How To Boost Your Focus Permanently in Minutes

If ever there was a tool that stood to rewire our attentional circuitry in a powerful way, this seems to be it. A simple practice taking 17 minutes can forever rewire your brain to be able to attend better and offset some of that attentional drift, regardless of whether you're a child or an adult, whether you have ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or not. The effects are significant, long-lasting, and they appear to exist after just one session of this quiet 17-minute interoception. So let's take a step back and think about how we focus and how to get better at focusing. What are called attentional blinks? We do this all the time, and people with ADHD tend to have many more attentional blinks than those who don't, and this is true for both children and adults.

If you see something that you're looking for or you're very interested in something, you are definitely missing other information, in part because you're overfocusing on something. This leads to a very interesting hypothesis about what might go wrong in ADHD. We've always thought that individuals with ADHD cannot focus, yet we know they can focus on things they care very much about. Maybe, just maybe, they are experiencing more attentional blinks than people who do not have ADHD. Indeed, there are data now to support the possibility that that's actually what's happening. This should be exciting to anyone with ADHD. It should also be exciting to anyone who cares about increasing their focus and their ability to attend. What this is saying is that the circuits that underlie focus, our ability to attend, and our ability to eliminate distraction, they aren't just failing to focus; that's just a semantic way of describing the outcome. They are over-focusing on certain things, thereby missing other things.

Our distractibility or the distractibility of someone with ADHD could exist because they are over-focusing on certain elements, thus missing other elements they should be attending to. What they really need is the property we call open monitoring. Open monitoring is typically associated with people who have practiced a lot of meditation, such as Vipassana meditation, or have spent time learning open gaze visual analysis and open gaze thinking. However, there is a simpler version of this that allows us to bypass all that.

Your visual system has two modes of processing. If you're very excited about something, you have that soda straw view of the world and you're missing other things. Okay, that's high levels of attention. However, there's also a property of your visual system that allows you to dilate your gaze to be in the so-called panoramic vision. Panoramic vision is something you can do right now, no matter where you are, and you can do it right now. If you are in a room, let try to be consciously dilating your gaze so that you can see the ceiling, the floor, and the walls all around you.That panoramic vision is actually mediated by a separate stream or set of neural circuits going from the eye into the brain, and it's a stream or set of circuits that isn't just a wide-angle view, but is also better at processing things in time. Its frame rate is higher. So, this is something that can be trained up, and people can practice whether or not they have ADHD. What it involves is learning how to dilate your gaze consciously. That's actually quite easy for most people, whether or not you wear corrective lenses or contacts. You can consciously go into open gaze and then contract your field of view as well.

There are now published accounts in the literature of a simple practice lasting about 15 minutes in which subjects were asked to sit quietly with their eyes closed and engage in a meditation-like state. They were instructed not to direct their minds to any particular state or place, but simply to focus on their breathing and to pay attention to their body sensations. If their mind drifted, they were asked to bring it back to focus on their breathing for about 15 minutes. This practice may not seem significant or unusual, nor would it be expected to have any impact at all. However, surprisingly, engaging in this practice for just 17 minutes significantly reduced the number of attentional blinks that people experienced. In other words, their focus improved in a nearly permanent way without any additional training. There is something about this practice that involves reducing the amount of visual information coming in and learning to pay closer attention to one's internal state (interoception) that enables individuals to have a heightened awareness. This heightened awareness can be helpful when looking for visual targets or when needing to focus on multiple things in sequence, they didn't experience the same number of attentional blinks.

People age and their working memory worsens, their ability to focus also declines. The number of attentional blinks they carry out increases. There are now studies exploring whether a simple meditation-like practice of 15 to 20 minutes of sitting quietly, resting, and paying attention to one's breathing and internal state can offset some of this age-related cognitive decline. These data suggest that regardless of whether you're a child or an adult, have ADHD or not, or are experiencing age-related cognitive decline, a simple practice of taking 17 minutes to sit and pay attention to your internal state can rewire your brain to better attend and possibly offset age-related attentional drift.

We could handle one meditation session of 17 minutes or so, and if there ever was a tool that stood to rewire our attentional circuitry in a powerful way, this seems to be it. In addition, the ability to engage in panoramic vision and dilate our gaze (the so-called open monitoring) allows the brain to function in a way that can detect more information faster. This is a powerful tool as well. The beauty of that tool is that it works the first time and every time. The exact way in which it works is a bit unclear, nonetheless, the effects are significant, long-lasting, and appear to exist after just one session of this quiet 17-minute interoception. This makes it seem like a very worthwhile thing to do for everybody.