How to Increase Your Attention Span: The Five-More Rule and Other Small Stretches

Twelve minutes into a dense contract, a paralegal feels the familiar pull to check the inbox, refill the coffee or open a new tab. Nothing is wrong with the contract. The urge turns up at about the same point every day, and most days she follows it.

How to increase attention span starts with that moment, because it is the part you can practice. There is little evidence that brain games improve everyday thinking, a 2016 review concluded after examining the research that brain-training companies point to.¹ What you can change is how you respond to the urge to stop, and the conditions around the task. Six small steps, starting with a timer today:

1. Time your current baseline
2. Use the five-more rule when you want to stop
3. Stretch your blocks a little at a time
4. Move your phone out of sight and reach
5. Take breaks that get you moving
6. Protect sleep and regular exercise

Broader habits, from planning to caffeine, are in our main guide to how to focus.

Why your attention span feels so short

Attention span feels short mostly because of the task and the setting, not because of a fixed limit in you. Speaking to the BBC in 2017, the Open University (UK) psychologist Gemma Briggs called the idea of an “average attention span” close to meaningless, since attention varies with the task.² Someone who loses the thread of a spreadsheet after ten minutes can follow a long match or a tense meeting without once checking the time.

Long, unchanging tasks are especially hard. A 2008 review of vigilance research by Joel Warm and colleagues concluded that staying alert to a monotonous task is hard mental work and stressful, and that people’s performance on such tasks declines over time.³ So the drift you feel at minute twelve is a normal response to effortful work, something to plan around.

Myth

Attention span is a fixed trait: some people have a long one and some a short one.

Fact

The same person can focus for minutes on one task and hours on another; the demands of the work, the setting and rest all shift it.

Surroundings add to it. A University of Rochester page with neuroscientist Ian Fiebelkorn explains that attention shifts in brief, regular windows several times a second, which helps people notice danger but also gives every alert and screen a chance to pull them away.⁴ Kaiser Permanente lists frequent phone notifications, poor sleep and chronic stress among the common reasons people struggle to focus.⁵

Claims that human attention has collapsed to a few seconds do not hold up, as our look at the claim that attention spans are shrinking shows. Before you decide your brain is the problem, note which task you were on and what was within reach when you drifted.

Can you train your attention span?

You can train the habits around attention, but the evidence that attention itself grows like a muscle is thin. Brain-training games, the best-known attempt to train it directly, fare poorly. A 2016 review led by psychologist Daniel Simons examined the peer-reviewed studies cited by leading brain-training companies and found extensive evidence that people improve on the trained tasks, less on closely related tasks, and little on distant tasks or everyday thinking. Many of the studies also had major weaknesses in design or analysis.¹

Meditation fares little better: a 2022 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary covered in our 10-minute focus meditation guide found mindfulness programs did not reliably improve scores on attention tests.

That leaves a modest kind of training: practicing a response at the moment you want to stop, and making the setting easier. No trial has combined these six steps, and each borrows from research on a neighbouring question, graded in the table near the end. Treat them as experiments you run on yourself and judge each one by your own timer.

How to increase attention span in six steps

Measure first, stretch in small amounts, then protect the conditions that make stretching possible.

1. Time your current baseline

Pick one kind of task you want to stay with longer, such as reading reports, writing or studying. Start a timer when you begin and stop it the first time you switch away or catch yourself drifting. Do this on three or four ordinary days and note the times.

The number belongs to that task in that setting. A manager who stays 14 minutes on a quarterly sales review but 40 on a planning document has two baselines, and the first is the one worth stretching.

2. Use the five-more rule when you want to stop

The five-more rule is our name for a small stretch: when the urge to stop arrives, do five more minutes, lines or problems, then decide whether to stop. No study has tested this rule; it draws on research about urges and plans.

Urge surfing is a technique from addiction research in which you notice a craving and let it rise and fall without acting on it. In a 2009 University of Washington trial with 123 students who smoked, brief instructions in urge surfing did not reduce the urges themselves, but the students who received them smoked fewer cigarettes over the following week than a control group. (We read the study’s abstract only.)⁶ Smoking is a different urge from checking your phone, but the result suggests practicing your response, since the urge itself may not shrink. The technique is explained in riding out cravings with urge surfing.

Plans help too. Pooling 642 tests, a 2025 meta-analysis found that plans with an if-then structure (“if situation X comes up, I respond with Y”) help people regulate their thoughts and actions, and the effects grew when people rehearsed their plan.⁷ “If I want to stop, then I do five more” is a plan of that kind, so say it to yourself once before you start.

Pick the unit that fits the task: lines for writing, problems for maths or code, minutes for reading.

3. Stretch your blocks a little at a time

Once the five-more rule feels routine, set a timed block a few minutes longer than your baseline and keep it for a week, then add a few minutes more. A block you can finish teaches you that the urge passes; a block twice your baseline mostly teaches you that you failed.

A student whose baseline on textbook chapters is 15 minutes might work in 20-minute blocks for a week, then 25. No interval has evidence behind it, so choose a step that feels slightly uncomfortable but finishable.

