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.