New Year’s Resolution: Focus
Brain fitness involves exercise, achieving a healthy weight, and eating well, at least as much as computer brain games. Those are all great resolutions, but to get there, you have to focus. But how?
I’ve lost count of how many web sites and blog posts I’ve read in the last week about New Year’s resolutions . Lots of blogs and books and talk shows repeat the reasonably good advice we’ve all seen many times:
- Write down your goals
- Get a partner
- Tell other’s about your goal
- And so on . . .
Nothing is wrong with those recommendations, but I think there’s a more important point that runs through all of the expert recommendations.
To be successful in changing your behavior, you have to focus on your goal, every day.
This might not sound as difficult as it is really is. Focus is probably the single most important thing you can do to achieve your brain fitness goals.
Why? Here’s an example. Your goal is to lose weight. You’re at work, and your friends ask you to go to lunch. You arrive at a restaurant, and everyone is ordering lunch.
This is a critical moment. You have to choose between something that works for how you want to eat, or what you want to eat. Your friends are talking, maybe there are other distractions, and you maybe you’re feeling a little stressed about a meeting you had this morning.
Your challenge: Order the right meal, and eat the right amount of it. How do you cut through the mental noise? You have to focus on your current goal, and screen out the distractions.
Looking at people who are successful at changing, the thing that most stands out for me is the fact that they can truly focus on their specific goal, and not get distracted by all the things that pull them away from achieving their goal.
For most people, this kind of focus only happens when something really big happens in their lives. Someone who drank two bottles of vodka every day, for example, couldn’t stop drinking. One day, he had a stroke that left him paralyzed for several days. He quit drinking.
Other people can’t quit smoking, and then they have their first child. Faced with smoking or taking care of their baby, they quit. Another person couldn’t lose weight. Then he realized that even trying to keep up with his toddler left him out of breath. He lost 100 pounds.
So I think the challenge isn’t to follow some expert’s recommendations. The key to behavior change isn’t waiting until you have a stroke, or a new baby, or the realization that you can’t keep up with a two year old. Those event give you the momentary motivation to focus for a while. And that shows us what’s really important.
The key to change is being able to maintain your focus on your goal, even when you are distracted. All the recommendations I’ve seen are really mostly focused on techniques to maintain your focus.
Plan how to keep your goal in mind by thinking through all the distractions.
Plan for how you are going to fail to focus, and visualize doing something else.
Think about when you’ll want a cigarette (after a meal, with friends at work, if you go out for drinks), and rehearse what you’ll do differently. Think about when you’ll over eat (in front of the TV, by buying chips at the grocery, eating the donuts around the coffee pot) and think about how you’ll walk away or make a different choice.
One of the best ways to focus is to set aside a little time every day to think about the challenges you’ll face during the day. Think about the critical moments you’ll confront during the day, and create a strategy for coping with them. By rehearsing a strategy to cope with them, you’ll be ready to do something different each time the problem arises.
That’s the most important way to make the changes that will help you with brain fitness in 2010.
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Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.
Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.
Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.
This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.
Reference:
Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. Priscilla Warner writes about the contrast between Tibetan monks’ apparent calm, evident even on brain scans, and her own anxiety disorder. Ms. Warner says that she suffers from panic disorder, a severe form of anxiety in which a person can have multiple anxiety attacks every day, even in the middle of the night. Her post is titled “I Want the Brain of a Monk” Although most people don’t suffer from anxiety this severe, many people have symptoms of anxiety. And research has consistently shown that higher levels of anxiety are related to more memory problems.
What’s the relation to brain fitness? In my brain fitness class, I often mention the usefulness of meditation in helping reduce stress and anxiety, both of which have negative effects on memory. You don’t have to go to Tibet to get the benefits of meditation. If you simply take 10 minutes several times a day to break in to the ongoing rush of getting things done, you’ve made a start. Use those 10 minutes to sit quietly, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply.
If you do that every day for two weeks, I think you’ll notice that you feel calmer and better able to focus. And if you’re better able to focus, you will be better able to pay attention and remember things.
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.
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