“Flow” is a psychological term of your mental condition that you immerse yourself into something earnestly. There is a research findings that the longer hours people soak themselves into something, the happier they will feel. I will explain 13 ways you can make a condition to concentrate on something.
1, Stimulate your nucleus accumbens with your action.
Nucleus accumbens are nerve cells in the brain that has a function of secreting the brain’s pleasure chemical, “dopamine”. Sitting still for long hours enables nobody to keep their motivation or concentration so you need to always give a flesh stimulation to your brain. For that reason, you should be conscious of stimulating your brain before doing something that you need to concentrate on like doing your job at the place where is your first place to do or challenging new games.
2, Set your clear goal
The size of goal and distance to goal is quite depending on the person who wants to achieve it but at any rate, what you must do before doing something is to set your clear goal which you think it probably easy to achieve.
The most important thing you need to be conscious of is that you need to set your goal from two aspects which is time limit and the progress on your work.
For example, writers or novelists set their goal to finish writing 5 pages for the day and time limit to sit at the desk for 4 hours. Thinking this way, if there is a day that you can’t finish writing 5 pages, you can convince yourself of accomplishing today’s goal because you stay at the desk for at least 4 hours. This is really compromising attitude but easy to get a sense of accomplishment and remain your motivation.
3, Be couscous of selection and concentration
What people can do on the day is really few and what people can concentrate in that is further limited. You must recognize this and focus on strengthening your concentration to few things you can do for the day. This is something of an exaggeration, but one of the best way you can concentrate on few things is to give up and throw away others which is difficult for you to achieve.
4, Record the access to your deep absorption
Every people has an experience of being absorbed into something. Try to recall your mental condition when you were absorbed and record the happening that triggered you to access your deep absorption for example, the time slot when you started concentrating, whether the place where you concentrated was quiet or noisy and something like that. If you know the entrance to access your deep absorption, you can create and maintain this condition for yourself.
5, Record logs of 3 stages of you condition. “ possible to concentrate”, normal, impossible to concentrate”
Record 3 logs when you concentrated very much, you concentrated normally, you couldn’t concentrate at all. In doing so, you can grab the time of concentration. What I want you to remember is that people who have constant daily rhythm of sleeping, rising and having meals have tendency to find the timing of concentration easily. So organizing your life rhythm is very important thing to win the condition of concentration.
6, Give gaming element to what you are doing
People tend to concentrate on something which gives a rapid feedback to what they have done so we tend to concentrate on gaming. Try to tackle with things to require the speed of solution and its effectiveness as much as possible for example, update your finishing time of the routine task as often as you do it.
7,Focus on appropriate difficulty
I will get bored in doing something too easy but I will probably give up something too difficult. Appropriate difficulty is in the condition where things you know are 50% and things you don’t know are 50%. This is the psychological law advocated by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky.
8, Put youself in controllable conidtion.
People can’t immerse themselves into something without the feeling that they can control the situation they are in by themselves. If you are controlled by someone, your sense of duty becomes stronger and you get bored very soon. Of course, it is difficult for people working for companies to control everything but there is something you can control within the range of your ability and your authority.
For example, shorten the delivery deadline by your judgement than that which is required to meet. The important thing is not to do what you are told naturally but to find your original way with your creativity.
9, Take delight in your activity
“I can’t keep my motivation with only rewards of promotion. I am likely to give up doing my job and study unless these are enjoyable” The easiest question to make you answer this kind of worries is this. “Would you like to continue doing the present job and study independently if the same amount of money you earn now is automatically transferred into your bank account without doing anything?”
You might be the person who hate clerical work but like planning but you should make an effort to make environment that you can do only what you like to do with selection and concentration.
10, Exclude interruption
It is essential for “flow” to exclude any factors of interrupting your concentration thoroughly. There are many cases that people interrupt their concentration because of their phone’s ringing and there must be other factors than this. How we can avoid this interruption is to record the moments when your concentration is interrupted and make its list and create the environment which suits you to concentrate by erasing every possible interruptions from the list. From the start, you must switch off your mobile phone while you are in “flow”.
11, Grasp the chance of “2 hours” in the morning which enables you to make the highest concentration on the day.
The frontal lobes control your concentration. The power of controlling your thoughts and emotions by using this frontal lobes is called “will power” and the time the frontal lobes work actively is at the right moment you wake up in the morning. A neuroscientist says one hours in the morning is comparable to 3 hours in the night. This is why most of successful CEOs wake up early.
Anyway, you should make a big decision in the morning. After that, you should move on to simple tasks like study and routine work. I would say it is pretty difficult to work effectively with the advantage of your concentration. If you cannot make time in the morning, taking a nap for 15 minutes provides you equivalent effect.
12 Grasp the chance of 30 minutes to 3 hours after doing exercise.
I said stimulating nucleus accumbens enhance your concentration but it is also easier to put you into “flow” from 30 minutes to 3 hours after doing exercise. Don’t miss it.
13, Do nothing at night
Unless you have unique brain system, it is impossible to make any expectable results. Give it up and go to bed. Decide to do nothing at night.
