Pay Attention: Dramatically Increase Your Focus In 5 Easy Ways

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.” – Zig Ziglar

Achieving great things in your life is all dependent on your power of attention.

Whether it be building a business, succeeding in school, devoting your life to spirituality, or anything else – you need to utilize this power of attention.

As ways to compensate for lack of this attentive power, people do things like:

• Pull an “all nighter”
• Drink tons of coffee
• Take stimulants and amphetamines

Luckily, there’s a better way to increase your ability to maintain sustained attention in a more natural and healthy way without having to rely on harmful substances or wreck your health, so you can increase your productivity.

In this article you’re going to learn:

• The true meaning of sustained attention and how it relates to awareness
• How to increase your power of attention and mental focus
• An actionable path to increasing your power of attention

What is the Power of Attention?

The power of attention is the ability to direct mental focus and the various parts of the mind and brain to accomplish things and solve problems as quickly as possible.

People think “focus” is just the ability to concentrate or sustain attention, but a good level of mental focus means you know what needs to be done and you do it without hesitation or stops and starts.

The power of attention is broken down into:

• Clarity – the ability to understand the task in front of you
• Speed – the ability to complete a part of the task in good timing
• Fluidity – the ability to connect the pieces of a larger, more complex task

Let’s use an example of remodeling a house. The builders, contractors, and other people need to direct their attention to the overall task of remodeling a house and every other subtask involved in it.

Clarity in this case would be the knowledge of knowing what goes where, how everything fits, and how it will look like as an end product.

Speed is the ability to complete smaller parts of the task quickly and well, such as finishing one room of the house and moving to the next.

Fluidity is the ability to cycle through different parts of the task without getting “mentally jammed”.

A novice at home remodeling will not be able to direct their power of attention because they literally don’t know the next step.

They haven’t developed the clarity, speed, or fluidity needed to create high degrees of skill and focus at that task.

Why Should I Care About Developing Sustained Attention?

Consciousness (aka awareness) exists everywhere and is being filtered through your brain and mind.

Concentration is the act of focusing this awareness.

When you concentrate, you are using your power of attention and general awareness to amplify a certain stimuli and turn down the volume on others.

Ordinarily, you don’t think about how your toes feel on your foot. Or the Ivory Coast (unless you live there).

But after reading this, those things are now top-of-mind. You are bringing them to the light of your conscious awareness.

The thing is, most things in life remain “shrouded in darkness” to many of us, most of the time.

It’s a myth that human beings can split their attention.

This is why you can’t text and drive at the same time without eventual disaster.

Nor can you watch TV and study for a test at the same time, unless you don’t want to absorb anything.

Me, writing this: I’m not listening to music, I’m not watching TV, I am focusing on completing this.

This is the only thing that exists in my conscious awareness as of right now. Everything else is is in darkness.

Multitasking creates a drag on task completion by introducing friction.

Friction is what happens when you switch tasks.

After constant interruptions, task that should have taken 15 minutes take 1 hour due to constant attention shifting.

Add this up over the course of a day and you can easily see why many people aren’t productive.

Over time, this takes a sledgehammer to your ability to focus.

If you don’t know how to direct your innate power of attention and aim it at a certain task or objective, achieving your dream life will be impossible.

How to Improve Your Power of Attention to Achieve Goals

The act of improving your power of attention are two separate yet intertwined processes.

To improve your mental focus, you need to…focus on improving your ability to mentally grasp things.

The following things are a non-exhaustive list of ways on how you can sharpen your power of attention.

1. Strengthen Your Prefrontal Cortex

The ability to concentrate calls a number of neurological forces into play, but the main player is your prefrontal cortex, which gives rise to your working memory.

Working memory is a neurological function that allows you to store short-term information and organize it into logical pieces.

If you do something repeatedly over and over again, it will be pushed to long-term memory, which lead to habits and learning new material.

However, for a lot of people, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as well as it should.

There’s many reasons for this such as lack of training (which I’ll touch on soon), a physical disability, or many other factors.

But for many people it comes down to poor sleep, poor diet, and even addictive behaviors.

The last one is interesting because several studies have shown that addiction leads to decreased prefrontal cortex activity.

So stopping bad behaviors that lead to instant gratification is one part. The other part is training it.

2. Purposeful Training

Your prefrontal cortex is a muscle and responds to training and efforts to increase its effectiveness.

You can do this in several ways, but the thing you want to be concerned with is doing more with it over time.

I personally do this through meditation and deep work.

Meditation

“Zen training is a means of enabling us to live our ordinary lives supremely well.” – Katsuki Sekida, Zen Training

Meditation is the act of strengthening your ability to concentrate.

Here’s the deal though: most people don’t meditate.

We live in a culture that thrives on distraction. Regardless, even small amounts of meditation have a great impact.

Deep Work

“What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.” – Cal Newport, Deep Work

Deep work is the act of focusing on a relatively challenging cognitive task.

