Issue 37

It’s a Monday afternoon, and after getting home from school, you sit down at your desk. You have a lot of school to do if you don’t want to be up till midnight doing trigonometry. But even thinking about school is daunting after such a long day. You just need a break before you get to work. So you turn on your phone, and before you know it, start scrolling through reels.

Just a couple minutes and then you’ll get back to work. Before you know it, your mother is calling you down for dinner and you got nothing done this past hour. You look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: “What just happened? Where did I go wrong?”

It’s a situation that we all end up facing sooner or later. You have now contributed to the two hundred billion reels that are watched on Instagram and Facebook alone, every single day (Demandsage). This is one of the many reasons so many people struggle with paying attention and getting things done. It’s a scary reality that our attention spans now less than a third of what they were just twenty years ago (Microsoft). So with all of these distractions, what can we do? We can stare at a wall. Because yes, staring at a wall really can help your attention span.

Let’s back up. What is an attention span in the first place? An attention span is the amount of time you usually spend focused on a single thing before moving on. Microsoft once did a study on the average time spent on a website before moving on. In 2000, the average time was two and a half minutes. Now, it has dropped down to just forty-five seconds. So how then do we lengthen our attention spans? While there are many legitimate ways we can try to do so, one of the best is to stare at a wall for just five minutes a day. Yes, really. Staring at a wall clears your brain from the dopamine and stimulation that fills every part of our lives. As Ashley from Medium.com says “If you stare at the wall long enough without any input or variety from the rest of your sensory system, your brain will overcompensate and pay hyper attention to things going on within your mind and within your peripheral vision bubble,” This shows that staring at a wall can help you to understand and control what is going on inside your own head. Similarly, the psychologist Dr. K Healthy Ganer says “just stare at a wall for an hour… once you can train your mind to tolerate boredom, you no longer fall into the pull of these things, because then you don’t need to play video games because boredom is okay.” While staring at a wall is a bit over the top, it does show the benefit of putting yourself through something like this. Through this time of peace, away from the technology that has cluttered every part of our lives, we can get a new view of what it is that we are doing.

Staring at a wall once a day has been very helpful in my own life. When I’m exhausted and tired and know I still have work ahead of me, I can remind myself to take a break. A break that doesn’t involve social media, reels, or technology. But why can’t it involve technology? The problem is that everything on the internet wants your attention because that’s how they make their money. However, the one thing that isn’t asking for your attention is a wall. By staring at a wall we learn how to act and concentrate without any help from an outside source, specifically, technology. By removing ourselves from technology, we get used to being inside of our own minds.

Sometimes life gets busy and staring at the wall for five minutes can feel like a waste.

However it is in these busy times that this becomes most important. You truly don’t have time to waste. Because of that, clearing your mind of the dopamine and stimulation is more important than ever, because in five minutes, you can make the next five hours much more effective. If those five minutes make you five percent more productive, then in five hours, you’ll have gotten fifteen minutes more done. Instead of losing time by staring at a wall, you are actually gaining it.

So the next time you come home from school, tired and worn out, I want you to try something. Sit down, and make it a goal that no matter what happens, no matter how tired you feel, you will not stimulate yourself through your phone until dinner. To kick this experiment off, stare at a wall for just five minutes. While you could scroll through your phone for an hour and still feel tired and unready to work, in five minutes, while you may still feel tired, you will also feel ready. While you could waste your time, you will now be gaining it. The clarity and determination will have the power to override any weakening feeling that may go through your mind. Because with each action that you take, you are building your future. You can either build a hard working, determined person, or a lazy person who doesn’t know how to live without stimulation. The choice is yours, now it is your time to act. Even when pain is strong, our will can be stronger. In the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Where the mind goes the body will follow.”

 

Works Cited

Ashley. “Things I Learned From Staring at a Wall.” Medium.com, December 2019. https://medium.com/@ashleyhayward/things-i-learned-from-staring-at-a-wall-c16 5aacd065d. Accessed 8 January 2025.

Mark, Gloria. “Regain Control of Your Focus and Attention with Researcher Gloria Mark.” Microsoft, April 2023.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/podcast/regain-control-of-your-focus-and-atte ntion-with-researcher-gloria-mark. Accessed 8 January 2025.

Williamson, Chris. “Could You Stare At a Wall For an Hour?” youtube, June 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noKzTAm6Jz8. Accessed 8 January 2025.

Kumar, Naveen. “How Many Instagram Reels are There? (2025 Statistics). Demandsage, January 2025. https://www.demandsage.com/instagram-reel-statistics/. Accessed 8 January 2025.

 

James DeGraaf is fourteen years old and loves reading and spending time outdoors with his Trail Life group as he learns and grows with his friends. When he has free time, he enjoys spending time with his seven older siblings, finding new ways to improve his life, and playing sports with his friends.

Maneuvering the tiny awl through the rock was a test of real patience, the layers of earth that had to gently be removed were hard and crunchy after being baked in the sun for millions of years. As the youngest team member at the Judith River Dinosaur Institute’s Snowy Mountain Dig, I learned more than I have in years of reading about dinosaurs. The act of digging is not for the weak. It requires industrial strength knee pads, brushes, knives, dental picks and awls. To sustain the long hours of crouching over the dirt, one must get creative, shifting the weight of the body to find that perfect low fatigue position. At times, I even experimented with the “lying on the belly move” arms extended in front of me, as if ground-flying toward my reward.

While there are no guarantees of discovering anything on a dig, I found it easy to keep my hope and curiosity alive. Dig sites are charged with possibility. We all felt it. And after four days of digging in the 110 degree weather, I heard that hollow sound and knew I hit something. Patiently, I brushed away the dirt and saw that beautiful brown/purple bone. While some team members had already found bones or bone fragments on the first few days, I had not. This was my moment, and my first fossil was not just any fossil. It was a Stegosaurus back plate. I looked down at the bone with pride and wonder, knowing I had uncovered an animal that hadn’t seen daylight in 150 million years.

My fascination with dinosaurs started when I was a little boy. Mornings watching Barney the dinosaur made me curious about other facets of ancient life. As I grew older, I moved beyond children’s shows, and my favorite documentary was Walking with Monsters, where I became enthralled with evolution. I was drawn to how organisms change, how they behave, and how they operate within their ecosystem. It is amazing to think about how different organisms today evolved from ones from the past.

My interest led me to search online for a dig in which I could participate, and when I found it, I jumped at the chance to experience the life of a paleontologist. This dig taught me that TV does not reflect what really happens on these digs and the different types of paleontologists. Some professionals specialize in geology, others lean more into the evolutionary biology aspect, but all of them play pivotal roles in the excavation of animals and the growth of scientific knowledge. I learned there are three types of paleontologists, the “hands-on” individuals who go out into the field, the lab paleontologists who then reconstruct and study the bones that come from the excavation, and the PhD paleontologists who take the evidence found in the fossils to create theories and publish their ideas. The most interesting thing that I learned on this dig was that as a paleontologist, you don’t have to have a formal education to make a discovery! The man leading the dig, Nate Murphy, is a well-known paleontologist who didn’t go to college! Instead, he honed his skills in the field and supported it by reading widely on the topic.

While my friends spent their summers on the beach, I am so grateful for the experience to dig in the dirt in Montana on a quest for discovery. Paleontology is difficult, tedious work but each person has the opportunity to make a discovery and contribute to the team effort.

 

 

Henry “Banks” Bourtin has had a life long fascination with paleontology. He had the opportunity this summer to go on his first dinosaur dig, where he unearthed a stegosaurus backplate. He is a 10th grader from Texas, and will earn Eagle Scout rank in May, 2025.