5 Ways to Improve Your Attention

 

Things You Can Do to Minimize Distraction and Increase Concentration

It happens to the best of us. You're sitting in class or in a meeting and you suddenly find yourself daydreaming, losing focus, and not paying attention. In one study of over 2,000 adults, people reported that their minds weren't really on the task at hand almost 50 percent of the time. Perhaps even more importantly, people report feeling less happy when they are distracted.

So what can you do to improve your attention, increase your focus, and prevent your mind from wandering? Researchers have discovered a few different things that might help:

suedhang/Image Source/Getty Images

1. Stop Multitasking

Trying to do many different things at once makes it more difficult to concentrate on any one thing. While it might seem like multitasking can help you accomplish more, research has shown that juggling multiple tasks actually reduces both productivity and accuracy. If you want to make the most out of your attentional resources, try focusing on just one task at a time.

Thomas Barwick / Getty Images

2. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness involves purposely paying attention to things in a particular way, and new research suggests that practicing mindfulness might actually help improve your ability to concentrate. According to research presented at an annual conference held by the British Psychological Society (BPS), children who took a short training course in mindfulness were better able to concentrate and ignore distractions.

Juzant / Getty Images

3. Meditate

Researchers have found that those experienced in meditation are better at focusing their attention on a single item and ignoring irrelevant items. What about people new to meditation? Can practicing this skill help you better focus your attentional spotlight? The research indicates that the answer is yes. Participants in one study who learned to meditate and practiced for approximately 30 minutes per day were quicker to notice new stimuli, indicating that they had improved their attention.

So why exactly does meditation help? One suggestion is that it decreases the attentional blink that we all experience. Attentional blink is a brief period of time after we focus on one item, about half a second, where we are unreceptive to secondary stimuli. Essentially, focusing on one thing makes us briefly blind to other things. One study found that participants who received meditation training demonstrated a marked reduction in attentional blink.

Tetra Images / Getty Images

4. Turn Off the Technology

From smart phones to video games to online video, it seems like we spend a huge chunk of our day absorbed by various forms of technology. Unfortunately, research has demonstrated that the constant distraction presented by such technology can actually make it more difficult for young children to focus on activities such as reading for an extended period of time. If you want to focus your attention and fully devote yourself to a task, turn off the technology - at least for long enough to let you finish the job.

Zakaria Wakrim / Getty Images

5. Practice Makes Perfect

Meditation can help you learn to improve your focus, but it takes practice to learn how to bring your bring your attention back to the task at hand. Researcher Wendy Hasenkamp suggests that becoming aware of when your mind has wandered, actively disengaging from the distraction, and bringing your focus back to the task at hand can help make people more mindful of how they utilize their attention. The more you notice that your mind has wandered, and thus the more you actively bring yourself back to a state of attention, the better you will become at maintaining your focus on a single task.

"Understanding the way the brain alternates between focused and distracted states has implications for a wide variety of everyday tasks," Hasenkamp explains. "For example, when your mind wandered off in that meeting, it might help to know you’re slipping into default mode—and you can deliberately bring yourself back to the moment. That’s an ability that can improve with training."

Final Thoughts

If you've ever felt like you have a "short attention span" or if you often catch your mind wandering when you should be focusing on a task, you might be able to benefit from some of these "attention boosting" activities. Eliminating distractions, putting an end to multitasking, meditating, and actively practicing these skills are just a few of the things that researchers believe can have a beneficial influence on attention. Think of attention as a muscle – the more you work with it, the stronger it will be.

References

Carr, N. (2010, June 20). As technology advances, deep reading suffers. SFGate. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/As-technology-advances-deep-reading-suffers-3261215.php

Hasenkamp, W., Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Duncan, E., & Basalou, L. W. (2012). Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: A fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states. NeuroImage, 59, 750-560.

Hasenkamp, W. (2013, July 17). How to focus a wandering mind. Greater Good. Retrieved fromhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_focus_a_wandering_mind

Jha, A. P., Krompinger, J., & Baime, M. J. (2007). Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7(2), 109-119.