4 Strategies to Drastically Improve Your Mental Focus
Here’s how you can pay attention for longer to help you get things done…
Your attention span is not shorter than a goldfish’s attention span.
A lot is flying around out there that claims our attention spans have reduced to 8 seconds — which is lower than 9 seconds for the common goldfish.
That’s not true. Our ability to focus is task-dependent.
“How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer.
This explains why we can focus on a 2-hour long movie with ease but may struggle to read a book for 10 minutes. It also depends on if you enjoy books or movies more.
What I can say is we all lose our mental focus during any task. However, it’s up to us to bring our attention back to focus. There are simple ways we can do this, which can drastically improve your ability to focus on the task at hand.
And, the better focus we have, the better we perform.
1. Analyse Your Mental Focus
The more you work on your mental focus, the stronger it becomes. You also need to work on it for a prolonged period to see the results.
It’s like a muscle. Lifting a weight for one week won’t create any significant impact. It’s the repetitive nature of lifting weight and the diet that helps.
The same goes for your mental focus. You need to practice bringing your attention back to what you’re doing and mindfully focus on the task at hand. A good place to start to improve your focus is to analyse it right now. Ask yourself:
When is my focus good and when is it bad?
Is your focus better first thing in the morning? Is it better when you’re in a quiet place? Can you focus for long periods or is it better in short bursts? By doing this, you’ll also identify what your current mental focus is like.
It’s easy to disregard this step but, don’t take this step for granted. This step tells you what situations your focus is better in. That way, you can implement these conditions more to help.
It’s also a good way to help you track your mental focus. It enables you to identify how your focus is currently which gives you something to compare yourself against in a couple of months. For example:
If you notice your focus right now is only good for 10 minutes at a time, then you can use that as your measuring point. You can see in two months if that has improved or not. So start by dissecting your mental focus at present.
2. Develop Meta-Awareness
It’s natural for our minds to wander — so don’t beat yourself up about this.
We can have thousands of thoughts in a day, which makes it even easier to lose focus.
A common scenario is when we’re reading a book or blog post. Halfway through you might not have a clue about what you just read.
You’ve probably just thought about what you’re going to eat later or something your friend told you the day before.
If that’s common for you, then a great way to improve your focus is to develop, what psychologists term meta-awareness. This is all about knowing where our mind is wandering too.
When we do this, it helps us realise what we’re thinking about and how we can bring attention back to the task at hand. The better our meta-awareness is, the better our mental focus will be.
Mindfulness can help cultivate meta-awareness. Research shows people engaging with mindfulness exercises show improvements in their meta-awareness 3 months later.
Three simple and easy mindfulness techniques are:
- The raisin method — it involves placing a raisin in the palm of your hand. Examine the raisin, its ridges, lines, dents, colour. Turn the raisin and do the same. Now hold the raisin in between your thumb and finger. Explore the texture. Now smell the raisin. What aroma do you notice? Now place the raisin on your tongue and move it around. What can you taste? Notice the changes in your mouth even before you have bitten into it. Now bite the raisin. Slowly chew and notice how its texture changes. And finally swallow the raisin, noticing your intention to swallow and how it passes down your throat.
- The body scan — this involves sitting in a comfortable position, closing your eyes and breathing in and out. Imagine your attention is a spotlight and focus it on your feet paying attention to the sensations (if any) in your feet. Notice how your feet feel or the surface they are toughing. It’s fine if you don’t feel anything, simply pay attention. Now shift this spotlight of attention around your whole body, moving from your feet, to your legs, hips, body, arms and head. You might have thoughts come into your mind and that’s ok. Simply acknowledge them and bring yourself back to your spotlight of attention. Try this for 3 minutes, to begin with.
- The 10 finger gratitude list — Every day, towards the end of the day, count 10 things you are grateful for during the day. You’ll notice it’s easy to get 3–5 things. Then, it gets harder. The purpose is to help you really think back and concentrate on your day to help you focus on what things you could have been grateful for. It could be something as simple as your lunch meal.
Try and practice one of these exercises once a day. Trust me you will struggle at first. I struggled when I went on an 8-week mindfulness course, but you just have to keep going to get the results.
Having your mind concentrate on this task can help with meta-awareness, which will help with your ability to focus.
3. Try Some Video Games
This could possibly be the most exciting way to improve your mental focus. Simply, play video games.
Think about when you played a video game. How concentrated were you? I know that when I used to spend a hell of a time on video games like Fifa or Black Ops Zombies, my concentration levels were at their highest. I could filter out things with ease and focus for a long time.
Research even shows that people who play video games have better attention. This includes better sustained attention — focusing for a prolonged time. And, selective attention — filtering out things to attend to one thing.
Again, the important thing is the more you practice and try to train your attention, the better it can become on other tasks too.
That’s because when you are practicing focusing, changes in your brain can occur. This will then help with your mental focus on other tasks too.
So play a video game, download an app or try brain training games to help with your mental focus.
The only caveat I will say is don’t spend your whole day on video games. They can easily interfere with your ability to get your things completed.
4. Be Intentional With Your Schedule
We often make our schedules quickly and try to get started with our tasks immediately. In this generation, everything is about getting things done as quickly as possible. We either want everything now or we feel we should be doing multiple things at once.
But, that won’t do our mental focus any good. You don’t need to be doing things quickly. Instead, every day should involve thinking, intentionally about how your attention can help you.
In particular, it should involve knowing what easy and more difficult tasks you have. You can then use this to help with attention.
Don’t break your day down into a load of easy tasks. Each day have tougher tasks. Attention is better then.
Research has found when a task is more difficult, more mental focus is elicited. This then leads to a better performance in the task you’re doing.
It’s the same in life. For example, when you first start driving, it’s a tougher task. Your attention is extremely focused, looking out for things, making sure you’re doing the correct speed etc.
But, when you become more experienced with driving, the task becomes easier and your attention is actually focused on other things too. You might speak on Bluetooth with someone, look out for shops around the area, listen to music etc.
To implement this, try and make a task harder to help focus your attention more. Or, don’t set a load of easy tasks to do in one day. Split the week up and put hard tasks in your day too. It requires more attention and the more you practice focusing, the better your mental focus can become.
Final Comments
Our ability to focus can either make it difficult or easier for us to perform at something.
And, with the way the world is, it can be so hard for us to focus on one thing for an extended period.
There are so many things going on — distractions and new trends which just drag our attention away.
However, we can always improve our mental focus. We just have to know how to do this and keep practicing.
Keep these four things in mind to help with your mental focus:
- Analyse your mental focus.
- Cultivate meta-awareness.
- Play a video game.
- Be intentional with your schedule.
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