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The latest in mental health news, resources, and stories for the burnt out and languishing.

WEEKLY(ISH) ROUNDUP

Latest in mental health 🧠

• While social media is being scrutinized for its impact on youth mental health, TikTok is creating digital spaces for mental health.

• This Kansas City ‘wellness court’ takes a new approach to mental health and substance use.

• Fresh off the Grammys, music orgs launch mental health fund to support musicians.

Your wellness microdose 💊

• Feeling financial burnout? Try this Cal Newport-approved productivity hack

• Here are some small ways to improve your mental health.

• If you’ve been skeptical about journaling, try this simple and effective approach (your mental health may thank you).

JOIN THE MOVEMENT

Let’s change minds together 🤝

It’s all too much, thanks.

The most valuable resource in the modern workplace isn’t talent. It’s not innovation. It’s not even time. It’s our attention — and we are running out of it.

At work, distractions come from nearly every direction: Slack notifications, emails, meeting invites, Teams pings, text messages, and the ever-present hum of the internet. 

Our attention is being systematically harvested and fragmented attention not only impacts productivity, it can also impact mental health.

The same forces that make social media addicting—dopamine-driven feedback loops, infinite scrolling, micro-interactions—are the same ones shaping the modern workplace. We don’t just do our work anymore. We consume it. Tools like Slack have turned communication into an always-on feed. Email is a 24/7, unrelenting inbox of demands, obligations, and expectations.

The result is a workplace that feels less like a space for deep, meaningful work and more like a digital content feed we can’t stop refreshing. And just like social media, it’s leaving us drained, overstimulated, and mentally unavailable.

Our brains weren’t built for this 🥴

Research shows that deep focus is the paramount to productivity, creativity, and problem-solving. But this type of work is nearly impossible in an environment of constant interruption. Wen we’re working in a constantly fragmented way, here is what is happening:

• 🧠 We never enter a flow state. It takes 20+ minutes to regain focus after an interruption. Most of us are interrupted every 3 minutes.

• 📉 We experiencing “continuous partial attention”, vaguely aware of everything happening around you, but not truly absorbing any of it.

• 😵‍💫 Our nervous systems are in a low-grade stress response all day. Constant notifications keep us in a reactive state, making even small tasks feel overwhelming.

• 🛑 We don’t get the dopamine payoff of finishing something. Instead of completing work, we “graze” on tasks—starting and stopping a million things without ever feeling the satisfaction of deep, meaningful completion. Work is a never-ending scroll, and it’s breaking us

The short-term impact of fragmented attention at work is exhaustion, cognitive fatigue, and an ever-growing to-do list that never seems to shrink. The long-term impact can be burnout, anxiety, and the pervasive sense that you’re always “on” but never getting anything done.

If the attention economy is designed to keep us hooked, modern workplaces are designed to keep us distracted. Meetings mimic social feeds. You sit in one, half-listening, while you scroll your inbox and Slack on the side. Emails mimic notifications. They demand immediate responses, triggering a compulsive need to “clear” them like unread messages on an app. Work itself is fragmented. Instead of tackling big projects, we chip away at small, low-impact tasks that give us the illusion of progress.

For many, this way of working is not sustainable. It’s turning our jobs into endless cycles of context-switching, shallow work, and overstimulation.

So what' do we do?!

Work is broken in ways we can’t fix overnight. But if we want to reclaim our attention (and our sanity), we need to start resisting the attention economy at work:

• ⏳ Monotask. Block off 90-minute windows for actual focused work. Turn off notifications. Guard it like it’s your job—because it is.

• 🔕 Mute the noise. Disable Slack pop-ups. Turn off email notifications. Check messages at set times, not all day.

• 📅 Say no to unnecessary meetings. Before accepting, ask: Could this be an email? Could this be an async update? If so, decline it and ask for the preferred delivery method.

• 📉 Shift from urgency culture to meaningful work. Most things can wait. The ability to do deep, thoughtful work is more valuable than answering quickly.

• 👥 Build real connection. The solution to digital overload isn’t more messages—it’s better conversations. Instead of just coffee badging, find ways to prioritize actual connection with your peers on things that matter.

We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us to learn more about improving attentional health at work.

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