Source: Stanford

News alerts ping your phone. Your watch buzzes, reminding you to stand up. Slack notifications sound on your desktop. And that’s all before you open your email inbox.

The world is constantly vying for our attention and, at least evolutionarily, we’re primed for distraction. But it’s still possible to block out the noise, hone your focus, and concentrate on what’s most important.

“We’re bombarded with information, some of which we want and a lot of which we don’t,” said David Spiegel, MD, the Jack, Lulu, and Sam Willson Professor in Medicine and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “In a world that is painfully distracting most of the time, it’s particularly important to hone your skills to focus on what matters.”

We asked Spiegel and other Stanford Medicine experts why it feels harder than ever to focus – and how we can improve our own ability to concentrate. Here are five key takeaways.

  1. It’s not just you – it really is that hard to focus and concentrate 

The human brain is wired to detect rewards and, increasingly, our smartphones are wired to dole them out, said Weidong Cai, PhD, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Our brains get a boost – in the form of a dopamine hit – when our smartphones ping us with a new message, for instance.

“We find it rewarding to read new emails, Slacks, a friend’s post, even when they’re not relevant to the task at hand,” Cai said. “Every time you see something fresh, you feel a reward.”

Once the brain becomes accustomed to those easy wins, Cai said, it’s more difficult to perform the effortful, long-term thinking that demands focus and concentration. “You need to put a lot more energy into the actual hard work,” he said.

2. Our attention and memory capabilities change with age

Cai studies response variability – that is, the different lengths of time during which people respond to the same stimuli. Research shows that response variability continually drops in children from ages 9 to age 18, suggesting that attention function improves as children get older.

But, Cai said, children need protected time to develop their attention capacity through activities like reading a book, solving math problems, or playing chess. “If they get used to zero-effort rewards from things like social media,” he said, “they might have difficulty developing the capacity to think longer and deeper.”

For older adults, memory capacity shouldn’t drastically diminish with age, said Sharon Sha, MD, a clinical professor of neurology and neurological sciences and chief for the Memory Disorders Division and the Stanford Center for Memory Disorders.

“Working memory” is the information we can hold in our minds without writing it down. As we get older, it’s typical for working memory to decline slightly – as in, we can’t remember a seven-digit phone number, but can still recall a six-digit passcode, Sha said. If your working memory is consistently getting worse than that over time, she said, talk to your doctor.

3. Willpower alone won’t strengthen your focus

It’s tempting to rely on willpower to keep the relentless distractions at bay. But, Cai said, it’s not that easy. Each exertion of your willpower depletes your attention capacity a bit more. That’s because it takes effort to resist the temptation of distractions – and in today’s world, we have to resist constantly. Eventually our willpower stores get used up.

A better approach is proactive control, Cai said, or keeping the distractions away altogether. “You want to protect time for writing or studying, so you move the smartphone to a different room,” he said. “Instead of training yourself to resist the temptation, it’s better to move the temptation away.”

Proactive control is the idea behind tools like Brick, a device that blocks distracting apps like news websites and social media from your smartphone. “You get to decide what you pay attention to,” Spiegel said, “not what people on the news or apps tell you.”

4. Be sure to build in breaks

Though it might seem counterintuitive, Sha said, taking breaks can be a boon for focus and concentration. “As much as we keep pumping the caffeine” to push through, she said, “our brains do need a break.”

Sleep is the ultimate brain break, Sha said, and studies show that quality sleep leads to better cognitive performance. “Your brain needs that time, not only to consolidate the memories from the day, but also so you can have concentration for the next day,” she said. “It’s going to really diminish your attention if you’re not sleeping.”

Daytime breaks are also crucial, Sha said. She recommended a 10-minute break each hour. “I can’t say I follow that all the time,” Sha admitted. “If it’s not feasible, try to at least block out time for one or two breaks in the morning.”

One way to ensure you take breaks is to drink water throughout the day so your body will demand “bio” breaks, Sha said. A trip to the bathroom, combined with a stretch and some fresh air, can work wonders.

5. Self-hypnosis could lead to “flow” states

Want an out-of-the-box way to hone your focus? Try hypnosis.

Unlike the stylized hypnotizing we’ve seen in the movies, self-hypnosis is a way to direct highly focused attention to a specific task, said Spiegel, who is also director of the Center on Stress and Health, and medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine. Think of it as using the techniques of meditation, like physical sensations and visualization, to put yourself into a “flow” state of immersion during a challenging and rewarding task.

“Hypnosis is about going into this altered state for a purpose: to study better, to control pain,” Spiegel said. “You gain control by choosing what to attend to.”

When the Stanford women’s swim team was swimming faster in practices than in meets, the coach came to Spiegel for help. He discovered that, during meets, the swimmers were focusing too much on their opponents in neighboring lanes. Spiegel trained the team to practice self-hypnosis before meets by picturing how they controlled their bodies as they swim their best race in their minds, ignoring those in the next lanes – and the women swam faster.

Spiegel is co-founder and scientific adviser of Reveri Health Inc., a hypnosis app company. But he said anyone can practice the tenets of hypnosis on their own. Imagine yourself floating (the floating is essential because it makes you feel physically supported and comfortable, and therefore physically relaxed but mentally more focused). In your mind’s eye, picture a task or problem on the left side and a possible solution on the right.  Float and focus, he said.

“Focus is a skill, an advantage that we humans have that allows us to determine where and how we deploy our attention,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to prove to ourselves how much control we have over our bodies and our minds.”

Keywords; neuroscience, willpower