Podcast #10: Focus Mastery: 7 Essential Tools To Keep Your Focus High And Unlock Your Concentration

Mirna Smidt (0:00)

Hey, it's Mirna from Happiness Academy. Welcome to the Happiness Academy Podcast, a place where you can discover practical, simple, yet effective tools from the science of positive psychology.

You're at the right place if you're looking to live a life of well-being and joy, staying resilient when facing any challenges, and incorporating a sense of meaning in things you do. Ready? Let's dive in.

Hey, are you ready to talk about seven tools to keep up your focus high and sharp? I hope so. And I hope you will pick some from these seven that you will be using and focusing on a bit more in this week. So remember to also think from these tips that I'm sharing, which is the one that's the winning one for you, which is the one you can truly use to make a difference for yourself.

Let's start.

Tip number one is to recognize that the focus is consequence of how our brain feels right now, and that our brain is just a part of our body. So we do have to maintain the energy, the physical energy and the body on the positive side and on the high side, and that will also support high focus. What do I mean by that? I mean food, water, sleep and potentially exercise.

In other words, to maintain focus sharp over extended periods of time, without like crashes and ups and downs, you definitely want to pay attention to that physical baseline. How do I feel physically? What is the energy of my body right now? And you do want to maintain and fuel that regularly over extended period of time with good patterns in your sleep, in hydration, so drinking enough water, in food. Primarily, this means not to create sugar crushes and not forgetting to eat and to try to eat with quality. And then, of course, also trying to move our body enough and keep it fairly fit, so we have enough of oxygen fueling our brain. Now, for me personally, one of the things that really helped with this as well, in terms of keeping my brain physically alive, was also using standing desk instead of sitting desk.

I love it, I highly recommend it. I'm sure there is also individual factor there, who prefers what. For me, it's working really well. And when I chose it, I was also reading a lot about pros and cons of standing desks. And it turns out that there are two main pros of using standing desk. One is simply not sitting, which makes us breathe better and often stand up a bit more straight, and in that way it contributes to our energy. And the second one is it's not that much that standing is so much better than sitting. It's more about the fact that when we are working on a standing desk, we don't get so still and we are inclined to be moving much more than when we are working in a sitting position where we tend to kind of forget most of our body and just kind of cut off from it and ignore it a bit more. So it's not so much about standing desk versus sitting desk. It's more about creating an environment in which we are shifting our body position often and we don't get stuck always in one and the same position forgetting about how our body feels. So that's also something to consider when thinking about physical energy. How much in a day can I, you know, move a little bit? Can I keep my body alive?

Okay, tip number two is using pomodoro or any other technique in which we establish a rhythm between deep focus and total break. Total break like total rest, not breaking down or anything like that. What do I mean by that? I think it's easiest to explain it through pomodoro technique, which is technique in which usually the rhythm of work is around 25 minutes of focused work and then five minutes of a break. But then, of course, you can adjust that in any way that suits you best.

And the idea of pomodoro is that for 25 minutes, we really focus on one thing only, which is a specific task that it's achievable to finish in that period of time. And we really sustain our focus and try hard to focus on that time, removing all of the distractions. But then after that, for five minutes, we completely disconnect from that topic. We don't move from that task straight to, you know, email staying on the screen or maybe social media or anything else, but we really move away for five minutes and create a really deep break from the work we were doing so we could reconnect with it again. I'll be honest, for me, the Rhythm 25.5 is not the best. I usually prefer to shape it depending on the day and types of task and how focused I feel that day. But usually it will be that I'll take chunks of work for half an hour, 40 minutes, maybe 45 minutes, sometimes even an hour, but usually like around 40-45 minutes. And then I'll take a break that's maybe 10 minutes, and that rhythm will work much better for me. And not every period has to be the same, but the point is to establish that rhythm where we have a chunk of time when we're really focused, really working on one thing only, and then we disconnect from that thing and really create a break from that thing. So ask yourself what would that be for you, what would work best for you in terms of the rhythm, and maybe explore it a little bit. And if that's not sustainable to work in such a way for the whole day, maybe you cannot protect your space from distractions completely, it's worth exploring it in just a couple of rounds or a couple of hours each day. It creates better outcome and better focus when we are working, and it also creates better sustainability of our energy because we have more regular breaks where we tend to recharge. So test it, maybe a day per week or maybe a couple of hours per day, and play a little bit with durations and see how it feels and how it works for you.