3 Little-Known Tricks That Helped Me Build Limitless Focus In a Society Afflicted with Short Attention Spans
Why Deleting All Social Media And Installing a Pomodoro App is Not Enough
In a time overflowing with shiny dopamine triggers, both on screens and in reality, our attention spans have been cut short and our focus, stolen.
Everyone understands the importance of being able to tap into the flow state at will, so you download a minimalist launcher, remove all social media (except Medium of course), and give a crack to the good ol’ Pomodoro technique.
But it is not so simple. Since the advent of newspapers, people have been vying for your attention. You cannot win the fight overnight.
Yet these 3 tricks make that fight a lot easier for me:
#1 Micro-Meditation
We all know how important meditation is for mental clarity.
I had always struggled with maintaining a meditation routine for more than a week or two until I learned this technique.
You don’t have to sit for 10, to 20 minutes in a cross-legged position with your eyes closed to meditate. The purpose of meditation is to be mindful. Mindful of where you are, what you are doing, and what you are feeling, in the present. You shut out the past and the future, as well as the outside world and be mindful of yourself.
That involves focusing on your breath and your bodily sensations and not attaching yourself to your thoughts which are ever-changing.
Well, I can do that while walking too!
So now, instead of meditating at a specified time for a specified period, I meditate multiple times a day whenever I feel like and wherever I feel like for just 2–3 minutes. If I feel like it, I do more. If not, that’s fine too.
Micro-meditations have changed my life.
#2 Be Bored
With constant stimulus at our fingertips, we’ve forgotten what being bored feels like. But boredom is necessary to recharge your brain and clear the mental fog that overstimulation brings.
When you’re waiting for your order, walking to a bus stop, or standing in line, instead of reaching for your phone for a quick dopamine hit, be present in the moment. This ties together with #1. Maybe get into a micro meditation.
Great ideas come when you let your mind be idle.
The constant bombardment of engaging activities dulls your brain, making it incapable of thinking clearly. Too much pleasure fogs the brain.
#3 Task Sculpting
When taking on something new or difficult, it can be daunting to see the mountain of work ahead of us. But one mindset shift has helped me cope with this very easily.
All that matters is what you do today.
Break the mountain into steps you can take to reach the summit. Each day take one step. That’s all you have to focus on. Not how far you have still to go, not even how far up you have come. Just keep your focus on the current step and you will have reached the summit before you realize.
Thinking like that takes a huge load off my back. All you have to do is show up. Showing up is half the battle.
Establish a routine by sticking to showing up every day for 30 days and you’ll see how easy limitless focus actually is!
Only Legends Read Till the End! You Deserve an Amazing Ebook for Free :)
In this age of digital noise, never have there been more people telling us who we should be.
But it’s never been easier to become who you want to become.
And it all starts with honing your mind. A mind that is able to solve problems is necessary to reimagine your life and reinvent it any way you want.
If you want to level up your thinking and learn to use mental models to evolve into an independent thinker, grab a free copy of my ebook and never look back.
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