The Number One Way to Improve Mental Speed and Focus
It’s easier than you think.
Virtually every single person on earth wishes they were more productive. We all want to get more done, and we’ve all tried using many different methods to improve our focus.
There’s meditation and the pomodoro technique; the 2-minute rule and Feng Shui. Some people micro-dose recreational drugs and some swear by cold showers in the morning.
Most of these are great methods, don’t get me wrong. But if you’ve tried any of them, you probably found yourself quickly slipping back into the same lazy habits that were bothering you in the first place.
Like a caffeinated coffee early on a tired morning, these methods often give us a quick burst of short-lived inspiration but fail to produce any long-lasting changes in our behaviour.
Why?
Because the problem isn’t that you’re not meditating enough. It isn’t that your shower is too hot. And, believe it or not, it isn’t that you’re not taking enough LSD.
Chances are, it’s your mobile phone.
Why Our Phone Usage is a Problem
Scrolling through our social media feeds day-in and day-out might seem like a completely harmless task.
Smartphones are everywhere, and everybody’s using them excessively without harm — so why shouldn’t we?
Well, firstly, those few minutes of checking Instagram stories soon add up.
US adults will spend an average of 3 hours, 35 minutes per day on mobile devices in 2018, an annual increase of more than 11 minutes
Three and a half hours is a crazy amount of time to be spent doing, well, nothing.
But it isn’t just our time that’s being sapped — our attention span and mental performance are suffering, too.
Our brains get so used to watching short, snappy videos on Facebook and Twitter that when we attempt to tackle a large task like reading a book or writing an essay, we just can’t concentrate.
Rewiring Our Neural Circuitry
The good news? Our brains are plastic. That is — they’re constantly growing and changing, adapting to new environments.
In fact, each and every time you build a habit or learn something new, your brain updates its circuitry. Tiny cells called neurons link up to one another, forming cognitive highways that allow particular signals to travel faster.
Thanks to this mechanism, an experienced driver can make it from A to B without having to focus intently on changing to the right gears or checking their mirrors.
This is great because it means that reversing our habits is as simple as replacing them with different actions and then performing those new actions more often than our bad habits.
Overtime, those counterproductive habits fade away in place of healthier ones.
The solution is as simple as it is initially uncomfortable.
When the urge arises, instead of cycling through pointless 5-second Instagram videos and digesting mindless Facebook content about things you don’t even care about, do something else. Something productive.
Remind yourself that your long-term happiness means more to you than short-term pleasure.
And, the more you do that, the better your mind will be able to focus on those things that matter most.
Read a book, exercise, cook a meal— you can even stay on your phone as long as you’re using it to do something worthwhile.
Overtime, your mind will reprogram itself. You’ll stop relying upon the immediate satisfaction of your phone for happiness and take great pleasure in prioritising those long-term goals you actually care about.
What seems like a small, harmless habit is probably causing you far more misery than you realise.
So stop it.
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