Increasing Focus pt 2

In the previous post we covered a few ways to begin increasing focus:

Remove distractions,
Avoid Multitasking,
Choose environments that support your ability to focus,
Change where you work on a regular basis (but not too often).

Those sound simple, but if they were everyone would do them. They involve repeated intention, control over your work environment, and importantly: time. These things are habitual – just as motor functioning becomes automatic over time, so do our daily routines.

Tip: occasionally change the route you take to work. Change your music. Go to that new restaurant. It’s good for you, and the brain responds well to new environments and experiences, which will aid in increasing your overall focus level.

Have a Warm Up Routine

Just as intense exercise requires stretching, sustained periods of focus require preparation. Our working memory requires a short period of time to reorganize the relevant pieces of information for different tasks.

This can take a variety of forms depending on your personal preference and what you are attempting to focus on. It could look like reviewing notes or documents, or perhaps you intentionally check your emails at the start of the workday. It could be outlining the tasks that need to be tackled that day with their proper order of operations and which materials you’ll need to accomplish them or cleaning your workspace. It could be as simple as having a cup of coffee while you get into character.

Q: Is there a genre of music that you associate with focusing?

Your morning routine or drive to work can do double duty as your warmup routine. These are examples; intentionally checking your email may signal to your mind ‘hey, it’s time to focus,’ it may not. Warming up for working on an excel document may look different from preparing a written report. Find what works best for you but the point is the same: for sustained periods of focus you need time to warm up while your brain reorganizes its working memory.

Dedicate Time to Dedicated Focus

Hopefully you can control your schedule enough to dedicate time to specific tasks. Dedicate a set amount of time to focusing solely on one thing – preferably at the same time each day. Which part of the day are you most alert? That is the time that you should set aside for serious focus. Dedicating time – at the same time – each day will begin to shift your body’s ultradian rhythm; just as other behaviors and habits become routine to the point that the body expects them, you can do the same with focus.

To return to cutting out distractions, perhaps you cannot have your phone off all day, but you can certainly have it on do-not-disturb for one 90 minute session.

90 minutes isn’t just an example; studies have shown that it’s the upper limit for a single session of sustained cognitive activity. The amount of information that our working memory can process over a short period is capped by our individual biology, and 4 hours a day of genuine – intense, focus will leave most people exhausted. That said, there’s a strategy that can help you maintain sustained focus for longer periods:

Shorter Sessions, Real Breaks = Real Work

Pace yourself: break your day into shorter periods of real focus and productivity separated by substantive breaks to recharge. These blocks of dedicated focus do not have to be 90 minutes each, that’s the upper limit of one ultradian rhythm. 40 minutes of real work is going to be more productive than an hour of half focused work. The standard 9-5 is not the optimal formula for genuine productivity, after 90 minutes of real work the working memory needs about 10 to 20 minutes to recharge.

Vitally, your break has to include real disengagement from the task that you were working on. Stepping outside and thinking about the task you were working on doesn’t give the working memory the break it needs. Choose an activity that doesn’t require serious cognitive activity for ten minutes: perhaps you go for a short walk, you could grab lunch or chat with a coworker; maybe you run to the gym. The important part is that you give your prefrontal cortex and working memory time to recharge.

3 or 4 hours of real, genuine focus is a reasonable goal. Start where you are, progress gradually, and make sure to take the breaks both at a daily level (breaks between sessions) and to take days off. If you push yourself too hard without rest or serious disengagement, you’ll gradually become increasingly stressed from protein buildups in the brain and begin to experience burnout.

If you do this each day, you’ll begin to notice that you can focus for longer, and more easily, but you still need the breaks. Remember our working memory varies and is capped by our individual biology. If you reach your ceiling, give yourself a break. You’ll have earned it.

Cut Down on Your Priorities

Another strategy is to trim the number of items you dedicate your focus to, both on a macro level, and day by day. Moving from one task to another requires the working memory to readjust and expend energy, and it’s important that energy is well spent. First, what are your priorities? Ask yourself, how do you actually spend your time. A cognitive bias that human beings share is that we underestimate how long it takes do anything (nothing ever takes 5 minutes).

Here’s an exercise, keep track of your day and log your time like you’re a hot shot lawyer who bills by the hour. The results might surprise you. A day, a week, a month, how much of your time is spent focused on your priorities. Perhaps you are only able to control your personal priorities, but hopefully you have some amount of control over the number of priorities that crop up in the workplace.

Everyone is different so the number of things you are able to successfully prioritize will be unique to you, but so long as you’re dedicating serious focus to each of them, you’ll begin making progress.

