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Absentmindedness sucks.
You forget where you put your keys. Your car disappears from the parking lot. You left the stove on again.
Well, guess what?
There’s a cure for absentmindedness.
It’s called focus, and you’re about to learn three ridiculously boring ways to develop it.
The following techniques work best in combination, but obviously life changes work best when you add them one by one, so pick your favorite and dive in.
But if you have to begin anywhere, I recommend that you start with establishing a basic framework by understanding …
The Stunning Magic Of Being Boring
Boring?
Oh yes, and here’s why:
Just about every successful person in history has lived a life of constraint. Check out the following video and beneath that, I’ll break out some of the key points.
As you’ve just learned, highly boring people live exciting lives. They reduce everything they do to the essentials, including:
- Wearing similar clothes and eating repetitive meals every day to eliminate decision fatigue.
- Isolating tasks and remove distractions. You can do this by working in cafes without WiFi. Leave your smartphone at home and bring only a pad of paper and a pen and your laptop if you must.
- Wear earplugs if noise bothers you, or if you like music, try an app that features focusfriendly compositions, like focusatwill.com.
- Hammering away at carefully defined tasks without adding new things to do willy nilly.
- Keeping a journal to record their activities and track their time. You can even keep an attention span journal.
The reason developing a life based on constraints helps develop focus and eliminates absentmindedness is because you give yourself far less about which to be absentminded.
Not only that, but should you fall prey to absentmindedness, you’ll find your way back to focus.
Why?
Because the mountains you climb in your daily life won’t be hidden behind the fog of multitasking.
Frankly, when you limit your activities and focus on the essentials, you’ll not only find and climb your mountains, you’ll move them entirely out of your life and move on to finer things.
Even if you have a boss, it should be possible for you to isolate your most high margin tasks. Write a proposal, make a meeting and ask to redefine your activities.
If your boss rejects your suggestion, either track your time on your own time to prove what you can do on your own, or …
Find Another Boss!
Speaking of which, if you want to bypass working for the man altogether, becoming an entrepreneur or self-employed is a great way to develop focus.
Placing yourself in a situation that forces you to get results or starve will rip absentmindedness from your life and leave it wriggling on the floor like a helpless insect.
As you can see, developing a boring life really can add tremendous excitement to your days on planet earth. So get started. Time is ticking.
The Extraordinary Power Of Sitting Still For No Reason Whatsoever
One of the most regular activities you can add to your life involves one of the most boring and yet tremendously exciting activities ever invented by humanity …
Yes, we’re talking about meditation.
Would you like to know why so many people struggle to incorporate this simple activity into their daily routines?
The answer is simple:
It’s Because They’re Trying To Meditate
Sorry, dear Memorizers, but that’s the wrong road to enlightenment and a quick path to suffering.
But before we talk about how to meditate the Magnetic way, here’s what meditation can do for you. All of these features of the world’s oldest brain training technique are scientifically proven and should persuade you to add meditation to your daily routine.
Meditation …
- Increases focus
- Creates emotional control
- Improves your working memory (luca link)
- Reduces “wandering mind” syndrome
- Lowers pain
Each of these benefits of meditation reduces absentmindedness because when you’re not in pain, and you eliminate mind wandering, focus glides in to replace these distractions.
To maintained your renewed focus, all you need to do is keep meditating.
Boring, right?
Not necessarily.
Not when you know …
How To Meditate In A Buddha-shaped Nutshell
Surprisingly, proper meditation is super easy to do. You need only chuck the idea that meditation is about experiencing socalled “nomind” and sit just to sit.
That’s it.
Sit down and let your mind wander. When first starting out, don’t bother with breathing exercises or mantras.
Sit just to sit.
After a few moments, you’ll become aware of the fact that you’re sitting on the floor, completely lost in thought.
When this happens, you’ll become present. You’ll be in the room, totally focused on the present moment instead of fantasizing about the future, playing some alternative version of things you’ve done in the past, or talking to yourself.
In reality, all that inner-dialogue is far more boring than meditating.
Why?
Because You’ve Repeated All That Junk To Yourself Before!
When that moment of clarity comes, even if it takes a few sessions to get into it, you’ll feel pleasure, elation, and yes, enlightenment. That’s all enlightenment is: the elucidation that the present moment is all we have and you can be in it.
Here’s a practical, step-by-step meditation guide you can use every day for the rest of your life.
