🌻How to Train Your Mind to Do Hard Things Without Getting Distracted

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The simple way to train yourself to build better focus

When was the last time you waited for your doctor’s appointment and didn’t check your email? When was the last time you stood in a long queue without opening Instagram? When was the last time you did nothing but enjoyed the present moment?

Take a few seconds to think about these questions. Because they will make you realize how deeply distracted we all are.

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The brain desires novelty and hates boredom. And thanks to modern technology there’s no dearth of novelty around us. We can see what’s going on in the lives of billions of people, read infinite amounts of news, and order things without even lifting a finger.

Read also: If you feel stuck, ask yourself this question

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All of this is robbing us of our true potential. The more you indulge your desire to distract yourself, the weaker your mind becomes.

Every time you open Instagram or order a new dress from Amazon, your mind releases dopamine.

Dopamine is a feel-good hormone. It tells your brain, “Hey, that was good! We should do it more often!” Dopamine, therefore, is largely responsible for the development of addictions in humans.

When we overload the brain with dopamine in our daily lives, it becomes used to a certain baseline of dopamine. As the baseline increases, the brain asks us to perform more of the same action. This explains why people keep scrolling through Instagram for hours.

But here’s the main issue — once the brain becomes used to a certain amount of dopamine, anything that doesn’t release the same amount becomes boring.

Do you wonder why it’s difficult to focus on work when you’ve just spent 37 minutes watching YouTube shorts? That’s because “work” is now boring for the brain. It wants something interesting.

The more you continue this cycle, the more difficult it becomes for you to focus. The solution?

Embrace Boredom

When I started writing online about three years ago, it would take me half a day to write a thousand words. I would get distracted every five minutes.

Only after a few weeks of practice (and meditation), I was able to restore my ability to focus. But to build my concentration abilities even further, I realized I needed to protect my attention throughout the day.

To be able to concentrate deeply, you need to train the mind to embrace boredom. If you resort to a distraction every time you get bored, you’re setting yourself up for failure. When the time comes to work on a cognitively demanding task, your mind will rebel like a monkey whose banana was taken away.

Cal Newport writes in his book Deep Work,

“Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom”

When you go on a diet, you don’t eat vegetables in the morning and junk food throughout the rest of the day. You maintain that discipline as a lifestyle — all the time.

How do you do that? Look at your life and find moments that you’re spending in distraction. Then eliminate those distractions as much as possible. For me, this means:

  • Not listening to music or podcasts when working out or commuting
  • Trying to leave my phone away from me whenever I can
  • Checking emails and messages only at scheduled times during the day
  • Taking small breaks throughout the day to savor a cup of tea or read a few pages of my favorite book instead of wasting time on shallow activities.

Read also: Little things that can change your life and maybe the world

The Bottom Line

Practicing boredom is a way to train your mind to do hard things.

As a culture where everything comes so easily, we no longer know how to focus and concentrate. Everything we want is available at our doorstep without lifting a finger.

Cal Newport explains it beautifully,

“The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, ‘the superpower of the 21st century’.”

As technology advances, those who can learn new things quickly will rise, and those who haven’t trained their minds to focus will be left behind.

Don’t worry; if you’re reading this article, you’re already much ahead of most people. Now, you just need to put in the work.

Contributed by Shivendra Misra

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