It’s designed to push you to your cognitive limits to produce high quality work.

Deep work is a skill that’s becoming more rare in our modern society due to many factors.

At the beginning, your capacity and capability for deep work is very…shallow, but over time it can increase.

If you want more information on how to do deep work, check out The Complete Guide to Mastering the Vital Skill of Deep Work.

3. Diet and Supplementation

Increasing focus and concentration is not only about what you do, but also what you eat.

Your brain is a greedy organ. It consumes about 20% of the calories you put into your body.

The best diet to increase brain power is one that is dense in macronutrients such as a diet high in protein, complex carbohydrates and some saturated fat.

This will provide your brain the energy it needs to maintain high levels of focus, concentration and energy.

Some really notable foods for boosting focus and concentration are:

• Eggs
• Salmon
• Avocados
• Blueberries
• Blueberries
• Brown Rice
• Coconut Oil
• Dark Chocolate
• Whole Grain Bread
• Nuts of various kinds

A lot of people are lacking a lot of the building blocks that the brain uses to function effectively, mainly because it is a lot harder today to eat a nutrient-rich diet.

In order to re-optimize the brain and make sure it’s working effectively, you can take certain supplements.

Some of these are:

• L-tyrosine
• L-theanine
• Ashwagandha
• Bacopa monnieri
• Vitamin B complexes

These supplements will naturally provide the micronutrient building blocks your brain needs to synthesize information, create new brain cells, and improve your focus and concentration.

Please consult with a medical professional and/or nutritionist before overhauling your diet or taking suggestions like these.

This is not a substitute for qualified medical advice.

4. Getting Sleep

“When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it is deficient, they don’t.” – Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep

Lack of sleep will not help you in any way, especially when it comes to focus.

The body naturally follows a 24-hour sleep/wake cycle called the circadian rhythm. This rhythm is influenced by meal times and natural light.

In our modern world, both of these are affected in a negative way. It’s been estimated that 1 in 3 (!) adults don’t get the sleep they need. This may be due to bad sleep habits, a destructive disorder like sleep apnea, or shift work (trust me, I’ve been there).

The best way to positively influence the circadian rhythm is to:

• Don’t stay up unnecessarily late
• Eat at around the same time per day
• Go to bed at around the same time per day
• Reduce blue light screen exposure late at night

5. Get Rid of Addiction to Social Media Platforms

“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” – Nicholas Carr, The Shallows

The inherently addictive nature of social media and related platforms make it a prime enemy to focus.

I encountered this problem many years ago when I realized that my overall ability to concentrate on tasks was decreasing.

I couldn’t even read a book for more than 5 minutes until my eyes started to glaze over.

Platforms that have a “notification” at the top of a screen plays on the human desire for novelty, expectation, and anticipation.

This creates a mental “itch” to check the notification out of curiosity. What you are doing is training your brain for lack of focus.

There’s also another reason: remember that “task switching penalty” I mentioned earlier? It comes into full effect here.

Since many people multitask and look at their phones simultaneously, they are not only training their brain to be stimulated by short term rewards, but they are fragmenting their focus as well.

The overall effect of both of these can turn even a Nobel Laureate into a mental ball of sludge very quickly.

You need to curtail and control your Internet use or else it will take over the rest of your life.

To learn more about how to manage your time (and as a result, your Internet use), check out How to Structure Your Time Management Using the Tower Technique.

The Path to Sustaining Your Power of Attention and Increasing Mental Focus

If you want to get onto the road to smashing tasks, getting more out of your day, and destroying “bottlenecks”, you have to have sustained focus.

Here’s some action steps for you to cultivate this focus:

1. Start with 5 minutes of meditation a day, then increase – Meditation is hard at first. Start small, then, build up to longer time periods.
2. Get off your smartphone– Every time you interrupt yourself with a bunch of different “blips”, you destroy your ability to have sustained focus. Put your cellphone in airplane mode and put it away. Or – turn it off.
3. Eliminate or drastically reduce social media use – Has your life drastically improved by spending hours on Facebook? I doubt it. Cut off all social media use or reduce your time on it dramatically.
4. Train your mind for deep, rather than shallow – If you spend a lot of time messing around on the Internet, social media, and your cellphone – you’ll just find it difficult to dig deep and concentrate. Instead, focus on activities that require concentration. Reading, writing, learning a musical instrument are some examples.
5. Develop a desire for mastery – Having a subject you’re passionate about will compel you to develop sustained focus. Maybe you’ve hit a stumbling block in some area and you want to overcome it. Maybe you want to be the best in your area of specialization. Whatever it may be, having something that inspires you to learn more about it will give you the mental strength you need to go deep.
6. Take care of your body – Think of your body as a machine. If that machine is broken down and isn’t working, you’ll make it that much harder to actually increase your focus and concentration.

Now, I want to hear from you. What methods are you using to increase your overall levels of focus and concentration?