1. 1Time your baselineone task, a few ordinary days
2. 2Add five morewhen the urge to stop arrives
3. 3Set a slightly longer blockkeep it for a week
4. 4Review and step upadd a little only when it feels finishable

4. Move your phone out of sight and reach

Phone cues are the cheapest distraction to remove. Cindy Lustig, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, suggests turning off unnecessary notifications and, better still, putting the phone in a different room.⁸ The University of Rochester page gives similar advice: switch the phone off or move it out of the room, and disconnect from the internet when you work offline.⁴

Distance helps for a simple reason: if checking means walking to another room, the urge has time to pass first. A shelf in the hall at home, or a zipped bag at the office, adds that delay.

5. Take breaks that get you moving

Kaiser Permanente’s advice on attention span starts with mini breaks to walk around or stretch.⁵ Breaks that involve doing something, such as a short walk or moving to another room, are what experts quoted by the Associated Press recommend, and passive phone scrolling does not count.⁸

A 2011 University of Illinois lab experiment (abstract read) hints at why. On a long vigilance task, people who now and then briefly switched to recalling a set of digits avoided the usual decline in performance, which appeared when they recalled the digits only at the end.⁹

Walks in green places have the best-known evidence, though it is less solid than its reputation.

The study

Limited evidence

A walk in a park before a memory test (Berman, Jonides and Kaplan, 2008)

Students first did a tiring memory task, then took a walk of about 50 to 55 minutes either in a tree-lined park or along busy downtown streets in Ann Arbor, and swapped routes a week later. After the park walk they scored better on a backwards digit-span test, which asks you to repeat numbers in reverse order; after the city walk the change was not reliable.¹⁰

Later reviews are more cautious. A 2016 systematic review of 31 studies by a University of Exeter team (UK) found benefits of natural settings on only three of the attention measures it could pool, with no marked effect on the rest, and warned that the studies were few and small.¹¹ A walk outside is a reasonable break with a modest chance of helping concentration.

Short pauses mainly help how you feel. A 2022 meta-analysis of micro-breaks of up to 10 minutes found they raised energy and eased fatigue, while the gain in overall performance was not significant; after very draining tasks, the authors suggest, a longer break may be needed.¹² A five-minute walk between chapters is a sensible default.

6. Protect sleep and regular exercise

Pooling 70 articles, a 2010 meta-analysis found that less than 48 hours without sleep hit simple attention hardest, with lapses showing the largest effect of any measure tested; these were studies of short-term total sleep loss, not months of short nights.¹³ If short nights are the problem, start with practical ways to sleep better, and set a gentler target after a bad night.

A review carried out in part for the advisory committee behind the 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines judged the evidence strong that one session of moderate or vigorous exercise brings short-lived benefits for thinking afterward.¹⁴ A brisk walk before a hard reading session is a sensible way to use that window.

Set up a five-more session

• A single task picked and this week’s target time noted
• The five-more rule said once: if I want to stop, I do five more
• Phone switched off or in another room
• A short break planned that gets you moving
• Last night’s sleep in mind when you set the target
• A tally ready for each time the urge passes

How long does it take to improve attention span?

No study gives a timeline for stretching attention, so expect weeks of practice and judge progress by your own timed baselines. In a UK study of habits published in 2010, 96 volunteers repeated a daily behavior for 12 weeks; individuals needed anywhere between 18 and 254 days before the behavior came close to its own peak level of automaticity, and missing one day did not materially set people back. (We read the abstract.)¹⁵

A slow first fortnight is no sign of failure. Re-time your baseline every week or two on the same kind of task; the research is unpacked in our guide to how long habits take to form.

Grading the research behind each step

Each step borrows from research of different strength, and none has been studied as a way to lengthen attention span.

Exercise has the strongest evidence but is the least specific to attention span, and the five-more rule has the thinnest. Start with the cheap steps (the timer, the phone, a moving break) and keep the rule if your tallies show the urge passing more often.

When poor focus is worth a doctor’s visit

Persistent trouble focusing can be linked to depression, anxiety or thyroid problems, and less often to ADHD, according to Kaiser Permanente (US).⁵ We have grouped advice from the NHS (UK), the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Cleveland Clinic (US) by urgency (a GP, in NHS wording, is a family doctor).

• Now: sudden confusion in anyone is an emergency, according to the NHS; call your local emergency number (in the UK, 999, or go to A&E), and do not drive yourself.¹⁶ If poor focus comes with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, contact your local emergency number or a crisis service straight away; for the US, NIMH lists the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.¹⁷
• Soon: trouble concentrating is one of the depression signs NIMH describes, and it recommends talking with a health professional if such signs last.¹⁷ Cleveland Clinic advises telling a provider if fog and trouble paying attention disrupt your daily routine, and lists poor sleep, anxiety, depression and medication side effects among possible causes.¹⁸ A doctor or pharmacist can check whether a medicine you take might be playing a part; keep taking a prescribed medicine until you have asked them.
• At your next appointment: ADHD symptoms begin in childhood and usually continue into adulthood, NIMH says, and they often occur alongside sleep problems, anxiety or depression.¹⁹ If you have long been easily distracted or forgetful and it affects study, work or relationships, the NHS advises making a GP appointment, where other possible causes can also be considered.²⁰

The bottom line

A longer attention span is more likely to come from practicing a different response at the moment you want to stop, in a setting that makes the urge easier to outlast, than from brain games. Time your current stretch on one task this week, use the five-more rule each time the pull arrives, and move the phone to another room before you begin. If poor focus persists and starts to affect work or study, book a doctor’s appointment.