice. 25 minutes a day is enough. Like any training, what matters is consistency, not initial intensity.

Should you get diagnosed?

If your difficulties with focus have been present since childhood, span several areas of your life, and have a real functional impact — yes, see a clinician. Best practice is an assessment by a psychiatrist trained in adult ADHD, with a structured interview, collateral history, and neuropsychological evaluation.

If your difficulties appeared between 2019 and 2024, vanish during screen-free holidays or while reading on paper, and concentrate on tasks that require sustained effort — you are probably not ADHD. You are a normal adult in a hostile attentional environment.

The good news is that the second case is fully reversible. A few weeks of long sessions, without AI and without notifications, restore a focus span over 30 minutes. It’s not a wellness promise. It’s standard neuroplasticity.

In short

Adult ADHD exists and concerns about 3 % of the population, from childhood onward.
What most of us call ADHD is actually environmental attentional erosion: average dwell time per object dropped from 2’30” to 47” in twenty years.
This erosion is reversible through regular deep-work sessions in a low-stimulus environment.
Tool matters less than discipline, but a quiet tool (no AI, no suggestions, no notifications) considerably shortens the road back.

If you want to try a long writing session — no assistant, no noise — that’s exactly what Draft_ was built for.