How timely focus became all successful as my new addiction

I’ve been continuously thinking about change, progress and moving forward. One of the overarching methods I use is the creation of a system of ‘things’ or activities that inspire me and drive my quest for improved creativity, focus and well-being. I find the biggest challenge for me is that some of the ingredients of this system potentially become a little staid and eventually evolve into:

“why am I doing this?”

The habits, therefore, become less attractive, more infrequent and sometimes fall by the wayside. In short, the focus is lost.

To be honest, the only practice that has become a failsafe and constant ‘new’ habit is doing push-ups before my morning shower. This started with three push-ups (not too daunting), to achieving thirty push-ups in the as many days. The initial stage of three push-ups gave me the incentive to carry on. As they were relatively easy to perform, it gradually became progressively more comfortable to do more. I, therefore, increased the daily count and became better and more efficient by doing more push-ups each time and so on. I haven’t yet progressed beyond thirty push-ups, but going from 3 to thirty is a pretty good improvement especially for something I never really thought I would enjoy doing or benefit from. The very gradual increments (three, then five, then 8 then 10 etc.) allowed me to do them without very much effort, it was a no-brainer and therefore relatively easy perform and eventually improve upon. I find that the process isn’t really about increased ability but moreover to do with establishing some mental focus at the outset of my day — the increments and improvement are an added benefit. By concentrating on doing the push-ups every morning, it awakens my brain and kicks me into some early morning clarity of thought and focus, which I thrive on.

So I was scrabbling around trying to gather some mental energy to re-invigorate my quest for further habits that would be readily achievable, become ingrained and lead to steady and noticeable improvement, i.e. habits that would be as successful as the push-ups. Not to say that ‘easy’ means that I am averse to hard work. The ‘easy’ refers to something that isn’t hindered by the initial human thought of ‘I can’t be bothered, so I’ll skip it today’ — the initial ‘ease’ of doing it means it is more likely to develop into a daily habit. At the outset, the initial phase of ‘work’ for me is about finding the right thing to adopt and then progressing the activity to a point beyond it just being easy to achieve. This is where you begin to hone the idea and focus on improvement as opposed to just doing it. I then thought of one of the most impactful habits I created well over a decade ago. The habit was smoking (via the help of nicotine addiction). Granted, I didn’t attempt to cultivate this habit, and this is not the kind of practice that I am currently aspiring to. I was more drawn to thinking about the process of how I managed to stop smoking. With hindsight, it was a reasonably straightforward process. I didn’t use nicotine patches, hypnotherapy or acupuncture and managed to stop straight away. What provided this mental focus to succeed? There must have been a system in place.

This got me thinking about the mental processes involved in the breaking of old habits or indeed in the creation of new ones. The seemingly massive habitual change of going from smoker to ‘non-smoker’ at the time seemed out of the question. I was puffing away at least twenty cigarettes a day, it was part of me, and that was that. My brain convinced me that I enjoyed it, and I went along with it. Until one day out of the blue, I decided to stop.

Looking back at the process of stopping revealed a system that I casually adopted of dividing the day into a series of readily achievable goals. This was way before I had ever started thinking in detail about creativity, productivity or focused improvement. It also occurred to me that I had used a system for stopping smoking back then but hadn’t applied the process to any other part of my life. So I set about the task by divided my focus into ten minutes slots. I thought ten-minute chunks were do-able and less daunting than looking at the big black hole of jittery withdrawal symptoms — I even found the thought of going one hour without a cigarette to be a little intimidating. I objectively spent each ten-minute period focussed on not smoking. This was preferable over spending the same ten minutes looking towards my next fag break, which would lead to the next and so on.

I was indeed living in the moment and focusing on nothing else. I was actively thinking about not reaching for a cigarette and began to quite enjoy the ten-minute ‘struggle’. The amount of energy and focus it took not to smoke now seems admirable. At the time it felt good as I could almost feel my brain physically re-wiring itself. The nicotine-free neural pathways gave me a mental buzz — or it may just have been psychological delirium. Either way, I felt a chemical and almost visceral change. Incidentally, I had a packet of 100 duty-free cigarettes in the drawer from a recent trip, so it was doubly challenging and rewarding not to reach for a fresh pack of twenty.

There were various challenges to overcome without a cigarette in hand, such as the first coffee of the day without a cloud of smoke. Initially quite tough, but I then realised my taste buds were coming back from a terminal slumber — super bonus. Days spent at the studio were much more comfortable as I was occupied with work, even when moments of stress kicked in I still managed to focus on those ten-minute slots which instead of a fag break would involve going for a walk. The ten minutes slots progressed to thirty minutes, then one hour, then half a day — and it would all start again the next morning — I actually loved the challenge. The new habit of not smoking soon became ingrained, and that was that.

I’m not entirely sure what focussed me on wanting to stop — although I had recently met the woman of my dreams so maybe that had something to do with it. She didn’t actually don’t mind me smoking, I suppose my tobacco infused clothes and increasingly yellowing teeth were not as prominent as I feared. So on it went, the first ten minutes was relatively easy, the next less so and so on until it became a zero effort non-habit. Although this seemed like a mammoth task at the time the more I continued (and succeeded) the more I was inspired to go through the process. The benefits of stopping are obvious but can probably be matched by the learning that I can achieve by using this as a model for creating ‘good’ habits. I obviously didn’t think about that at the time, but that incredibly bad habit may have some long-term benefits (as well as the unthinkable long-term ill effects) of at least teaching me that if you are focused and driven to do something, it can be achieved in a relatively painless way. I’m not urging anyone to start smoking so they can learn something about their mental conditioning — but I’m happy to share my less than scientific case study with anyone that might find it interesting.

This was like a personal quest to see if I was capable of doing something I had never envisaged being possible. The ten minutes at a time scenario was working like a dream — as soon as a ten-minute period was up, I relished conquering the next ten-minute chunk. To cut a long story short, I stopped for good that day and have never craved nicotine or indeed smoked anything since — has a packet of twenty cigarettes reached the £10 mark yet?!

The focus needed to stop was the driving force in making the process a success. Without this focus, it was guaranteed to fail. Looking back I think my motivation at the time evolved like this:

1. The challenge of achieving something I initially thought impossible.
2. The Incentive of being free of such a bad habit.
3. I’ve come too far to stop the process (I thought this even after 30 minutes) and was inspired by each ten-minute milestone to do the next ten minutes, then thirty etc.
4. The sense of elation every morning knowing I had ticked off another day.

So to boil everything down to the essential ingredients;

1. Incentive — to succeed
2. 2. Reward — success

This is such a simple way of achieving an improved focus. In being able to use this experience, I have provided myself with further insight and focus on how to attain life-long positive change through creative and enriching habits. There is nothing more inspiring or rewarding than moving towards the next level of learning.

Just ten minutes of focus at a time will suffice — at least at the very beginning.