How to solve concentration problems?
Let's begin
Trouble concentrating? Work that requires deep immersion is almost unbearable? You can't write a thread about that particular project? What if I told you there's nothing wrong with your concentration? Let's delve into it!
The first thing to say is that your brain is fine, don't worry, nevertheless you have a problem, to figure it out let's go back a few million years...
The time of bitcoin's creation
We're trudging through the jungle, with leaves, insects, animals, berries, birds, mushrooms, etc. in front of us. It's a chaotic flow of information, and we can't tell the difference between the useful and the useless.
But our brains have learned over time to calculate useful information for survival. Returning to the 21st century, we find ourselves in the same jungle, but surrounded only by useful information from our brain's perspective.
Let's give you some examples
Are TV shows useful from the brain's point of view, of course they are! Why?
They give us information about society, about how relationships between people are built, just like for our ancestors information about the relationships of tribesmen, because it allowed us to quickly socially adapt and elevate our status. When we watch soap operas our brain takes it as reality and we want to keep watching it because it's definitely useful.
It's the same with social media, it tells us about other people's lives, who has it better or worse and in this way we adapt our lives to society. Same with news, to know what's going on with the other tribe, tik-tok and other things that get in our way from a Rationality perspective.
Are street advertisements useful, of course, because there are bright colors and information about where to buy good products. So wherever you look for your brain there will be useful information everywhere.
Take our ancestor, who, going into the woods every time, found more and more berries, mushrooms, animals, etc. Those very useful stimuli.
But at some point, going into the forest, our Neanderthal would see ONLY berries, mushrooms and animals, and then these berries would become just huge, mushrooms also huge, animals also gigantic, and our poor ancestor, just eyes would be scattered, he just would not know what to grab and what to do. Can we expect him to be able to walk into the woods and sit down to do a job report. Of course not. Because his brain sees more useful information, he urgently needs to gather all the berries and mushrooms. I hope the logic is clear, let's move on.
21st century
Thus, the same thing happens in the world of modern man. We took the most important information and from it, took even more interesting information, and from it even more useful information, and repeated it 1000 times. And we got social media and the whole world around us. Networks and the whole world around us, soap operas, commercials, billboards, stores, bright signs, the phone.
And we took this compressed lump of berries and mushrooms and animals and threw it right into our brains. And then you catch FOMO because you couldn't do L0. But there's nothing wrong with your brains, they stay focused on the most useful things. And so there are only 3 solutions to this situation, which I'll talk about next.
3 Covenants.
- The first solution ¬- we have to reduce the diameter of the pipe through which all this information is poured on us. Thereby reducing the amount of information, very briefly. That is, sell the TV, if we can delete all unnecessary social networks. Unless it's better to learn to allocate time and find retrodrops by yourself than to wait until the next TH channel writes about it, of course we should not go to extremes, but we need to seriously think about why you need some TH channel. Which shieldposts a lot of information unnecessary to your life. We clear our infofield of rationally useless, but what our brain perceives as very useful.
- The second solution is to reduce the pressure of that tube, what does that mean? Decrease the interestingness. I guess a lot of people think that disciplined people are the ones who want to watch YouTube, but they choose to read a book. No, these are people who have YouTube and a book as one and the same thing. You've got audiobooks on YouTube and paper books on the table, so like there's no such choice, it's such, you might say, a trick on the brain. So we reduce that pressure to a minimum.
- The third solution is to start noticing that this flow of information is pouring into your head. It's called meta-attention, like when you're reading a book and suddenly you notice that you've been thinking about something else. The moment you notice that is meta attention. You can get meta attention through meditation, there's a lot of literature on that, I can give it to anybody who's interested.
Finale
These are the 3 ways that are fundamental to regaining concentration. There are tons of studies on this today. It's not because people have somehow changed, etc., but because every year there is more and more useful information that our brain takes in as useful and we can't get our focus off of that information in any way, we put ourselves in those very chaotic jungles, including tick-tock or instagram, our brain can't discern things rationally, to it is a huge red berry compared to a withered little berry (our boring business), that is the situation we find ourselves in, so there are these 3 ways to solve it.
Also, living in the country if you can will help a lot to free up your brain and improve your focus. I hope I helped you, these solutions are not exactly simple, but it is definitely worth a try, or at least this situation is revealed to you from a different angle.