4/19/2023 0 Comments Focus undistracted![]() ![]() Not only will this provide them practice with boredom, it will also expose them to the efficiency that can be gained by working without distraction. During these periods, they may feel bored and their minds may rebel, but through repetition, these stretches without distraction will come to seem less daunting.Ī productive place to enforce this disconnection is during homework time. The best way to accomplish this goal is for parents to remove, on a regular basis for relatively long periods of time (at least an hour) kids’ access to phones, tablets, computers and television. To help kids learn how to focus, parents must first help wean them from this dependence on stimuli. Most young people are uncomfortable with this state, having instead trained their minds to expect a quick dash of stimuli (be it responding to a text or checking a social media account) at the faintest hint of boredom. So how can parents help their kids focus? In my experience, there are two general types of training activities that matter: those that increase their comfort with boredom, and those that increase the intensity of their concentration.įocusing on something hard is almost always boring in the sense that it lacks a steady stream of novel stimuli. ![]() Teaching kids how to live a life filled with focused attention means teaching them to live a life with less anxiety and more meaning. ![]() There’s a certain anxiety that seems to arise from constant distraction, and this anxiety can be replaced with deep satisfaction when you instead allow yourself to get lost in a single activity. If parents can teach their kids to work for long periods without any such distraction, the quality of what they produce-be it a term paper or answers to their calculus homework-will be of much higher quality.įinally, giving something your rapt attention can be intrinsically satisfying. Most young people, of course, work in a state of constant context switches of this type, meaning that most young people are working at a fraction of their mental capacity. In other words, if you quickly check your phone or e-mail inbox, your brain will operate more slowly for the next 15 to 30 minutes. Recent research on the attention residue effect, for example, reveals that when you switch your attention from one target to another, there’s a residue left behind from the first target that reduces your cognitive performance for a while before fading. A large part of the explanation for this apparent paradox is that these star students were able to work with great intensity-getting their work done in a fraction of the time required by their distracted classmates.įocus also produces better results. One of my most surprising findings was that many of the very best college students studied significantly less than most of their peers. To research this book, I interviewed college students with exceptional GPAs to find out more about their habits. This is an effect I first encountered over a decade ago, when I wrote a book called How to Become a Straight-A Student. A student who can focus intensely, for example, can master classroom lessons much faster than his or her peers working in a state of muddled attention-helping the student avoid the late-night studying and related burnout that often accompanies high academic performance. Decades of research from both psychology and neuroscience underscore that undistracted concentration is required to learn complicated information efficiently. ![]()
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