How to Improve your focus and concentration
Completing an important task can be very difficult if you’re struggling with lack of focus
Neuro Athletes,
Happy New Year! I hope this one is your best yet! Many of you have been reading my newsletter for over a year now and it brings me so much joy to write. If you love this and have any suggestions or questions, please put it in the comments section so I can schedule them!
How many times have you found yourself sitting in front of a computer screen and struggling to comprehend what you just read?
Then keep reading the same paragraphs, but the words seem to blur together and make no sense.
It’s a difficult situation, right?
You become helpless, frustrated, and anxious.
Completing that task is very important to you but there seems to be no way of doing that.
This is what people have been facing. Some days are good for them but other days their brain is kinda blocked.
Let’s discuss some potential causes of these situations:
Lack of Sleep: It can make you tired and that will affect your ability to concentrate.
Lack of Physical Activity: less oxygen that circulates the brain and also, what we know so far from reading this newsletter is that exercise grows the brain, especially in the focus area generators (prefrontal cortex).
Distractions: distractions such as noise, clutter, or other external factors can interfere with your ability to focus.
There can be other factors, too. Like, medications or a health conditions like depression, ADHD, or anxiety.
If you are struggling with lack of focus, it is extremely important to identify the underlying cause.
Because after identifying it, you can work on solutions.
Once you identified the cause, here are some solutions you can implement to help you with better focus and concentration:
Make space
To solve hard problems, the brain needs ready access to the information, plans, procedures and knowledge it will be using. Cognitive scientists refer to this collective task knowledge as a task set. However, the task set is not always immediately available: we can’t hold it all active in our limited mental workspace, or ‘working memory’, all the time.
Minimize distraction and never multitask
When we do two or more tasks at once, either at the same time or switching between them, our performance efficiency and quality will suffer. This happens partly because the tasks use shared cognitive resources, such as working memory. As a result, they will compete for that shared resource and interfere with one another. When doing a hard task, it is important to minimize this interference from multi-tasking.
Neuro athletes, when you master your focus you can improve your cognition and cognitive capacity over the lifespan.
Remember the basics, implement the above and keep pushing forward.
Until next time,
-Louisa 🧠