Exams, writing reports, solving work problems … Many of our daily activities require a good dose of concentration , and this ability is also very important in relation to learning and memory . However, the difficulty to resist distractions or to maintain a good level of attention for long periods of time are two more than frequent complaints among people. Here are some tips to help you focus better :
1. Use your metacognition. Learning how attention works in general, the distractors that affect you the most, when you start to fatigue, are fundamental aspects that will help you better manage your attentional resources.
2. Take regular breaks and better in natural environments. Various studies such as the one carried out by Marc G. Berman and his collaborators at the University of Michigan in 2008 have shown the power of natural environments such as forests and parks to reduce attentional fatigue. So, find a little park and take a short walk every two hours or so.
3. Train your cognitive abilities. More and more scientific publications say that improving mental abilities is possible. Jolles and his collaborators published in 2013 that working memory training promoted changes in the connectivity between structures of the frontal-parietal network of the brain, involved in the processing of attention. Thus, online training programs could be a more innovative and fun option that allows you to exercise your concentration skills wherever you are.
4. Modify your environment. It is highly recommended that you eliminate as many distractors as possible from your environment. Television, people talking, music from your favorite group will capture your attention preventing you from dedicating it to the important task. It is also important that you are comfortable, so do not forget to control the temperature of the room, use a comfortable chair, etc.
5. Practice meditation. In 2007, a team of researchers led by Yi-Yuan Tang, described in an article published in the scientific journal PNAS that training 20 minutes a day for five days was enough to improve performance in an attention test, in addition to reducing anxiety and fatigue.
6. Use strategies to control your thoughts . If you find yourself getting distracted and thinking about something else, repeat a ‘redirect’ phrase to yourself. Saying words like ‘Focus’ to yourself, or ‘Go back to studying’ will help you stop thinking and refocus on the content of what you are doing.
7. Play video games. In a now classic study from the University of Rochester (New York) published in Nature, it is observed that those people who played action video games improved their visual selective attention, were able to attend to more stimuli and were more efficient in the form of use your attentional resources.
8. Change content. This will prevent you from getting bored doing the same thing all day. Alternate subjects or tasks and also their degree of difficulty, or the type of learning strategies that you must implement. If you avoid saturating yourself, you will stay motivated.
9. Get organized to control anxiety . Sometimes we have so many things to do that we don’t know where to start, and when we get down, we are filled with thoughts and concerns about what we still have to do. A good strategy to avoid these distracting thoughts is to organize daily activities and keep a schedule, this will make it easier for us to focus every moment on the task that we have to perform.
10. Get physical exercise. A whole body of publications points in the direction that physical exercise improves cognitive performance. Michele T. Tine and Allison G. Butler published a 2012 article in the journal Experimental Educational Psychology in which they demonstrated that short (12-minute) aerobic exercise improved selective attention capacity in a group of children.
We know homework is tough, so don’t forget to brace yourself for the effort. Of course, it is important that when you reward yourself, you do so for having met a specific objective. For example, if you want to get up ‘to see what’s in the fridge’, do so when you have completed part of your work, but not by leaving it halfway. That way the award will taste better to you.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
