You’re reading 5 Simple Ways To Skyrocket Your Concentration at Work, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Before you go on to read this, I want to ask you one thing.

Are you giving me your full attention?

Unfortunately, the answer is probably no.

Studies at the University of California suggest that our ability to focus has dropped dramatically over the last decade, particularly at work. And it looks like technology is the main culprit.

But do we really need studies to tell us that we’re struggling to concentrate?

I definitely don’t. I’ve struggled with focus for a long time.

As a freelancer and a Millennial, there seemed to be all the time in the day to get things done, and all the entertainment in the world to make sure that they weren’t going to get done immediately.

Every day distractions kicked in and they could easily turn 4 hours of work to 8. I always felt like I was behind on projects, staying up late trying to finish pieces that could have been done and dusted before lunch.

But at some point I just decided that wasn’t the way things were going to be anymore. I don’t remember exactly when I made the decision or why I did. I probably stumbled across an article similar to this one, took a concerted effort to turn the advice into action, and through trial and error, drastically improved my ability to focus in a matter of months.

I don’t really have the problem anymore. And neither should you. To be honest, what I learned about concentration is pretty simple to put into practice.

Improving my concentration has been a product of two things; structuring my routine to minimize sensory distractions, and strengthening my ability to focus to reduce emotional distractions.

These two factors: sensory distractions—such as your Facebook tab flashing while you’re trying to write a report—and emotional distractions—such as anxiety, fear, worry, or anger—are the biggest obstacles that prevent us from concentrating.

What I’ve composed here are 5 ways you can skyrocket your ability to concentrate at work, simply by working on breaking down these two factors:

1. Remind yourself of the rewards and consequences

Going back to the basics of motivation and thinking about rewards and punishments is actually very beneficial. Most of us forget why we are doing things on a day to day basis, and that leaves our attention open to other avenues.

If you have your mind focused on why you are doing the work, whether it be to reach a larger goal, to feed your family, to move up in the company, or to travel at the end of the year, you will keep your motivation level high enough to stop you from being swayed by simple distractions.

Likewise, negative reinforcement can often be even more effective. What will happen if you don’t finish the job on time; will you miss spending time with your family? Will it stop you from the chance of a promotion? Will it mean you’ll have to skip going out with friends?

Write a list of both the rewards and consequences down on two separate post it notes, and keep them on either side of your desk.

2. Set email, text and social media windows

These three are the biggest time killers in your life. And unfortunately, you can access them all directly from your computer.

What you need to do if you are to be productive at work, is to set specific windows for when you can and can’t use them. Email is best reserved for the morning, say between 9:30am and 10:00am, and the afternoon, say between 4pm and 4:30pm.  Text and Social Media should be used sparingly, no more than 20 minutes per work day. Give yourself 2 x 10 minute blocks, or 4 x 5 minute blocks. But outside of that have your phone on airplane mode and your social media accounts off (or blocked).

3. Use web apps to keep you on track

When it comes to webs apps to boost productivity, there are dozens to consider. These can make a huge difference to your habits. I generally look for three types:

• One to block websites for a pre-specified time, such as Self-Control or Focus
• One to time my work with the Pomodoro method, such as the Marinara Timer
• One to sync my documents, I find Evernote works well for me.

4. Strengthen your focus muscle with exercises

Meditation is the quickest way to strengthen your ability to focus, and research suggests that it takes as little as 8 weeks to see measurable improvements. However, there are other ways to increase your attention span. Here are some practical ways to improve your concentration:

• Practice mindfulness throughout the day
• Memorizing facts or quotes
• Exercise/stretch your body
• Take cold showers
• Read difficult books

Remember, much like in the same way you’d build your body in the gym over time, you don’t want to overexert yourself, but you also want to increase the mental weight.

5. Listen to the right type of music

Music has been found to be a very powerful tool for workplace productivity. And that’s great, because there has never been an easier time to listen to music while you work. It’s important to know however that we’re not talking about just any type of music. Some types of music are better for energy, some for focus, and others for creativity.

For repetitive tasks that require little cognition, you want positive, up beat tunes—think Pharrell Williams: Happy. If you want to boost your creativity, leave out songs with lyrics, as your brain will instinctively try to comprehend them (unless they are in a foreign language), and this saps extra energy. For focus you want something repetitive, without many peaks or troughs.

