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Ever get distracted by an email at the very moment you were settling down to concentrate on an important task? Ever lose focus on your husband/wife/partner precisely when they needed you most? Ever feel overwhelmed and lacking ability to direct your attention purposefully at one thing at a time?
Join the club. Achieving consistent mental focus is a battle I have been fighting for years. And I have helped hundreds of clients win this battle too.
Read on for 8 tips to get you started.
This blog post is designed to be used in conjunction with my free checklist, “How to stop getting distracted and start making a tangible difference: A 10-point checklist to assess the quality of your mental focus”. Sign-up below and I shall send you a copy:
1. Sugar
Governments, researchers and even parts of the food industry know that sugar is one of the most pervasive toxins around. Sugar gives an artificial spike to your brain (among other things it does to your body), and this spike is short lived, being outweighed in size by the subsequent low.
So when you reach for that Sprite, ready meal or slice of white bread (all full of sugar), consider its effect on your mental focus.
Instead, drink water, seek out fresh ingredients and eat brown bread.
2. Weight
Alexandros Vgontzas, MD, a professor of psychiatry at Penn State, found that obese people are more likely to feel sleepy during the day.
See three studies on daytime sleepiness presented at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Boston, 2012: http://bit.ly/22EMPDZ and http://wb.md/1Uk9kgu.
For some, then, working on your weight will be important. Note that feeling sleepy during the day is different from actively using sleep to reduce distraction – on which see the next tip.
3. Sleep
This is actually 3 separate tips in one.
A. Optimise night sleep quantity: The National Sleep Foundation recommends 7-9 hours of sleep per day for adults between the ages of 18-64.
B. Improve night sleep quality: quality is as important as quantity. The biggest threat to our sleep quality today is blue light before bed. Exposure to blue light within the 60-90 minutes before going to sleep negatively affects sleep quantity and quality. Sources of blue light include the sun, digital screens (TVs, computers, laptops, smart phones and tablets), electronic devices, and fluorescent and LED lighting.
C. Nap during the day . If you nap during the day, you refresh your mind and get smarter.
Researchers from University of California, Berkeley, found that people who napped after finishing a difficult tasks performed better when finishing the task again later, compared to participants who stayed awake between tasks.
4. Relationships
Many of us spend too much time playing mental tapes of conversations or relationships that have gone wrong. These distractions are often deep rooted and a short blog post such as this is insufficient to address every nuance.
At the big picture level, there are three things one can do with such distractions:
- Do nothing: this is he only option that I do not recommend.
- Let it go: whether you need to write down your grievances and burn the piece of paper, meditate or pray, an excellent route is to find a way to let the issue go (so you no longer keep replaying it in your mind). This route may involve offering forgiveness in your heart.
- Deal with it. This is another recommended route, where you proactively and gently approach the person (or people) and have a good conversation about the issue. Not easy to do – I am considering writing about this in more detail. Submit a comment below with your experiences of trying this, and/or whether you would like to read more on this topic.
The link with mental focus is that these distractions take up our brain space, which could be used on other things, and/or developing other relationships.
5. Caffeine
Beware using caffeine to help you concentrate, because you may be achieving the opposite.
Research shows that although caffeine can cause a spike in alertness for a few hours, a bigger dip follows (much like sugar). When caffeine exits the body, people can experience a dip (bigger than the spike), caused by more adenosine molecules flooding the brain, and dopamine being repressed. (Adenosine plays a role in the sleep-wake cycle and dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centres.)
And the more coffee you drink, the smaller the positive short term spike in attention, per cup.
6. Email
A recent report by the Future Work Centre found the following:
- People who leave their email on all day were much more likely to report perceived email pressure.
- Checking email earlier in the morning or later at night is associated with higher levels of perceived email pressure.
- Higher email pressure was associated with more examples of work negatively impacting home life and home life negatively impacting performance at work.
How much time do you waste getting distracted by email? Improve by cleaning up your email habits in the following ways:
- Don’t respond to the ping of every email as it comes in.
- Batch process them instead, so that you can focus on other tasks, and focus properly on emails when you do deal with them.
- Schedule times during the day when you will deal with email (and instant messages, social media and other interruptions that can wait). Ensure that these times are not too early or too late.
7. Drugs
All the drugs listed in the checklist have been shown to cause decreased alertness (William H. Blahd, Jr., MD, FACEP: http://wb.md/1UFiwM4; also see: http://bit.ly/22ENPbm.)
The drugs are: antidepressants, antihistamines, narcotics (including narcotic-based pain relief such as sedatives), tranquillisers and medicines for bladder control problems (anticholinergics).
8. Creativity, play and rest
Tony Schwartz and Jean Gomes have written masterfully on the power of creativity, playfulness and rest on improving your mental focus.
For example, they write that remaining absorbed is critical for effective mental focus, and that by being playful and intuitive we can remain absorbed with a broad, big picture view, which allows us then to return more effectively to narrow mental focus when we need it. And by taking regular rest (including naps and sleep), we renew ourselves physically which also helps our mental focus in the medium and long term especially. (See The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working.).
Do you find this tip surprising because it does not seem to relate directly to mental focus? In fact, researchers are finding that the more creative, playful and restful we are at times, the better our level of detailed focus becomes. This is because creativity, playfulness and rest takes us into a big picture zone that – ironically – distracts us from the million pressing detailed concerns we have, enhancing our ability to focus on those details when we return to them.
What next?
If you have something in your life that you want to change, sign-up blow for my new free course, 77 Minutes to Change the World. With 7 high-quality short videos and templates, this course helps you plan your change and sustain it long term. All in just 77 minutes.
Which tips have you tried before? Share your experience below in the comments section? And also share your experiences below about the point mentioned in the ‘relationships’ tip.
Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.