Category: Attention

Even the best of us get distracted, so find out how to focus better and increase attention on whatever you choose.

Learning how to focus is vital in a world of constant distractions.

To achieve anything is life, you must be able to focus.

Unfortunately, people who are highly creative are also very easily distracted.

One of the most famous examples was the French writer Marcel Proust, who lined the bedroom where he wrote with cork and used ear-stoppers to help him concentrate.

So, if you find it hard to learn how to focus you are in good company, don’t worry.

Try these science-backed steps for a laser-like mental focus:

1. Choose only one thing to do

Our conscious attention is not really designed for doing more than one thing at a time.

First and foremost, then: choose just one thing to do.

This is easy to say, harder to follow through on.

Often there is a larger task which is chunked down into smaller tasks.

When one task is tricky or you get stuck, it’s easy for attention to slide off to something else.

Keep floating from one half-finished task to another, though, and nothing ever gets finished.

Pick one task or sub-task and stick to it until it’s either done or you’ve decided it really can’t be done now.

2. Concentrate on your best time of day

People are best at how to focus at different times of the day.

For a lot of people it’s the morning, for others it’s the afternoon or evening.

Whenever you feel most focused — or are least likely to be distracted — use that time for tasks that require the focus.

3. Short breathing exercise

Breathing exercises can you teach you how to focus.

Before you start work, do a little breathing exercise.

This is enough to refocus the minds of highly distracted people, research finds.

Heavy media multitaskers benefited most from simply counting their breaths.

Simply count groups of nine breaths: nine inhales and nine exhales.

A few minutes of this will do.

4. How to focus: mindfulness

Everyone gets distracted while they are trying to focus.

It’s normal and it’s better to see it as inevitable when you get distracted.

While working away at your task, try to bring the mind gently back to what you are doing.

Don’t chide yourself or get down when the focus slips.

Just note the distraction and nudge the mind back to where it is supposed to be.

5. Brief diversion

Attention gets tired over time — it happens to everyone.

After 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour or whatever, the mind starts to fatigue.

It is much better to take a short break when this happens rather than just ploughing on.

Studies show that when people take a short break they return with renewed vigour.

It only needs to be 5 minutes, or whatever works for you.

6. Take a walk, appreciate nature & doodling

Walks work wonderfully as a break from trying to focus.

Often, though, a walk is out of the question.

If so, why not try doodling on a piece of paper.

Doodling helps the mind relax because it is a ‘pointless’ task.

At the very least, try the short breathing exercise again (number 3).

Can’t manage that?

Even just looking at a picture of nature can help your attention.

Try resetting your desktop background.

7. Refocus

After a break, it’s time to refocus.

If you are finding this difficult, then use the mindfulness strategy again.

Gently nudge your mind towards what it is supposed to be doing.

Remember to be nice to yourself!

8. How to focus: self-check

It’s easy to get distracted without really noticing that you’re distracted…

…because…well…you’re distracted…

However, learning to periodically self-check can improve attention and help people focus better on tasks, research finds.

The study’s authors write that attentional lapses occur because:

“…humans do not adequately monitor how well they are attending from moment to moment.

Lapses emerge gradually and may be detected too late, after the chain of events that produces behavioral errors has been initiated.”

9. Adjust the task if you lose focus

Still losing focus?

Try adjusting the task.

Tasks that are either too easy or too hard cause us to mentally check out.

Can you set yourself a time-limit for easy tasks to make them harder?

Can you chunk down a difficult task to make it easier?

Adjust them so the challenge is in the sweet-spot: not too easy, not too hard.

Tasks that fit our skills but push us a bit are easier to enjoy: and so it’s easier to focus.

10. How to focus: listen to your body and mind

If the body or the mind start to ache, give it a break.

There’s a limit to how much we can get done.

When the head starts to hurt, the body to complain, then that’s the sign that it’s time to stop.

There’s no point pushing on and doing bad work.

Give it a rest until later, or until tomorrow.

Dodgy work is a waste of time — go and do something fun instead!

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What multitasking does to your brain and the emotions.

Multitasking mostly makes people feel sad and fearful, new research finds.