1. Pick a time. Morning, noon, evening, it doesn’t matter. Regularity matters.
If you can’t commit to an actual time of day, create an After X meditation practice.
For example, meditate after eating a major meal. Meditating after eating can feel especially profound because, so long as you’ve eaten nonirritating foods, you’ll be physically content. And who knows? You might also digest your food better.
2. Pick a place to meditate. It could be your bedroom floor, basement rumpus room or backyard garden.
Face East, West, North, South … Take your pick. Which direction doesn’t matter, so long as you have one.
Remember, the way to eliminate absentmindedness and increase focus is to eliminate decision fatigue. If you give yourself too much to think about, you eliminate the chances that you’ll get down to business.
3. (Optional) Set a timer.
Tim Ferris suggests that you do less than you think you can. In other words, if you think you can sit still for ten minutes, set the timer for eight minutes, maybe even five.
If you do this, I would add that once the timer rings, you turn it off and then sit a little longer. You can move a little or even stand up,but do squeeze a few more moments into the session. It’s often in this second, untimed session where the magic happens.
4. Sit and do nothing else but sit.
A lot of people teach that you should progressively focus on each muscle of your body from head to foot. This practice is often called a “body scan.”
By all means, experiment with this. But understand that it is not waiting for your awareness of the present moment to arrive. It is not allowing yourself to be lost in thought so you can catch yourself everywhere but here.
5. When you finally arrive, enjoy and observe.
The more you practice this simple form of meditation, the longer these moments of arrival will last.
Clarity will also bubble up in different ways throughout your days. Although it’s unlikely and undesirable that absentminded fantasizing can be eliminated from your life, you can limit the amount of time your mind spends wandering out of control.
There are also dietary reasons why you can’t focus. If that’s the case …
Cut The Booze With A Vengeance
Drinking’s awesome, right? You get a buzz, inhibitions loosen and that ugly stranger across the room starts looking a lot more attractive.
By the same token, your vision blurs. Your speech slurs. You develop difficulty walking as your reactions slow. Worst of all, you impair your memory, including your working memory for two days or more.
Worse, alcohol interrupts neurogenesis. Scientists once thought that the brain doesn’t generate new cells, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.
However, we now know that new brain cells generate from stem cells and alcohol interferes with this process. The lack of new growth in super important parts of your brain (like the hippocampus) leads to foggy thinking, reduced concentration and poor decision-making.
Of course, not all people react the same to alcohol, but even so, why take the risk?
Dump The Sugar
Did you know that sugar changes the structure of your brain?
Not only that, but it messes with neurotransmitters like acetylcholine. That, dear Memorizers, is one supercritical substance when it comes to your ability to learn.
Sugar also leads to brain atrophy, which itself leads to dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Those conditions involve more than absentmindedness. They are a complete and permanent journey into the void.
Eat brain healthy substances instead. These include:
- Leafy greens
- Berries
- Whole grains
- Nuts and seeds
- Fatty fish
- Avocado
- Bananas
- Green tea
- Beets
- Bone broth (link)
- Broccoli
- Celery
- Coconut oil
- Egg yolks
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Rosemary
- Tumeric
- Walnuts
Warning: Dark chocolate (but beware of this because prepared chocolate bars usually dissipate the helpful ingredients. You’d need to eat 70 or more to experience any benefits)
And of course, drink water. Like there’s no tomorrow. Without regular hydration, your brain will shrink in mass and it can’t detoxify.
And it’s 85% water, after all, so it’ll feel in good company when you keep it swimming.
This Is Just The Beginning
There is a lot more you can do to increase focus in your life. Reducing clutter, regular walks, playing games and being social all
contribute to greater focus.
Simple stuff, right?
Put these simple practices into your life and you’ll reduce absentmindedness to the bare minimum. You’ll focus like a hawk on your goals and become the Magnetic King or Queen of your realm, just like you’ve always wanted to be.
Muito bom, achei fantastico esse artigo, vou praticar a meditação, pelo menos é muito mais simples que a explicação que encontrei em outros lugares.
Eu estou contente que você achou isso útil. 🙂
Fun Anthony as usual, although there seem to be a lot more than 3 things here!
Thanks, Rosemary.
Yes, I guess there are more than 3. But hopefully people can focus on the main ones to get the biggest and best advantages first before milking treasure from the sub themes. 🙂