A Case for Focus but Also a Case for Distraction
This is the case for focus. And at the same time, it's a case for taking a break from thinking about things directly and doing something else for a while. Often this is what you need to get the answers that evade you.
Yesterday I had a lot of questions in my mind. I am coming off of an injury and looking for new work. As always, I'm optimistic that I can make a name for myself through my entrepreneurial pursuits, but I also recognize that until that happens, I need to pay my bills.
As you can imagine, being on the job hunt, I have a lot of questions and concerns coming up. With so much activity crowding my mental landscape, it became impossible for any answers to make their way in.
With no new answers coming to me and now in a mental fog, I decided to cut through the confusion by taking a short online course. I know, what a nerd! I'm genuinely interested in the subject and needed to take my mind off of myself. But, for my focus, I was rewarded!
I began taking the course, and as I was concentrating on the subject at hand, I started to get answers to the questions I had earlier in the day.
What often happens when you focus on something else, really focus on it for an extended period? Answers to questions you may have had can now come to your mind. They have somewhere to land.
When you have one question after another, and you're in this web of questions, answers, and ideas, there's no space for higher-level solutions to come in. There's no space for answers you may have yet to think of before to enter your mind. When working from that space, the quick fixes you'll get are like low-hanging fruit. And they may not satisfy you. But if you let it go for a while and focus on something else, you can get insights that are a little harder to reach. You may find solutions that you may not have considered before had you settled on one of those easy-to-come-by answers already hanging around in your mind.
This is how yoga works. You focus your mind on something for an hour or so. When you do that, you create a lot of space in your mind. Yoga aims to focus the mind, but an added benefit that's not always guaranteed is you may get some much-wanted answers. But don't go into it with this expectation because, as you may have noticed, chasing things, answers included, leads them to run away from you. Also, you can't program your mind to give a specific answer. As the lyrics go, "you can't always get what you want...but if you try sometime, you'll find you get what you need."
Oh yeah! If you have not noticed, I likened an online course to yoga. Popular yoga is very much the physical (poses) branch of yoga, but there are many others. Some other limbs of yoga involve simply focusing on your breath or even singing. The goal is still the same: to quiet the mind by giving it something on which to focus.
“In practicing a skill at the initial stages, something happens neurologically to the brain that is important for you to understand. When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex (the higher, more conscious command of the brain) are recruited and become more active, helping you in the learning process...The frontal cortex even expands in size during this initial phase, as we focus hard on the task.”
Or, the way I see it:
I share this because our attention spans are falling drastically. We may only sometimes recognize the need for focus, but its power goes far beyond what you can imagine. So the next time you feel trapped in a web of confusion, break through that trap by focusing on something else! And sorry, scrolling through Instagram or TikTok isn't going to cut it. It will have to be engrossing- a short course, a book, or even a movie will do the trick!
