Does anyone have any tips and tricks on acquiring incredible, laser levels of concentration and mental clarity.
I’m interested in anything you’ve found to help. Listening to certain music, diet, meditation, white noise, etc. What isolated tools help you? Does anyone have a holistic regime?
Find your best time of the day. That usually lasts around 3-5 hours for most people. Mine is 5-9 am. This is the best time to get work done. Don’t eat; it slows you down(I mean until the best time is over). I usually start eating around noon.
Juicing.
Music powerful enough to block out outside noise without being annoying, but not engaging enough to distract you.
Meditation.
Cold showers. Whenever it’s past the ‘best time’, and I still need to do stuff, I take a cold shower, and can get an extra 1-2 hours of focus time.
Sleep.
A walk in the cold(usually around 8pm), around 20 minutes. I nearly always find that by the time the walk is ending my mind is clear. I don’t really know how to describe it. But before the walk, it’s all cloudy, busy, unfocused, anxious. Afterward, it’s clear, calm.
It’s probably highly individual. You just have to find your own methods. Trial and error, by following others’ routines. See what works and what doesn’t work for you. 95% of what works for one person won’t work for another. The trick is to find that 5% and add it to your machine.
Bateman
This is my method:
Thank you both very much!
I do a lot of that already, but I’m also going to try implementing “cold shots” (60 second ice showers) as a quick switch/top up. I’ll let you know how it works out
Avoid “multitasking” as much as you can: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say
Agree completely with Holmes. Always focus on one thing. ‘Do the most productive thing at every given moment’. That doesn’t mean always be working, sometimes the most productive thing is to relax and do something meaningless. But set aside time for that. Take 4 hours at the end of the day to wind down and relax, check social media and such. Just don’t do it while working.
Bateman
I don’t know if it is true but I have heard that if you do fast recall, binary numbers or so, you concentration may increase a bit due to the high level of concentration that you need to do those exercices.
Hello! This is the topic I have been obsessing with for a long time. I read, experimented, and as of now even taught it for quite a while. Prepare for the long answer:
It is necessary to understand that your mind can and will concentrate in just the manner you described (laser focus and mental clarity). But it needs a good reason to do so.
Yes, you have to trick your brain into concentration mode.
This is why there is no such thing as just pure concentration, because you want it. It needs to be something relating directly to your goals, including life goals in general.
You need to be really curious or perplexed, or accept your ignorance about something. You need to switch off the “I know it all” regime, so that your mind will have to start working.
Concentration is by design goal-directed. It will not work unless it has to do so in order to achieve something. And simply telling yourself “okay, I need to do this” is not gonna work well, you will have to force yourself too much and probably give up.
What works though is if you are working on a project that is important and meaningful for you, your mind will come to your rescue.
And how do you convince your mind that something is important? Not by talking to it. You are talking to yourself. It needs action, it needs to understand that you are the real deal and that you are serious about your intention.
This is why these first 23 minutes of concentration are so important. It takes about 23 minutes for your mind to focus, and any distraction will steer it off and it will take another 20 minutes. Sit down, breather, write down what you need to do and how you are planning to do that. But do not do anything else! You will experience a great pull of forces of distraction, because your mind still thinks that what you are doing is irrelevant to pressing things - food, sex, social needs, chewing on unfinished arguments and worrying. But this wave passes if you do not give in.
And then you get into the mode and can last for hours on end. Better yet, once you are drained of mental energy and go about other things, your mind will unconsciously keep working on a problem you just spent hours on. It is now convinced it is important and will take it seriously, even working on solutions in your sleep, or if it is something rather experiential, it will complexify your mental maps of this experience, without you even knowing before you go back to the task the next time, or do related things.
I write about this extensively elsewhere, including specific regiments, but cannot post or link it it here.
Juggling is recommended for improving concentration - and a load of other mental stuff:
Unlike Lumosity, the guys in the previous link have nothing to gain by making fake claims. They have a shop, but AFAIK, although their prices are more than the junk on Amazon - the quality looks better.
Here’s some sciencespeak:
Here’s a good Laurel and Hardy YouTube on how to learn. When I started 63 years ago, I started with 3 balls. I was naturally athletic, but it still took me a long time. If I had followed the YouTube method, I would have taken about 30% of my actual time. So, start with one ball - not three.
[I’m having trouble posting the link. I’m looking at the correct video right now - but when I post that link it gives me another video with only one guy, rather than the comedy pair. Give me time to sort this out. Here’s a screenshot of the correct video. So all you need to do is search all the YouTube videos for the one that looks like that.]
[And now, if I click on the above link, I see the correct video with 2 guys. Could someone else please tell me what they see - 2 guys or 1. Thanks]
As far as ball size is concerned, I started with tennis balls - which were far too light. As a result, there was no “feedback” regarding the amount of effort required to consistently achieve the required height. As soon as I could afford real juggling balls, I knew immediately that I would have taken a lot less time to learn.
You need to choose a size that has a weight that allows you to “feel” the feedback. For better feedback, my balls are 6.4cm. I think the much more common size is 6cm. If I could find 6cm balls having the same weight as the larger ball, that would be great.
To me sleep is very important and also going outside.
Just having a nice day out makes my mind clearer.
Indeed, sleep… I came to talk about that too.
TL;DR : 30 minutes nap, meditation, exercise/yoga.
Personally I usually start my day with a clear mind,
but as the hours go by, I have more and more on my mind.
… by dinner time, I’d often fall in “zombie-mode” where I have soo much on my mind that I can’t even focus enough to do basic things like having a conversation!
That’s a normal thing, we’re made to load up our mind while we’re awake, and it’s sleep that cleans that up.
It’s the natural process that erase the useless information,
filter it, rearange it, makes the connections and stores the usefull things in long term.
But you don’t need a full night’s sleep to get a clear start,
the REM sleep you get in a 30 minutes nap can be enough to clear most of the junk information…
Personally I go for meditation rather than sleep if I feel I have emotional conflicts I want to sort out rather then just “wipe it clean”.
God will help you a lot…of course, the tools that we can use here on this planet are, meditation, food, sport, reading, a lot of mindful moments… God be with you :*
Certain kinds of baroque music. Not while working, but just five minutes before beginning. Especially in days in which it is more difficult to concentrate. I always use the same pieces:
Air in D string. Bach.
Adagio. Pseudo Albinoni.
Canon. Pachelbel.
Something else by Bach.
In extreme cases, Summer and Winter. Vivaldi
I believe that meditation gives such focus across all endeavors and all of life since such focus is actually what you are developing during meditation: calming of the ‘monkey mind’. Indeed, one can achieve such focus that one becomes unaware of the anything external to the object of focus. Indeed, the reason there must be one or two people who are not meditating during extended meditation sessions, is for safety should something happen because meditators in such a state will generally not respond to the external environment. Of course to achieve this strength of focus, we are talking about people who can meditate continuously for many many hours on a regular basis.
However, you can achieve good results in increased focus with something like 1 hour per day, every day. Such meditation also typically brings other benefits such as greater peace, less emotional lability, and a less judgemental attitude.
Don’t try anything,
Just do every day yoga and meditation at least 30 minutes per day and try to increase the time with full dedication.
