How to get your brain focus?

A few years ago, I began to observe something in my own behavior that made me a bit uncomfortable. Thar was from the moment I woke up to the end of the day, my life was series of screens. I started the day with the thing that woke up me that is my phone and so I sat there in the bed watching videos on Instagram and bouncing around between the bunch of applications.

But then it was time to get up from the bed and cook breakfast, then I focused on the iPad which was kept beside the oven  and then it was time for some work then I focused on a different screen that is my laptop. But there was one particular offender out of all of these different devices that I wasted more time than anything else. That was this dastardly thing: my phone.

I could spend hours on this thing every single day. So, I decided to essentially, for all intents and purposes, get rid of the thing for a month. As an experiment I thought " I'm going to live on this thing for just 30 minutes every single day at a maximum." 

Then, I observed what happened during this time. It took about a week to adjust downward into a new, lower level of  stimulation, but once I did, I noticed that three curious things began to happen.

1. My attention span grew. I was like I could focus on things, not effortlessly, but with much more ease than I could before this experiment started.
2. In addition to this, I had more ideas that arrived at my mind, and on top of this.
3.  I had more plans and thoughts about the future.

Getting rid of one simple device led to these three effects. WHY? Noticing this a few years back led me on this long journey to get to the bottom of what it takes to focus in a world of distraction. I pored over hundreds of research papers from front to back at my office. I flew out to meet experts around the world who study focus; I conducted more experiments on my self.

How does technology influence our attention and our ability to focus? I want to start with the attention span that we have. This is how we pay attention with world around us and how much control we have over our focus. 

The research around this particular area is fascinating. It turns out that when we do work in front of a computer, especially when our phone is nearby, we focus on one thing for just 40 seconds before we switch to doing something else, But the reason this is the case is not what we might think after looking after research.

We think that the problem is that our brains are distracted. But after looking at the research, this is what I came to know as a symptom for the deeper problem, which run much more deeper as the root cause  of this distraction.

It's not that we are distracted; it's that our brains are overstimulated. It's that we crave distraction in the first place. Our brains love these tiny little nuggets of social media and email and things that we do over the course of the day.

There's even a mechanism in our mind called the 'novelty bias', by which our mind rewards us with a hit of dopamine, one of those wonderful pleasure chemicals, the same one we get when we eat and order a whole medium pizza from Domino's. We get the same stimulation when we check Facebook. So, our mind is craving distraction at the first place.

What I think, after doing this deep dive into the research, we need to make two fundamental shifts with regard to how we think about our attention.

1. We think that we need to fit more in. We don't need to fit more in. We are doing enough; we are doing too much. We are doing so much that our mind never wanders anymore, It's sad. This is when our best ideas and plans come to us. We need more space.
2. We like to think distractions as the enemy of focus. It is not. It is a symptom of why we find it difficult to focus, which is the fact that over mind is overstimulated. 

So to be more focused in life or to be more focused on a particular thing you are doing you should have more space and do not get your mind overstimulated.

If in case above measures are not useful for you, I have something else for you. A book by Chris Bailey named as 

"Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More Paperback" read this book and you will absolutely find change in yourself. If you want to buy this book in discounted price click shop now below.