Beyond the Attention Span: Building a Tolerance for Uncertainty

How the "escape hatches" of modern life are changing our ability to sit with the unknown.

This weekend I went to an NHL game. I'm a huge Edmonton Oilers fan, and one of my favorite things to do is go to live games. The Oilers lost. But that's almost beside the point. There's a moment late in a close game where the arena gets tight, the crowd quieter than you'd expect, everyone leaning forward, nobody quite breathing. I was sitting in that feeling, nowhere to go and nothing to do but watch, when I noticed something about myself. When I watch games at home and things get tense, I often reach for my phone.

But at the game, there was no real escape. I had to sit with it.

The tension, uncertainty, and frustration of a play not going the way I wanted.

It was exciting, but it was also more stressful than I’m used to when watching from home.

Not because the game was different, but because my attention was.

That moment made me realize that attention isn’t just something we either have or don’t; it’s something we are constantly managing. Increasingly, we often manage it by escaping discomfort rather than staying with it.

The Escape Hatch: Why We Reach for Our Phones

Attention isn't a fixed trait. It develops in response to the environments we spend time in. In lower-stimulation environments, attention has to be generated internally. In high-stimulation ones, it is captured externally. Today, discomfort is optional, stimulation is immediate, and distraction is always available. What's changing is not whether we have the ability to pay attention but what our attention is being shaped to respond to.

Historically, people regularly experienced boredom, waiting, frustration, uncertainty, and sustained tasks. These moments required staying with discomfort, generating their own engagement, and maintaining focus without external stimulation.

The issue is that these are not the same conditions that build sustained attention. Sustained attention develops in environments where stimulation is lower, rewards are delayed, progress is slower, and individuals have to generate their own engagement.

When those conditions are present, attention is not just required, it is practiced and strengthened.

Today, the challenge is that many of the environments where attention is being practiced look very different from the environments where it is still expected to be used, particularly in classrooms.

From the outside, these changes are often described as declining attention spans. Students seem more distracted. They disengage more quickly. Tasks that require sustained focus feel harder to maintain.

But what we’re observing may not be a loss of attention so much as a change in what attention has been practiced to do. When attention is regularly shaped in environments that provide constant stimulation and rapid feedback, sustained focus begins to feel uncomfortable.

It’s not just that the task is difficult. It’s that staying with something slow, effortful, or uncertain feels uncomfortable. In that context, shifting attention isn’t a failure. It’s a learned response—a way of regulating that discomfort.

Learning often depends on the ability to stay with something long enough for understanding to develop. Reading a complex text, working through a math problem, writing something that doesn’t come together right away all require sustained attention.

They require sitting in states where answers aren’t always obvious, progress can be slow and/or incremental, and confusion may not be immediately resolved. That period is where learning begins.

Staying in the Fog: Attention is a Learned Skill

In a classroom, the task doesn't adapt to the student's attention. The student has to adapt their attention to the task. I see this regularly as a professor. A student will approach me and say "I don't get it", and when I try to dig deeper, asking what part is confusing, the answer is often "all of it." They want the discomfort resolved, but they haven't sat with it long enough to even identify where the confusion begins. That kind of self-awareness, knowing what you know and what you don't, only develops when you stay with a problem long enough for the fog to start clearing. If attention shifts the moment difficulty appears, that process never gets a chance to start.

Over time, this can lead to difficulty persisting with tasks, an over reliance on external prompts or direction and a reduced tolerance for effortful thinking. Not because the capacity isn't there, but because it has had fewer opportunities to develop. I didn't fully appreciate any of this until I was sitting in that arena with nowhere to go and no way to escape what I was feeling.

I had to stay with it.

And while it was more uncomfortable than watching from home, it was also a reminder that the ability to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and not knowing what will happen next is not automatic.

It is built through repeated exposure to those moments.

And importantly, those moments are often tied to the experiences we care about most.

With that stress came the experience of being in the building, fully present, watching something I care about unfold in real time. That doesn’t happen when attention is divided or redirected.

Increasingly, many of the environments we spend time in make it easy to avoid that kind of discomfort. They offer immediate relief, constant stimulation, and a way out as soon as tension begins.

Over time, that changes what attention is used for.

Building the Muscle: Practicing the Art of Staying

If we want to support attention in ourselves and in the children we work with, the solution may not be to push harder in the moment.

It may be to make small, intentional shifts in the environments we create.

That might look like putting the phone away during a moment that feels uncomfortable instead of immediately reaching for it. It might mean letting a child sit with a frustrating task a little longer before stepping in, or allowing stretches of time where nothing is happening and resisting the urge to fill them. It means not removing every frustration, delay, or moment of uncertainty from the path.

These are small things.

But small things, repeated often enough, become the conditions that shape attention.

Because attention doesn’t grow when everything is easy to escape.

It grows when we practice staying.

That night at the arena, I didn't just watch a hockey game. I was fully in it: the tension, the uncertainty, the not knowing how it would end.. The Oilers lost, but I was there for all of it. No phone, no escape, no way to manage the discomfort except to sit with it. And somewhere in that discomfort was the experience itself. That's what undivided attention makes possible. Not just focus, but presence. The ability to be fully inside something you care about as it unfolds. That doesn't happen automatically. It's built slowly, in small moments, every time we choose to stay.