In the media saturated world, it can be difficult to focus on one thing at a time. A University of Wisconsin study may have found the solution to unavoidable multitasking through simply counting breaths.

Thomas Gorman, lab manager of Learning and Transfer Lab, under UW’s Department of Psychology, published his senior thesis Monday on how mindfulness training can help media multitaskers gain better attention spans.

“I’m always interested in the different ways to improve people’s attention in general, including my own attention,” Gorman said.

The lab surveyed more than 800 students in an introductory psychology class, Gorman said, to measure how often students multitask while using media to come up with a measurement scale. Heavy media multitaskers are at least one standard deviation above the average while light media multitaskers are one standard deviation below the average, Gorman said.

Media multitaskers spend a lot of time using multiple types of media concurrently, such as emailing while texting or web browsing while watching television, Shawn Green, Learning and Transfer Lab private investigator and assistant professor in psychology, said.

“There are seven or eight years of research now showing that people who do concurrent types of media activities tend to have deficits to get attention,” Green said. 

People with attention problems often have trouble focusing and learning, Green said, especially the 15 percent of heavy media multitaskers. That is why Gorman experimented with a breath-counting exercise, developed by UW’s Center for Healthy Minds, to help heavy media multitaskers.

The mindfulness activity is a video game format and requires participants to press a button before they start exhaling, count their exhales from one to nine and then press a different button to start a new cycle, Green said.

It forces people to attend to just one thing, measured breathing, and may be beneficial to those who struggle to focus, Green said.

“Because it’s really easy to do, it’s kind of hard to stay on task,” Green said. “Your mind will naturally start to wander when you’re just trying to count your exhales.”

Gorman’s study had participants do two sets of attention tests, one after 10 minutes of the mindfulness exercise, the other after 10 minutes of web browsing, a typical behavior of heavy media multitaskers. Results show that the same group of people did significantly better on the attention test after the mindfulness activity than web browsing, Green said.

Moving forward, the Learning and Transfer Lab, as well as many other research groups in the field, are trying to explore the long-term effect of mindfulness practices on people’s attention span, Green said.

“I think the short improvement itself is interesting, but obviously it’s more useful that we can create something longer-lasting, that will definitely be the next step.” Gorman said.