I Didn’t Realise My Attention Span Was Dying Until I Watched A Movie

For one month, I did something without really thinking about it. I scrolled. Every spare moment, every quiet second, every small gap in the day. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, random clips sent by friends. Comedy, news, motivation, drama. I didn’t track the time or set any rules. It just became a habit. At first, it felt harmless. Even relaxing. By the end of the month, I realised I could no longer sit through a movie without losing focus.That realisation hit me last weekend while watching 120 Bahadur on Amazon Prime Video. I was genuinely interested when I started. Phone aside, lights dimmed, mindset ready. But around thirty minutes in, the ads appeared. Not one or two, but enough to break the flow. Instead of getting annoyed, I felt relieved.

The ads gave me an excuse to stop. I told myself I’d come back later, but I never did. The movie wasn’t bad. My patience was.After weeks of short videos, my brain had been trained to expect something every ten or fifteen seconds. A hook, a twist, a payoff. When a scene took time to build emotion, it felt slow. Boring. Skippable. The ads didn’t ruin the experience; they exposed how little tolerance I had left for delayed gratification. I didn’t stop watching because the film failed me. I stopped because I had forgotten how to wait.

I noticed the same problem earlier while watching Gadar 2 in a theatre. Big screen, loud sound, packed hall, yet I unlocked my phone several times. Not for emergencies, but for stimulation. Snapchat, X, Instagram and work WhatsApp groups. At times, I even found the movie boring, which made checking my phone feel justified. That was the unsettling part. Sitting in a cinema hall, work notifications felt more engaging than a three-hour-long film. Earlier, the theatre used to be a place where the outside world disappeared for me, but now it’s just a darker room where I glance at a smaller screen.

The habit spilt into everyday life too. Waiting became uncomfortable. If an elevator took too long, my handset came out. If the traffic light stayed red for more than forty seconds, the same reaction happened today. I had spent a month filling every small pause with noise, and in the process, I had lost the ability to just stand there without reaching for stimulation.At home, watching anything properly felt impossible. I’d put on a Netflix show and within minutes, my hand would drift toward my phone without conscious thought. I wasn’t really watching anymore. I was listening while scrolling. Two screens, two streams of content and almost no real attention. According to me, this is where the damage is deepest. We don’t even realise we’ve stopped focusing.The biggest warning sign came when I tried to remember what I had watched. I couldn’t name five short videos from the previous day. Not details, not creators, not moments. Hours of content had passed through my eyes and nothing stayed. Short-form content works like junk food for the brain. It fills you up instantly but leaves you mentally empty, with no memory or meaning attached.

The final moment came during a normal conversation that happened two days ago. One of my very good friends was telling a story and halfway through, I felt impatient. My mind searched for a skip button (bhai jaldi bta yaar) or a way to speed things up. Real life doesn’t come with jump cuts or background music. After a month of constant scrolling, even human conversations felt slow.That’s when it became clear. I didn’t just lose my attention span. I traded it away for thousands of tiny moments of entertainment that I can’t even remember today. And the worst part is that I chose to make that trade.And this is why your attention span feels dead. It wasn’t stolen overnight and it wasn’t taken by one app or one habit. It eroded quietly, scroll by scroll, until stillness started feeling uncomfortable and patience felt optional. After a month of short videos, I didn’t just struggle to focus. I struggled to wait, to listen, to stay present. The damage isn’t that we watch short content. It’s that we’ve trained our brains to reject anything that doesn’t reward us instantly.