Juggling emails, reports and other activities creates a tense working environment.

In contrast, people who have a relatively uninterrupted period to work find it easier to maintain a neutral emotional state.

The study suggests that allowing emails to continually interrupt is linked to negative emotions, even anger.

A previous study has shown that changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity and may reduce productivity by up to 40%,

Multitasking could even shrink the brain.

Dr Ioannis Pavlidis, study co-author, said:

“Not only do people experience stress with multitasking, but their faces may also express unpleasant emotions and that can have negative consequences for the entire office culture.”

The study analysed the facial expressions of 26 knowledge workers as they tried to write an essay.

Half received interrupting emails they had to respond to during the task.

The other half received all the emails in one batch so they were not interrupted while writing the essay.

The results showed that those who were continually interrupted displayed facial expression of sadness and fear.

Those who remained mostly uninterrupted maintained a neutral expression throughout.

Dr Pavlidis said:

“Individuals who engaged in multitasking appeared significantly sadder than those who did not.

Interestingly, sadness tended to mix with a touch of fear in the multitasking cohort.

Multitasking imposes an onerous mental load and is associated with elevated stress, which appears to trigger the displayed sadness.

The simultaneous onset of fear is intriguing and is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption.”

In the office, where a room full of people are all suffering (and causing) the same interruptions, the sadness and fear can spread like wildfire.

Dr Pavlidis said:

“Emotional contagion can spread in a group or workplace through the influence of conscious or unconscious processes involving emotional states or physiological responses.”

Many people are working from home during the pandemic, noted Dr Pavlidis:

“Currently, an intriguing question is what the emotional effect of multitasking at home would be, where knowledge workers moved their operation during the COVID 19 pandemic.”

The study was published in the Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Blank et al., 2020).

Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.

Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.

For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control (Loh & Kanai, 2014).

Multitasking might include listening to music while playing a video game or watching TV while making a phone call or even reading the newspaper with the TV on.

Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author, said:

“Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being.

Our study was the first to reveal links between media multitasking and brain structure.”

The study used scans of people’s brains along with a questionnaire about their use of media devices, newspapers and television.

People who multitasked more across different media had lower gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC: indicated by white dots in the image above).

This part of the brain, which lies towards the front, is mostly involved in aspects of cognitive and emotional control: things like empathy, decision-making and how we process rewards.

The study fits in with previous research suggesting that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.

The researchers found that this association had nothing to do with personality.

Both the study’s authors were quick to point out that this is a preliminary study which only finds a connection; it does not tell us what is causing what.

For example, it could be that those with a smaller ACC are more prone to media multitasking, not that multitasking is causing these changes in the brain.

However, Loh said:

“The exact mechanisms of these changes are still unclear.

Although it is conceivable that individuals with small ACC are more susceptible to multitasking situations due to weaker ability in cognitive control or socio-emotional regulation, it is equally plausible that higher levels of exposure to multitasking situations leads to structural changes in the ACC.”

We will have to wait for a future study which follows people over time.

This can examine how multitasking and brain structures change, and can give us another clue to this intriguing puzzle.

Image credit: Loh & Kanai (2014)

Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.

Neuroscientists have pinpointed the neural activity involved in avoiding distraction, a new study reports.

This is the first study showing that our brains rely on an active suppression system to help us focus on the task at hand (Gaspar & McDonald, 2014).

The study’s lead author, John Gaspar, explained the traditional view of attentional control:

“This is an important discovery for neuroscientists and psychologists because most contemporary ideas of attention highlight brain processes that are involved in picking out relevant objects from the visual field.

It’s like finding Waldo in a Where’s Waldo illustration.”

While this process is important, it doesn’t tell the whole story of how attention works.

Gaspar continued:

“Our results show clearly that this is only one part of the equation and that active suppression of the irrelevant objects is another important part.”

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, involved 47 students carrying out a visual search task while their brain signals were monitored.

The finding may have important implications for psychological disorders which involve problems with attention.

The study’s senior author, John McDonald, said:

“…disorders associated with attention deficits, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, may turn out to be due to difficulties in suppressing irrelevant objects rather than difficulty selecting relevant ones.”

Image credit: Bruno Butot