As technology makes it easier to become distracted, your ability to concentrate will become an increasingly valuable professional asset.

Improving concentration doesn’t take a genius, it just takes someone who’s willing to focus on routine and consistent practice. Work on the tactics above and you’ll start to see your concentration at work skyrocket in no time.

Do you want to take the next step to consistent and longer-lasting concentration?

Grab a free copy of our new eBook: MORNING MASTERY: The Simple 20 Minute Routine For Long Lasting Energy, Laser-Sharp Focus, and Stress Free Living.

Ben is a freelance writer, and the co-creator of Project Monkey Mind—a new blog for the 21st century solopreneur and young professional who wants to lead a more free and fulfilling life.

 

You’ve read 5 Simple Ways To Skyrocket Your Concentration at Work, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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You’re reading The Ultimate Guide To Sleeping Less and Living More, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

I think I’ve cracked this sleep thing.

For months now I’ve been waking up feeling great after only being in the sack for a few hours.

The revelation came after years of obsessing with getting the recommended 8 hours in. As a night owl who loves coffee, it rarely happened, but even when it did, I often rose feeling worse.

After eventually realizing that something wasn’t right, I did some digging and found out not everyone thinks 8 is the magic number. In fact, some believe there isn’t one at all.

Another number that’s thrown around by the media is 7—the average number of hours we sleep. This is more likely an effect of society not biology, regulated by television schedules and working hours. Looking back on the sleep patterns of pre-industrial societies supports this as you can see back then we slept between 5.7 and 7.1 hours a night.

So the jury is still out on how many hours we need, but one thing is clear: getting too much sleep is worse than getting too little.

Less is Always More

In an analysis of 16 studies that looked at the sleeping habits of over one million people, Prof Franco Cappuccio, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Warwick, found surprisingly that long sleepers tended to die earlier than short sleepers.

It’s difficult to measure the impact of too much or too little sleep on our health as they can often be symptoms of underlying diseases and illnesses. For example, sleeping too much being correlated with depression, and sleeping too little with stress. But when Professor Shawn Youngstedt of Arizona State University, understanding the problems with mass sample groups, conducted a small study with 14 young adults, he saw similar results that supported those of Cappuccino.

Participants of his study were instructed to spend an extra two hours in bed for three weeks. At the end of the study Youngstedt found there was an increase across the board in stiffness, back pain, inflammation, and depressed moods.

His results, although limited, make the long term effects of long sleeps sound similar to the effects of prolonged periods of inactivity. Could it be that lying down barely conscious for hours and hours every night is actually detrimental to our health, and even threatening to our life span? Well, just as someone can live a long and happy life sitting at a desk for 12 hours a day, while someone else needs to be doing non-stop physical labour, the numbers each of us need in the pit are just as varied.

If you’re between the ages of 18 and 64, it’s said you’ll function on anything between 6 and 11 hours. Though even these figures are only a guideline, and according to the National Sleep Foundation are secondary to your individual requirements. We know Margaret Thatcher could run a country on just 4 hours, whereas some teenagers can’t leave the house on anything less than 10.

So What’s Your Magic Number?

When we’re all tucked up in bed, the sand man begins to work his magic, kicking off our five state sleep cycle. This is made up of four non-rapid-eye-movement or ‘NREM’ stages, and one rapid-eye-movement or ‘REM’ stage.

We quickly pass through the light sleep state of N1, hang around in N2 for a while until our brain waves slow down, fall into the deeper ‘slow wave’ state of N3 and N4, and finally reach the temporarily paralyzed dream state of REM in N5.

It’s commonly believed this cycle occurs over 90 minutes, but in reality, it can range from anything between 70 and 120 minutes. Just like with ‘the magic number’ of hours, the figure we are told is just a population average which overlooks the unique and diverse needs of the individual.

We do know however, according to the science, that we need four to five of these sleep cycles in order to feel at our best—meaning, at least theoretically, Thatcher could have been firing on all cylinders on her 4 hours.

But with the varying cycle times, it’s pretty difficult to predict when you’re in-between your forth and fifth cycle and therefore in the ideal state for waking up.

