If you want to improve your attention, change your environment instead of changing yourself.
About the author
Monica Rosenberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, where she has been on faculty since 2019. She leads the Cognition and Attention in Brain (CAB) Lab, a research group that uses brain imaging, behavioral experiments, and machine learning to study how we focus and why we lose focus.
Her research centers on a striking idea:
“Your ability to focus is encoded in the pattern of connections across your brain, and that pattern is as unique to you as a fingerprint.”
Using functional MRI, her lab has shown that these brain network fingerprints can predict, with measurable accuracy, how well a person sustains attention on a task and even how likely they are to show symptoms of ADHD.
In 2022, Rosenberg received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, one of the most selective early-career awards in science. She has also spoken at the Young European Scientists Meeting alongside 2 Nobel Laureates — something she described simply as “surreal.” The quote above reflects a theme that runs through much of her public work on attention: that the environments we put ourselves in shape our focus more reliably than the sheer force of trying harder.
The meaning of the quote
Most advice about focus puts the problem squarely on you. Pay attention. Stop getting distracted. Try harder. Meditate. This quote flips that entirely. Rosenberg argues that the environment you’re sitting in is doing more work on your attention than your willpower ever will.
If the problem is you, the solution is personal discipline and discipline is exhausting, unreliable, and finite. If the problem is your environment, the solution is design and a well-designed environment keeps working even when your motivation runs flat. A phone left in another room doesn’t require daily resolve. A library with no Wi-Fi doesn’t ask anything of your self-control. The constraint is baked in.
Rosenberg’s research puts hard data behind this. Her lab has found that factors like sleep quality, air pollution, stress hormones, and technology use all measurably alter how the brain’s attention networks function. These aren’t character flaws, but environmental variables that respond to environmental changes. A 2015 study found that people who walked through a park for 90 minutes showed significantly lower activity in the brain’s default mode network (the region associated with mind-wandering), compared to those who walked along a busy urban street. The environment literally changed the brain’s activity pattern.
The practical takeaway from this quote is that most people who struggle with focus should not spend their energy trying to change their internal state (more motivated, more disciplined, more focused), but instead redirect that energy outward and change the environment you work in.
Four questions worth asking about your current workspace:
There’s something almost countercultural about this idea. We live in an era that prizes mental toughness, personal responsibility, and grinding through difficulty. Rosenberg’s research pushes against all of that by pointing out that effort spent rearranging external conditions outperforms effort spent clenching your jaw and trying to focus harder. The brain is not a muscle that gets stronger through strain. It’s an organ that responds to conditions. Change the conditions, and the brain follows.
The most focused people you know are probably not the most disciplined. They’re the ones who’ve built a life with fewer traps in it.
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