How to Get Your Brain to Focus

I began to observe something in my own behavior that made me a bit uncomfortable. And that was that from the moment that I woke up to the end of the day, my life was a series of screens. I started the day with the thing that woke me up first thing in the morning, my phone, and so I sat the

 We're at this hyperstimulated state where we bounce around between these bunch of different objects of attention that are very, very stimulating for our mind. And so I thought, "Okay, if the phone had this impact on my attention span, what if I lowered how stimulated I was even more, still?" And so, you know, this feeling that we experience when we go from being in a state of high stimulation into a state of low stimulation, it has a name. That name is called "boredom," (Laughs) you know, this restlessness that we feel when we have this super busy week and then we're lying on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, thinking, "Alright, well, what am I doing now?" So, I put out a call to the readers of my website and I asked them, "What is the most boring thing that you can think of doing? I'm going to make myself bored for an hour a day, for a month."

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And so I did some stuff that I still am upset about from my readers, to this day. Day one, I read the iTunes terms and conditions for one hour. (Laughter) It's actually shorter and more readable than you might think. Day four, I waited on hold with Air Canada's baggage claims department. It's very easy - This is the trick: if you want to make yourself bored, don't call the reservations department, call the baggage claim people because you're going to wait hours, if you ever get through at all. Day 19, I counted all the zeroes that I could in the first 10,000 digits of pi. Ugh. Day 24, I watched a clock tick, tick for one hour. And 27 other activities this month. Jeez. I still think back. But curiously, I noticed the exact same effects as I did during the smartphone experiment. It took about a week for my mind to adjust downward into a newer, lower level of stimulation, and this maps, curiously, on top of research that shows that it takes our mind about eight days to fully calm down and rest, like when we're on vacation, as an example. Our vacations need to be longer than they are today.

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 But I also noticed that my attention span expanded. I was able to focus even more effortlessly because I wasn't surrounded by fewer distractions, but my mind was so much less stimulated that it did not seek the distraction in the first place. But the fun part were these ideas and plans that struck me that didn't before, and the reason that this is the case is because my mind had a chance to wander more often. There's a great quote that I love that you might be familiar with from J. R. R. Tolkien, where he says that "not all those who wander are lost," and the exact same thing is true, it turns out, with regard to our focus, with regard to our attention. If you think back to when your best, most brilliant ideas strike you, you're rarely focused on something.


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