It's just like whenever I try and do anything I start craving some sort of distraction

I can't just focus on one thing at a time even if that thing is

Sleeping but I have things I want to do things I want to focus on I just don't because refreshing Instagram is always

Gonna be easier

And

It's a problem and I'm tired of it I am tired of feeling like my life is so far out of my own control

So today we are figuring out how to stop scrolling and how to start paying attention

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Motivational exercises guided meditations and more headspace has over a thousand pieces of content to help you be kind to your mind

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All you have to do is sign up with our link in the description or scan the QR code on screen

So what's in the box?

This is an electroencephalogram or an EEG it measures electrical activity in the brain which are associated with certain performance metrics like attention

Excitement and stress. Does that look good? How's it? How do I look now?

These things usually look a little bit more threatening and wiry

However, I reached out to this brand called emotive that creates more simplified consumer options

They gave me a little discount so I could actually afford this for the video and I look like a cyborg

I think it looks cute. Okay, so these are my brainwaves and if I focus on it really hard

It should be able to translate these into more understandable metrics like attention

Look at that. You see the building attention and spike in excitement. That's my brain

I kind of feel like a video game character and these are my stats. This is cool

Now I should note that EEG data can be pretty noisy and things like movement can really impact the results

However, I think that having any level of recording is an improvement because I basically never pay attention to my attention it only ever really comes up when I'm feeling guilty about my screen time or I realize that I've done nothing all day and

Only having these really infrequent and negative interactions with my problem makes it really hard to be objective about the whole thing to understand

How bad it actually is and see if it's getting better or worse

But now with the help of this brain scanner

I finally got to measure a baseline for my attention span without getting bogged down by guilt or forgetting to focus on my focus

I wore the EEG while I worked, ate, exercised, and relaxed. I did take it off a few times because it could get pretty uncomfortable after really long stretches

But overall it was pretty easy to ignore while I just lived my life for the rest of the week

Alongside the EEG I installed a program to automatically track how often I switch tasks on my computer and I recorded how many times I

Picked up my phone. Did you know that you can't actually export your screen time data?

Then I wrote a quick script to compile all this data and visualize it. Here is my life for the past three days

Oh

The x-axis is the number of hours in a day. These blue bars represent the number of times

I picked up my phone. This gray line tracks how productive I was at my computer and these colored lines are the median performance metrics from my EEG. Now some highlights include

This moment where I picked up my phone to start debugging the app that I was using to scan my brain

And then I ended up

Opening Instagram and spending the next two hours on it. However during my meetings the next day

I was like super interested and attentive, right? Great. No, it's because I kept picking up my phone

I was supposed to be on a call. I kept opening up Instagram, but it's not all bad news

There are these instances where I put down my phone

I get into the zone and my brain just lights up

The only issue is that in my eight-hour workday, it only happens for like an hour

It's over here at like two o'clock or five o'clock or ten o'clock

Now something similar does happen to my brain when I am working out

But how often am I doing that? All this is to say is that for these 16-ish hours that I am awake

I'm only engaged and focused for like 12% of it. The rest of the time the 88% of the time I'm all over the place. I'm checked out or I'm distracted

This could be most of the rest of my life unless we do something about it

So let's do that

So I started looking for any books about attention, focus, and distractions and I found a lot of them

There was just one problem. They're all identical

They invent different buzzwords and they switch up the personal anecdotes that they blur with legitimate science

But fundamentally if you've read one, you've read them all

Fortunately, you don't need to read any of them because here are the three things that you actually need to know

If you want to fix your focus. One, attention and focus are different things

Attention is a broad concept that boils down to our general awareness while focus is one process that controls that awareness

Concentrating it on something specific

Two, focus is a limited and exhaustible resource

So you can only really focus on one thing at a time and your ability to do that will tire out the further you get

From rest. Three, focus also filters out distractions

The more there are the more of your focus is being wasted

Now some research exists suggesting that certain forms of cognitive training can increase your capacity and ability to focus

But the type of training and the effectiveness has varying results

The brain is complicated and there's a lot of nuance in the details

Especially when you're trying to find things that work for you in your specific circumstances. So to fix my focus

I'm actually only going to do a handful of very simple things that support what we know about focus. Here's the plan

First, I need to manage my distractions starting with the obvious

My phone. I deleted the apps that I never use, set up time limits for the apps

I use way too much, everything except for my wallet, and muted basically all of my notifications

I also installed this app that replaces icons with text

So now I need to put in a little more effort before I open anything. I also changed my display to grayscale

I have never wanted to use my phone less. God, this sucks

I wasn't kidding. Almost immediately my phone pickups and screen time dropped dramatically

However, the silence made me notice the sheer number of internal distractions

I have too. These passing thoughts that just take me off task like wondering if I need to buy more toilet paper

Wishing I learned a musical instrument as a kid or thinking about what I'm gonna have for dinner

They were rarely urgent but often important enough that I didn't want to ignore or forget them

