Training Area: Focus – Become Immune to Distractions
How often do you check your phone and still can't tell what time it is? Do you sometimes read the same sentence ten times and still don't know what it says? Do you have a mountain of work on your desk, but the constant "ping" of your phone keeps you from making progress?
We all know how hard it can be to fully concentrate on one thing. Yet focus is one of the most important abilities for getting into and staying in flow.
Flow is a state of highest concentration where we're immune to distractions. However, if we struggle to maintain focus, we quickly get pulled out of our task by distractions like noises or wandering thoughts.
So it's worth training your focus.
Mindfulness for Better Focus
For optimal focus, you need to be concentrated – devoting your entire attention to one thing while blocking out all irrelevant thoughts, ideas, or feelings.
Every day you're exposed to countless distractions like smartphones, the people around you, or even your own thoughts. But the more developed your ability to focus, the better you can consciously determine where to direct your attention and keep it there.
Besides concentration, mindfulness also plays a major role in focus training. This is a special form of attention. Simply put, it's about being in the moment and perceiving things as they are, without rushing to judge them.
If you regularly train your mindfulness, you can live fully in the moment and thus fully engage with your current activity. You can also transform automatic and unconscious habits into new, positive ones.
For example, if you tend to grab your phone immediately when it "pings," with more mindfulness you can better block out the sounds and get used to simply leaving your phone in your pocket when it alerts.
Through mindfulness, your self-awareness also improves – the conscious perception of your thoughts and emotions. This helps you avoid ruminating and getting distracted by worries.
When you train concentration, mindfulness, and self-awareness, you learn to develop an awareness and understanding of your feelings, thereby silencing your inner critic, preventing rumination, and dedicating yourself to your task with high concentration.
Then noises, thoughts, or phone rings won't throw you off anymore.
How Can I Achieve This?
In flow training, we use various scientifically-based methods. For the focus area, mindfulness meditation has proven effective:
Mindfulness Meditation (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction)
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a behavioral therapy program that combines various mindfulness and meditation exercises to better cope with stress.
Current research shows that mindfulness-based meditations and body scans demonstrably strengthen the areas of your brain responsible for your concentration ability, emotional regulation, and impulse control.
And indeed, neurological changes in the brain can be observed: For example, changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is responsible for attention control, have been found in meditators. Wandering thoughts can apparently be reduced through meditation.
Additionally, parts of the frontal lobe that help us focus on the present moment appeared to be altered.
Through mindfulness, you improve your focus and train to direct your attention purposefully. The Flow Lab exercises support you in paying attention not to many things at once, but only to your breathing or body awareness, thereby strengthening your focus.
As a result, you can respond more consciously to external influences, let wandering thoughts simply pass, and better engage with the moment.
Improve Your Focus Now!
The focus exercises contain selected techniques from mindfulness meditation that allow you to sustainably strengthen your focus!
You have it in your own hands whether disturbing thoughts and distractions throw you off track or you work with concentration. So you can use your time productively and experience more flow in everyday life – start training your focus now!