This is Why You Feel Fatigued
You glance at the clock: 12:03 PM. You’ve barely moved since arriving at the office at 9:00 AM. Emails are taking longer to draft and your focus is waning, as it drifts away from your report and towards the Instagram app on your phone.
“Do I take a break or push through until lunch?” You ask yourself. “I promised my manager this report by noon, I can’t stop now.” With a groan, you put your phone down and push on.
Sound familiar? Brain fog, constant distraction, that heavy sense of mental fatigue - they’ve become all too common features of modern working life. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By understanding how attention works, and making small shifts in how we use it, we can dramatically improve our focus, supercharging our productivity to do more with less, while simultaneously increasing the quality of our output.
Want to know how? First, we must understand these key principles when it comes to focus (or attention):
Attention is a limited resource.
There are two types of attention: directed (voluntary) and involuntary.
Nature recharges our attentional batteries.
Social media drains them.
From the moment we sit down at our desks in the morning, we start burning through our attention. Work too long without taking a break and the resource becomes depleted to the point where your return on time invested on a task dramatically decreases. That drained, brain-fried feeling has a name: directed attention fatigue.
Dr. Marc G. Berman, whose work on Attention Restoration Theory has shaped much of the research in this space, defines directed attention as the mental effort of focusing on a task while attempting to suppress distractions. It’s demanding, energetically expensive and eventually, exhausting.
Involuntary attention, by contrast, is effortless. Think of a walk in nature, when your mind drifts to the swaying trees or the sound of the birds chirping. Here, your brain isn’t grinding to focus and block distractions - it’s simply noticing. And while you’re in this state, your voluntary attention is quietly recharging in the background.
That’s why stepping away from your desk, ideally into nature, is so powerful. A short, undistracted walk doesn’t just give you a break - it enables you to work at consistently high levels across the arc of the day.
The key here, is that our attentional resources (i.e. focus levels) are only replenished when we do this switch - when the directed attention mode (the one required for work) is turned off and the involuntary attention mode is turned on.
The problem? For most of us, our daily environment is structured to demand directed attention almost constantly. Work deadlines, MS Teams messages, email pings, social media push notifications - all depleting our attentional resources. Without intentional breaks, our productivity, creativity and quality of output is steadily declining throughout the day, to the point where by mid afternoon, we feel like a dud.
When it comes to social media, this is where it gets really interesting. When we try to “rest” from work by scrolling Instagram or TikTok, our attention isn’t actually recovering. Social media is designed to claim your directed attention. It bombards you with novelty and stimulation, keeping your brain in active, effortful mode. It feels like downtime, but it’s actually draining. You are staying in directed attention mode.
That’s why you can leave a 15-minute scroll session feeling more mentally tired than you were before you started. Instead of replenishing your attentional battery, you’ve just spent precious attentional resources on cat videos.
And when you spend time scrolling through social media in the evenings after work and at night, you don't give your attentional resources a chance to recharge before the next day. That means you show up at work the following morning already depleted. Do this daily, and by Friday you’re running on fumes.
The same is true of how we start our mornings. Begin the day by scrolling in bed, and you’re already spending down your attention credits before you’ve touched your most important work. Begin it with a run or a walk outdoors, and you’re topping up your reserves before you even log in.
If attention is a limited resource, then we need to spend wisely and with intention. We need to:
Aim it at what matters most. Use your peak hours to focus on the priorities that really move the needle.
Work in waves. Alternate between deep, undistracted focus and restorative breaks.
Seek out nature. Even just ten minutes in a green space can reset your attention levels.
Beware “fake breaks”. Social media doesn’t replenish - it drains. Choose activities that let your mind wander. I love to walk, run or swim.
As Dr Andrew Huberman says:
“Our ability to attend is the hallmark of a great life.”
Peak performers don’t grind endlessly at a steady pace - they master the rhythm of intensity and recovery. The next time you find yourself staring at the clock, drained and distracted, don’t force it. Step away and, if you can, into nature. Give your attention the chance to reset.
As the research shows, a walk in nature at lunch time can increase our focus in the afternoon by up to 20%. And, as we know from the law of compound interest, even just a 1% increase in productivity and output each day will lead to dramatically different results across the course of the week, month and year.