50 ways to become attentive and focused

If you're like most people. Then you most likely spend most of your day in a constant rush. You complete one task after another at a fast pace. As a result, you don't do everything in the best possible way. There are many thoughts constantly running through your head. You can't focus on them, and you just don't understand how to become a more attentive person. You are constantly thinking about what you need to do next. Where to go, what to buy in the store after work, who your children are with now and much more. And as a result, at the end of the evening you have a headache, and you realize that you didn’t manage to complete all the tasks.

Mindfulness is simply paying attention on purpose to what you are doing. And in order to become a mindful person, you need to pay attention to the present moment. And all those details you are working on. Instead of rushing to complete tasks and doing everything in a hurry. When you begin to take a more calm and thorough approach to completing tasks, it will ultimately bring you a feeling of calm. You will be able to become more attentive and will become better at performing all your tasks. But in order to develop this ability and become attentive, it requires time and work on yourself.

Watch your breath

Spend just a couple of minutes a day on this. Inhale longer than usual, then exhale longer. Often decisions are made based on emotions, which is more likely to lead to an undesirable outcome. This practice in such moments will help you calm down, cope with your emotional state and make a rational decision.

How to become attentive and focused: What distracts us?

External stimuli are everything that happens around us and that can be perceived by our senses. Loud music, unpleasant odors, cold or heat, visual disturbances. One of the options for getting rid of external irritants is to remove them or change your place of stay.

Internal stimuli are what happens inside us: our thoughts, internal dialogue, emotions, internal sensations. The most effective way to eliminate these types of problems is to develop the skill of calming the mind and eliminating internal dialogue.

Organize your workspace and your home

Clutter at work or at home can cause anxiety and stress. Getting organized is an easy way to reduce stress and improve your quality of life. Also, in the process of organizing, you improve your attentiveness, since you have to sort out each of your things separately.

Final Thoughts

Mindfulness reduces stress, anxiety and depression. It also leads to a feeling of calm. As a result, our bodies and minds are able to slow down and take time to engage with the world around us. Our tips are some of the most effective ways to become a more attentive person. But you also need to remember that mindfulness means living in the moment. And pay attention to all the details that surround you. You should not undertake several tasks at once. Make a plan for the day and complete your tasks consistently. At the same time, paying as much attention as possible to each of these tasks.

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Help someone

Research shows that people who help others live more successful lives. They are also less likely to experience stress and depression. Every gesture of attention will be useful: help your family members, help an elderly person cross the road. By doing a small favor for another person, you increase your self-esteem. It makes your life a little better. You realize the purposefulness of life.

General principles to help increase your own mindfulness

In order to achieve success in this difficult task, you need to adhere to a few simple rules that have been tested in practice and have a positive effect and high efficiency:

Using an algorithm to perform important tasks means that all the things that you plan (and you definitely need to plan) need to be divided into subtasks that make it easier to concentrate on individual small processes. This approach will allow you to work through each stage more carefully and not miss important points; it is also a kind of training that allows you to perform the same task the next time using the same process faster and with a greater degree of attentiveness.
Consciously transform involuntary attention into voluntary attention - that is, learn to notice those things that attract your attention by themselves. This is an excellent attention training , allowing you to expand your ability to notice small details and analyze what you see.
Healthy eating and healthy sleep is definitely a well-worn topic, but it would not be addressed so often if it were not so important for the effective functioning of the entire central nervous system. Loss of attentiveness is a clear sign of overwork or lack of certain micro and macroelements.
Fighting haste is a guarantee that important things will not be missed during the work process. It takes time to process information well and nothing can be done about it. By pushing yourself, you reduce your concentration on trifles, and as you know, they play a major role in any work.
Regular motivation is the necessary stimulus that forces the central nervous system to work at full strength. In its absence, interest in a particular task will inevitably decline and you will not be able to deceive yourself.
Multitasking is your enemy - this statement is true if you want to develop mindfulness and be as efficient as possible in the time allotted for work. A good specialist is not valued for his ability to work for other specialists at the same time; he is valued for his ability to concentrate on the task at hand and work it out to the smallest detail. This is precisely the characteristic that should be your goal.
Memory training is an integral element of effective thinking, which includes mindfulness. Having a poor memory, it is difficult to get the desired result from training and accumulate the necessary experience to analyze the information received. We discussed in detail what kind of memory there is and what can be done to improve it in the article “Types of Memory”.

Meditate

Enjoy the peace after being surrounded by endless distractions. Take some time to do this: put aside everything you are doing, sit in a comfortable position and just focus on your own body. Focus on how each part of your body functions. This will relieve the stress you received during the day.