So I dedicated a page in my notebook to quickly write them down for later. When later came

I sorted through those thoughts based on action, importance, and time sensitivity and kept it in mind when I was building my schedule

Which got way more specific. Now, I'm usually the type of person who only puts like events in my calendar. A normal person

However, a lot of the books that I've been reading have recommended time blocking or time boxing

I don't know. It's just setting aside time to do individual tasks

Apparently it helps you avoid the temptation to multitask

So every morning I took all of my work, chores, exercises, and hobbies and plugged them into my calendar

Now I found that the secret is that it's not as simple as just putting an hour aside for each thing. Since focus is an

Exhaustible resource, I need to take into account my energy levels throughout the day and how much effort each task is gonna take

Like reading research papers and writing takes a lot of focus for me. It's just really boring

But listening to audiobooks or animating, I'm locked in. I actually find it really hard to disengage from the tasks that I really enjoy

So I find myself thinking about them or even continuing to do them past their allotted time

Which means that I should probably think about those switching costs when I'm building my schedule out for the day

Eventually, I realized this process could be a little more automated

So I got Taha to put the process together in a notion template

Now I can input tasks, tag them, and it'll show me an order that I can drag into my calendar

I found it useful and if you want to give it a try, I'll include it in our next newsletter

But once I controlled my external and internal distractions and built out a schedule that minimized multitasking and optimized for my energy levels

All that was left was actually focusing

It was amazing. I was using my phone less and getting more done

My brain was lighting up. I was way more engaged in everything I did

I found different soundtracks to make it easier to get in the zone and life was great until it wasn't

It is 12

I haven't left bed yet. I've just been using my phone full color every 15 minutes. I hit remind me in 15 minutes

And then 15 minutes later I do it again

Just feels like we're back where we started

I ended up using my phone for seven hours that day more than I had all week prior

I had things I could do things I should do but I just

Couldn't bring myself to get up. I

Am kind of proud that I managed to pull up my code on my phone and see if there were any clues in my data

That could explain what went wrong

I know it's pathetic

But it was a small victory that led to an interesting discovery

The nights that I used my phone past midnight led to days where I felt more distracted and picked up my phone more often

I learned in an old video how important sleep could really be

So I decided to just give up on the day get some sleep and try again tomorrow

I feel like I'm drowning. It's like I'm not doing anything hard, right? I'm just doing my stuff

I'm just trying to focus on it more except I'm trying so hard to focus that

Everything is making me on edge

Like my cat will try and get my attention and I'll be annoyed at him for wanting pats

It's like there's sand falling and I'm trying to catch all of the sand and you can't do it

Am I making any sense?

I really need to make every grain of sand count by like doing everything on target and

Even if I'm enjoying something I can't because I need to move and catch different grains of sand

Hold on, hold on. Hold on. What did you just say?

Have you ever thought about just meditating and doing

Nothing taking a step back away from the thing that you're working on and not working like taking a break

Maybe it was because I was desperate actually it is totally because I was desperate but I decided to try meditation

The only issue is I have no idea how luckily I have headspace

I should probably turn the color on just that you guys can see what the app actually looks like when I ask headspace to

Sponsor a portion of this video

I genuinely thought I was only going to use their focus music and white noise because I love listening to those to the point that

It is ruining my YouTube recommendations and Spotify wrapped

So it's just great to have access to headspace's collection, but headspace also has stretches workouts podcasts and meditation

They have content specifically for beginners like me who don't know where to start. It's in their basics course

But if you don't want to commit to that

They also have shorter exercises including my favorite thing. I discovered on this app, which

Star Wars breathe with Yoda. It's a one-minute breathing exercise and Yoda's just sitting there levitating rocks. I love it

However, they also have longer less structured stuff for people with more experience

Just the sheer amount of variety is probably my favorite thing about headspace

They bring together so many resources to help you be kind to your mind

So even if meditation doesn't end up helping maybe movement will or another cool thing that I found

This is so sick they have ASMR and there's like a thing at the bottom that lets you control the balance between voice and like

Environmental noise headspace do more of this if you want to try out headspace completely for free for 60 days

You can sign up using the link in the description or scan the QR code. Okay, let's learn how to meditate

Hi my first experience with meditation was

Strange now the voice kept telling me to focus on my breathing

But I might have focused a little too hard because I was worried. I forgot how to breathe

I should wear my head scanner thing for this back to breathing, but eventually I think I got the hang of it and after 10 minutes

How am I supposed to know if meditation is working? Is there a light like what happened?

It's just you're supposed to just feel better or feel changed

Did it do anything? I don't know. Do you just keep doing it?

So I just trust the process so for the next few days I continued with my focus schedule and wore my EEG

But I also tried to meditate in the morning or evening or just random moments when I felt like it and

Then something kind of wild happened

Meditation works and I wish I could tell you this because I've achieved enlightenment or I have a newfound sense of peace but no, I

Just feel normal about as normal as the distribution of the sample