Reclaiming Focus

Sometimes I feel that the era of massively productive individuals is slipping away from us. I’m struck by passages like this one, from Cal Newport’s Deep Work:

[Theodore] Roosevelt would begin his scheduling by considering the eight hours fom eight thirty a.m. to four thirty p.m. He would then remove the time spent in recitation and classes, his athletic training (which was once a day), and lunch. The fragments that remained were then considered time dedicated exclusively to studying. As noted, these fragments didn’t usually add up to a large number of total hours, but he would get the most out of them by working only on schoolwork during these periods, and doing so with a blistering intensity. ‘The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small,’ explained Morris, ‘but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off [from schoolwork] than most.’

Why does this description sound superhuman? When did we get off track with channeling our own focus?

A veritable explosion of self-help content is trying to answer this question with productivity apps, email systems, detoxes and hacked diets. It’s time for me to unnecessarily add my voice to the masses. I’m no guru on this subject, and I struggle daily with staying focused myself — that said, here’s what I’ve learned from my research on this subject.

The reason you can’t focus is that your brain’s ability to concentrate on difficult, long-term work is being diluted by overly-easy access to simple, stimulating pleasures instead of getting rewards from activities that actually advance your life.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

For this argument to hold, we need a little background first.

Over-generalizing, dopamine is the chemical that provides your brain with rewards for accomplishing or obtaining things. People sometimes call it the “feel good” chemical. More importantly, it drives motivation, which can cut both ways. For example, when researchers flood rats’ brains with dopamine, those rats do not exhibit any drive to obtain food or water — their motivation system is totally satiated already. They lie in their cages, unmoving.

Thousands of people have trouble focusing on getting important things done because, similarly to the rats (unfortunately), our dopamine-obtaining mechanisms have been compromised by the pleasures of modern life. We get our dopamine from overly easy sources, thereby reducing our will to extract neurological rewards out of difficult work that requires personal sacrifice in the moment.

One classic example: pornography use. Young men in particular grow up on always-available stimulation and continual novelty from pornography, and so don’t feel the urge to cultivate meaningful, important relationships with real women, which would require an extended period of effort and investment. If you can get your dopamine from women and videos on the internet, you don’t need to try to meet women in real life — the effort-reward tradeoff simply does not seem worth it.

Once we notice the other examples, we start to see them everywhere.

It becomes impossible to focus on your work for an hour, or multiple hours, when you get notifications on your phone (and iMessages on your computer) every 3 minutes. Each notification gives your brain a small flash of dopamine in anticipation of social bonding — meaning your dopamine levels and motivation stay sated. Between Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and iMessages, your brain never drains its dopamine reserves enough to make your more complicated work into new source of neurochemical motivation. Your requirements are totally fulfilled by constant stimulation from media.

The same problem reaches our personal lives too. We can’t get through all those books on our Kindles because TV, Netflix and YouTube provide easy, visual enjoyment. You have no incentive to read, paint, practice the piano, or anything else that requires extended periods of concentration, because your brain subconsciously compares the effort-reward tradeoff for those activities against TV/Netflix/YouTube, and concludes it doesn’t need to get rewards from doing high quality, delayed-gratification work.

We can draw a connection from dopamine to the other neurochemicals too. When we try to neglect a current dopamine fix (say, choosing to work on a project rather than playing video games), we feel a spike of the hormone cortisol — which causes us to feel stress and manifests as “resistance” or “feeling lazy”. Over time, avoiding cortisol by always indulging in short-term dopamine fixes means we end up sacrificing the long term, delayed gratification work that provides us with serotonin.

So — how to start increasing our focus again, to reset our brains to be appreciative of long-term, high quality work? You can use a lot of small techniques rather than any grand gestures. The ideas can be sorted into three key areas.

Turn off the easy dopamine drip

• Block YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and any other “shiny” websites on your computer.
• Set 10 minute per day time limits for Instagram and Facebook on your phone.
• Set a 20 minute per day time limit for YouTube on your phone.
• If you really want to dilute YouTube’s appeal, turn off your watch history and other content targeting mechanisms. There are plenty of articles online about how to do this.
• Turn off notifications for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and any other social media websites.

Strengthen your work habits

• Work for sessions of 25 minutes at a time, leaving 5 minutes for a break away from your computer. This is called the Pomodoro Technique and has been well-covered by productivity blogs/vlogs.
• You might find that you actually want to work for longer stretches of time once you get over the hump.
• When you are working, put your phone out of reach, and DND both your phone and computer.

Take on helpful exercises in your free time

• Read 20 pages every night. When you do, keep your phone and computer in a different room.
• Figure out the things that you can live without. Treat these as small, one-week experiments:
  Example #1: for 7 days, pretend you do not own a TV.
  Example #2: reduce the stimulation you get from external media by not listening to podcasts or music in the car, or while taking a shower, or while doing chores.
• Bonus points: meditation. Getting started on a meditation habit (I do 10 minutes per day at a minimum) will help you train yourself to (1) concentrate, and (2) notice your automatic behaviors or thought patterns that might not be the most healthy.