It Takes 23 Minutes to Refocus After Checking Your Phone, Says ‘The Wellness Process’

You know that moment when you check your phone “real quick” and suddenly your brain feels scrambled for the next half hour? You didn’t imagine that. According to best-selling author Liz Moody, it can take up to 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption—and yes, checking your phone counts.

On The Wellness Process, host Elizabeth Endres sits down with Moody to unpack why our attention feels so scattered lately, even when we swear we’re trying to focus. From why a face-down phone still drains mental energy to why willpower alone won’t fix it, this convo explains what’s low-key frying your brain and how to reset without completely unplugging from real life.

Your attention is ‘residuing’ all over the place

“There’s something called attention residue,” Moody explains. It’s the idea that when you switch tasks, part of your attention stays stuck on whatever you were doing before, making it harder to fully focus on what’s in front of you now.

That’s why the whole face-down phone move doesn’t really work. You might think you’re present, but your brain is still half-attached to whatever notification, text, or scroll you just left. “We’re on our phones, we put it face down, we’re trying to focus on our friends,” Moody says, “but our attention is going to be a little bit stuck to our phone.” And that mental lag can last up to “23 minutes,” she explains, which is “a very long time.”

The problem compounds when your day turns into constant task-switching. Emails to Slack. Slack to texts. Texts to booking a flight. “Your attention residuing all over the place,” Moody points out, and once that happens, none of the tasks get your full focus. Everything takes longer. Everything feels harder. And you end the day wondering why you were busy but somehow didn’t get much done.

Willpower won’t save you

“One of the biggest mistakes that so many of us make is that we rely on willpower,” Moody says. We keep telling ourselves we just need to try harder, be more disciplined, have better self-control. But the problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s that the game is rigged.

“These things are designed to overtake our willpower,” Moody explains. When we fail, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with us. It means we’re up against systems built to pull our attention on purpose. From social media feeds to constant notifications to endless tabs, focus was never the goal. Engagement was.

And as Moody points out, “You can’t muscle against what the world’s greatest scientists have designed to be addictive.” That goes for your phone, your apps, even the food cues and dopamine hits baked into modern life. Capitalism wants you scrolling—and it has entire teams working to make sure you do.

Which is exactly why “just don’t check your phone” never works. Willpower burns out fast. The real shift, Moody says, comes from creating systems that work for you instead of against you. Less self-blame. More structure—“more friction” between you and the habits you’re trying to break.

How to actually reclaim your focus

If you want to feel less scattered, the first rule is simple: do not touch your phone first thing in the morning.

“Science shows that spending time on your phone first thing in the morning is the absolute worst time of day to do it,” Moody says. “It sets your dopamine levels in a way where you will be reaching for your phone more all day. You’ll also crave other dopamine-flooding activities like sugary processed foods.”

Basically, when you start your day with a high-stimulation hit, you train your brain to need that level of stimulation to feel normal. And then you spend the rest of the day chasing it.

The second shift is to stop bouncing between tasks. Instead of toggling between email, Slack, texts, and whatever else is pinging, try time-blocking: set a timer, commit to one task for 25 minutes, and don’t switch until the timer goes off. “It gets easier the more that you do it because you’re training that muscle,” Moody says.

Even just knowing about the 23-minute rule can help. “If I’m going through emails and I’m tempted to go over and check my Slack channel, I’m kind of like, ‘Oh, it’s going to take me 23 more minutes to get into this,'” she explains. That awareness alone can stop the impulse.

And here’s one more trick that doubles as a focus hack: give yourself less time. It’s called “Parkinson’s Law”—the idea that a task will expand or compress to fill the time you give it. “If you give yourself 20 minutes to do a task, you’re going to do the task in 20 minutes,” Liz says. “If you give yourself an hour, you’re going to do it in an hour.”

When there’s too much time, we stall. We scroll. We scatter. But when there’s just enough? We lock in.

The goal isn’t to white-knuckle your way through the day or shame yourself for checking your phone. It’s to stop expecting willpower to do the heavy lifting—and start designing your environment to actually support your focus. Because the truth is, you’re not bad at paying attention. You’re just fighting a system that was never built for you to win.

Want to hear the rest of the conversation? Tune into The Wellness Process, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.

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