![]() These short bursts of mindfulness training each day can help us notice the traffic of our thoughts and urges, and develop what Jha calls the “mental muscle” to observe, rather than act. So she came up with some simple practices “that exercise the brain in ways that it is prone to being weakened”. Jha began thinking differently about mindfulness when she experienced her own “crisis of attention” (“a blaring, unrelenting onslaught of mental chatter,” she writes) that reduced her ability to feel present with her small children. We might start blanking, zoning out or snapping at our partners, then feel guilty, which makes focusing even harder. When that whiteboard is full of thoughts, feelings and images relating to what’s making us stressed, there is no room for new information. “Working memory is like a mental whiteboard with disappearing ink,” says Jha. I find it hard to believe that something so stark, that we can do by ourselves, can help focus a mind that feels scrambled by multiple lockdowns, political divisiveness or economic uncertainty For example, choosing the words to put together in an email, or reading a page in a book. This mode impacts our “working memory”: the amount of information that can be held in our minds and used for a task. We get stuck in “loops of doom” or imagined scenarios. In a high-alert state, we often start ruminating and catastrophising. Stress is one of the biggest obstacles to focusing, says Jha. She has written a book called Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, a four-week training programme based on her research showing how simple mindfulness exercises carried out by people with high-demand jobs, such as soldiers, elite athletes and emergency medics, improve many aspects of cognitive and emotional health, including strengthening our attention. Specifically, with short bursts of daily exercises.ĭr Amishi Jha is a professor of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience at the University of Miami and an expert in the science of attention. We have to train the brain like a muscle. It is not something we can just choose to do. ![]() The good news? We can learn to focus better, but we need to think about attention differently. When I first opened Peak Mind, I set a timer to see how long it would take me to feel the pull of social media. My inability to concentrate on anything – work, reading, cleaning, cooking – without being distracted over the past 18 months has felt, at times, farcical. Books are left half-read eyes wander away from Zoom calls conversations stall. We have to focus.įocusing has felt particularly tough during the pandemic. To get anything done, we have to filter out most of this data. Then there’s our thoughts: the average person, researchers estimate, will have more than 6,000 a day. The ears will take in an orchestra of sound waves. Each second, the eyes will give the brain the equivalent of 10 million bits (binary digits) of data. What did you do? In every single moment – getting out of bed, turning on a tap, flicking the kettle switch – your brain was blasted with information. Picture your day before you started to read this article.
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