You open a page. Before it loads, you're already on another tab. You come back, stare at the screen, and can't remember what you were doing. Fifty tabs open, five unfinished tasks, nothing shipped.
This isn't distraction. It's a specific pattern: your brain has learned that the loading moment is unbearable, so it fills the gap with another stimulus. Then another. The result is a day that feels exhausting without producing anything.
What's Actually Happening
Research on attention switching from the University of California, Irvine shows that after a single interruption it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task at full focus (Mark, Gudith, and Klocke, 2008, "The Cost of Interrupted Work"). When you self-interrupt every 8 seconds, you never arrive at full focus at all. The brain stays permanently in buffering mode.
The mechanism is dopaminergic. Every new tab, notification, or refresh is a small dopamine hit, cheaper and faster than the reward of finishing anything. The system optimizes for the cheap hit, and productive work loses by default.