Types of attention

Despite the fact that the process itself is quite simple and understandable, in fact, there are several subtypes of concentration of nerve analyzers depending on the type of stimulus and previously done training that affects its perception. Even if it seems to us that we see and touch everything that is currently happening in front of us, this is just a mistaken opinion; the brain simply cuts off a very large part of the stimuli entering the information processing center. This is a defensive reaction to avoid unnecessary overload and a striking example of this is the fact that after a short time, a person stops smelling his perfume, although it remains throughout the day, or you can notice that there is no constant sensation of a watch on your wrist or a ring on your wrist. finger. Signals from the sensory system have not stopped reaching the processing center, but they have stopped being transmitted to our consciousness.

Involuntary attention

This process does not depend on previously present experience with a given object; it is the most basic type of mindfulness, which extends to everything that happens around a person. Let's say there is a passenger in a car who does not have a driver's license and does not know the meaning of road signs, but he just sees these signs from time to time and they attract his attention - this is called involuntary. Such a process rather depends not on training, but on the speed of reaction of the nervous system, which is influenced by many factors, such as nutrition, the presence of necessary microelements and the development of thinking in general.

Voluntary attention

The result of certain training that allows you not only to notice certain elements, but also to immediately understand their meaning. If we return to our example, such a process is available to the driver of a car, since, thanks to training, he has learned the meaning of road signs and has taught himself to always notice them. He looks at a road sign not because it is an attractive object, but to find out certain restrictions or necessary information on a given section of the road. This also includes the ability to read a certain language. A person not only notices an attractive inscription, but concentrates his attention on what is written there (on the information). Certain mindfulness tasks have an excellent effect on this type of concentration; they are the factor that trains the centers of the nervous analyzers to react to certain objects and not let them pass by our consciousness.

Post-voluntary attention

If we consider the levels of development of attention, then this is the next stage, after voluntary, since to achieve it, you first need to gain certain experience and learn to analyze certain information. After such an experience is repeated with a given person many times and over a short period of time, data analysis can pass by our consciousness and give us only the result. In the existing example, this looks like an experienced truck driver who does not consciously notice some signs, but clearly understands that he is already in a populated area and adheres to a different speed limit. The same thing happens with a person. If he reads books a lot, he can just skim the page without focusing his attention on what is written, but he already gets a picture of what is happening. The development of attention of this type directly depends on gaining experience in the previous type.

Take notes

Write down your thoughts in a few words. This is a great way to practice mindfulness and awareness. Just write down what you want to remind yourself of. Keep notes at your workplace or home in a visible place. You could, for example, simply remind yourself to smile or pay attention to what is happening to you right now. Remind yourself of simple gestures that you tend to forget.

Brains, cook!

During our school and student years, we regularly strained our brains: we learned poems and rules, crammed theorems, memorized foreign words, and wrote expositions. But, as adults, we abruptly stopped doing all this. But memory needs regular training. So that it doesn’t let you down, don’t be lazy in memorizing poetry, solving crosswords, learning something new: be it notation or a foreign language.

Article on the topic

Anyone can become a genius, or Who are counter people? Get carried away with puzzles, crosswords, put together puzzles, complete tasks to increase your attentiveness - all this is a great workout for your head. Don't neglect computer games. In particular, such a classic game as “find a pair”, where the player is briefly shown cards with pictures, and then closed and asked to find the pairs. This fun is very useful because it uses parts of the brain important for memory - the temporal lobe and hippocampus. By the way, you can do all this with your children.

In general, doctors believe that memory problems are most often problems with attention. So learn to concentrate. To achieve this, try to get into the habit of not doing anything automatically, but always being collected.

Set aside time for rest

To become a weightlifting champion, you need to train a lot, eat a lot and rest a lot. Remove at least one component, and, at best, you will not achieve results, and at worst, you will get health problems from exhaustion.

If you want to become a champion at focusing, this applies just as much to you. You can't stay focused forever. The more you work, the less you rest, the weaker your brain and its ability to focus on something.

Conversely, just 5 minutes of rest after an hour of work allows you to recharge your batteries and move forward again with high productivity.

But only if the rest was correct. It is necessary to completely switch from the current task to something else. If you've been sitting at the computer for an hour, spend the next 5 minutes doing some physical activity - even if it's just a walk.

Play sports

Physical activity has a similar effect. And even the most minimal, such as walking.

In their experiment, scientists asked middle school students to solve problems related to concentration in a normal state, after a 20-minute rest and after 20 minutes of walking on a treadmill. Scientists also recorded neuroelectric activity of the brain.

As a result, it was found that the best performance was demonstrated by the group that was engaged in walking. This was confirmed by both tests and EEG data.