Boredom

“Most people can’t handle boredom. That means they can’t stay on one thing until they get good at it. And they wonder why they’re unhappy” – Robert Greene

I’ve yet to meet someone who likes boredom, but paradoxically it is the secret not just for focus, but for productivity and creativity as well. It’s important to define what we mean by boredom: when the working memory is not attending to any tasks at all; we’re discussing biological boredom, not a zoom call that could have been an email.

While our working memory and prefrontal cortex are taking their break, different regions of our brain become active which are collectively called the Default Mode Network. While these regions of our brain are active our mind begins to wander and daydream; the brain begins releasing alpha waves, and the mind starts asking itself questions and making unprompted connections. It’s these unprompted thought patterns that are the source of creativity, and while the Default Mode Network is active our working memory and its ability to focus begins to recharge.

In our busy modern world we are discouraged from being bored or unproductive. Young students especially are told not to daydream, and most adults can’t handle prolonged periods of mind wandering. Their internal monologue starts asking questions like ‘why?’ and other existential questions which we’re conditioned to suppress.

There was a series of 11 experiments by the University of Virginia on mind wandering: Participants were asked to sit alone in a bland room for 15 minutes. Most participants responded that it was an unpleasant experience and that they had trouble concentrating. In the experiment’s final iteration, a button that administered an intense electric shock was added to the scenario. 67% of the male participants and 25% of the female participants shocked themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts. The research is still ongoing.[3]

In our day to day the easy distractions are all around us – you can look at your phone or listen to a podcast, but when you do so you are reactivating the working memory and it starts attending to the new information, which ruins the effect of giving yourself a break.

By being bored and allowing your mind to wander you are giving your working memory the break it needs so that you can have more periods of sustained focus throughout the day. Look at these stints of boredom as an opportunity to learn or practice new things, play a game, start drawing again. Furthermore, if the task or project you are taking a break from genuinely engages you, your mind wandering will probably lead to a new perspective or perhaps a breakthrough on the thing you were focusing on.

Make good sleep a priority

Each of the strategies and techniques we’ve covered so far are dependent on the number-one biological factorfor determining focus: sleep. Being able to sustain focus for an extended period is part of your overall biological system, which is to say that if you’re hungry or tired you will have increased difficulty focusing. The mind needs around 8 hours of good, quality sleep each night. This allows the brain to reset, the proteins responsible for stress get cleaned from the prefrontal cortex, our hormones rebalance, and the hippocampus processes the information from the previous day. Without serious rest the brain has less time to accomplish this nightly reset.

Here are some best practices:

1) Lower your stimulation level before its time for bed. Dim the lights about an hour before bed, avoid looking at your phone, the news, arguments with roommates, or television that increases your stimulation level. Some TV programs can be fine, if it is a re-run of sitcom or a peaceful nature documentary, the deciding factor is whether it increases your arousal level before bed (e.g. avoid content that upsets or angers you before bed, don’t watch the news).

2) Make the bedroom dedicated to sleep. The brain associates spaces with specific tasks, and just as it can be trained to associate a space with focusing, you can train your brain to reassociate the bedroom with actual rest. There are changes you can make to accomplish this: don’t have a television in the bedroom, we want to associate the bed with sleep, not watching television. Likewise, don’t take your phone or laptop with you to bed.

3) Following the same principle, if you can’t sleep after 20 minutes, get up, go to another room and read a book. Avoid reading in bed. Likewise, since we’re training ourselves to associate the bed with rest, if you can’t sleep you should get up. We don’t want the brain to associate the bed with any late-night anxious mind wandering.

4) Avoid alcohol and caffeine before bed. No vodka redbulls.

5) Have a cool room, wear socks. Each person has individual temperature preferences, but having a cool room makes falling asleep and staying asleep easier.

6) Take a warm shower before bed (warm here is subjective). Cold showers increase the amount of epinephrine in the brain and makes us more alert, which is what makes them helpful first thing in the morning, but we want the body’s temperature to warm up slightly before bed.

Combined with the cool room, and the other tips listed above, you’re on your way to a good night’s rest.

[1] Deepwork by Cal Newport

[2] Brooks, Harvard : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8&list=WL&index=60&t=10s&pp=gAQBiAQB

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mind-wandering#:~:text=It%20(%20Our%20mind%20)%20appears%20to,themselves%20with%20nothing%20to%20do%20but%20think.

https://as.virginia.edu/news/doing-something-better-doing-nothing-most-people-study-shows-0

[4] Cytowic, Big Think

Hubermann lab