That’s not all, as the night draws in, the length of our sleep cycle increases.

This should give you an idea of how varied your sleep cycle can be over the course of a night:

• N1: 1-7 minutes
• N2: 10-25 minutes (generally)
• N3: 20-40 minutes (decreasing every cycle)
• N2: Jump back to N2 for around 5-10 minutes before entering REM
REM: 1-5 minutes (increasing every cycle)

So what does this teach us?

1. Don’t believe anyone who tells you how many hours sleep you need unless they’ve first monitored your brain waves with an EEG machine while you’re sleeping (with your consent of course).
2. Get yourself a bit of tech that’ll monitor your sleep cycles and wake you up in the right stage every morning.

So technology is the way to help better regulate our sleep patterns. But before we get on to that, it’s first important to recognize its role in disrupting them in the first place.

Get Back in Tune With Your Circadian Rhythm

Technology is one of the main reasons we’re out of touch with our biological ‘body clock’, otherwise known as our circadian rhythm. Gadgets, electronics, street lights and any other light-emitting devices disrupt our circadian rhythms and push us further and further out of sync with solar time—the rising and setting of the sun.

The body’s circadian rhythm is managed by the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (SCN), a group of cells that invoke a bodily response to light and dark signals. These signals send messages through the brain to wake the body up, raising its temperature, producing the hormones we need like cortisol, and reducing others we don’t such as melatonin.

The problem is that when we’re exposed to artificial light in the twilight hours, our SCN responds, believing it’s already time to rise and shine, and engaging the body’s systems for our waking state.

It’s not only the fault of technology though, other factors like noise, hormones, exercise, and stimulants also have similar effects in disrupting our circadian rhythm.

However, the good news is that for over 6 million years our ancestors have lived by the rising and setting of the sun. Therefore, when it comes to changing our habits and resynchronising our circadian rhythm to solar time, all it takes is a little effort to avoid artificial light between dusk and dawn.

With that in mind, we can avoid exercising and drinking coffee too late, wear ear plugs and eye masks while sleeping, and overall make our bedrooms the sanctuaries they need to be in order to foster deep, uninterrupted sleep.

Cheap and Cheerful Sleep Cycle Monitoring

Anywhere from $0 to $500+, you can find a gadget that claims to improve your sleep by monitoring your cycles and picking the right time to bring you back around. Luckily for us, one that does it particularly well comes in right at the bottom of that range.

The majority of the sleep monitoring devices and applications work by picking up on the specific characteristics of the cycle stages. Each stage is characterised by changes in the body like temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. Now these are hard to measure without a plethora of sensors, but some of these changes we display externally: our movements and breathing rate.

The Sleep Cycle app (available on both iOS and Android), is a nifty little system which uses your phone’s accelerometer and microphone to monitor your sleep cycles according to changes in your movement and breathing rate.

An average night’s sleep

Before you drift off, you set your alarm like usual, tuck your phone under the sheets (or leave it on your nightstand if it’s iOS), and let it get to work. The app will track your activity throughout the night and wake you up within a 30 minute window of your chosen time, depending on when you are in N1—your lightest sleep stage.

Granted it doesn’t completely eliminate the shock of the alarm clock in the morning, but it can make that groggy and irritated feeling a thing of the past.

One of the nicest things about this app is the data it accumulates. Soon you begin to see a pattern in your cycles and start optimizing your sleep. I’ve found waking up after 4 sleep cycles works best for me, which usually means getting around 6 to 6 and a half hours sleep.

In summary, it’s not about the number of hours we get, but rather the quality and consideration of our sleep cycles that dictate how fresh we feel in the morning.

So disregard broad averages, eliminate disruptive factors like artificial light and stimulants, along with the cat, and let your phone and body do the rest.

Want to take the next step to rising fresh and optimizing your mornings?

Grab a free copy of our new eBook: MORNING MASTERY: The Simple 20 Minute Routine For Long Lasting Energy, Laser-Sharp Focus, and Stress Free Living.

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Joseph is a freelance writer, and the co-creator of Project Monkey Mind—a new blog for the 21st century solopreneur and young professional who wants to lead a more free and fulfilling life.

You’ve read The Ultimate Guide To Sleeping Less and Living More, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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