Concentration Practices

Humans’ use of technology fractures our attention spans. And because attention is critical to accessing sustainable sources of happiness, our use of technology has the potential to negatively impact everything that we do. Although I don’t think that there are any methods as reliable as a disciplined meditation practice for improving our faculties of attention (other than Ritalin and smoking), I’ve come up with a few techniques that can be used on the fly. Even though they range from only a few seconds to a few minutes, they invoke large amounts of concentration in small amounts of time. In an arbitrarily numbered list, here they are:

1. Write with your non-dominant hand. As you do this, try especially hard to relax all of the muscles that you are clenching including relieving the tension in your face. You may have to write very slowly to be able to relax at all, or even to notice that you are tense.

2. Write words on a page, but try not to know what word you are going to write until the last possible instant. Sometimes I even have a letter or two down and then switch the word that I am forming. This is a useful technique as it forces you to be hyper-aware of your own mental projections and their influence on subsequent behaviour.

3. When you catch yourself thinking thoughts, imagine that the voice in your head is coming from somewhere other than your head. If you play close attention, you realize that the voice in your head actually overlays everything within the field of your awareness (and can reach a point where it is the only thing in your field of awareness). By imagining that your voice is coming from, say, your hands, you keep a foot in the field of sensory experience as your thoughts go on, which helps to break their spell.

4. Stare at your face in the mirror, but focus on something in your peripheral vision. This can be done every day while brushing teeth. Hopefully you brush your teeth every day. This technique can help loosen our brains’ fascination with faces while at the same time train you to be consciously aware of more of your visual field.

5. When walking, sitting, or doing whatever, imagine firework-like visuals. Think Rust Cohle-type hallucinations as he drives his car down the street. This is simply a portable distraction from mental ruminations while keeping one focused on visuals.

6. Think of someone that you have strong feelings towards (be they angry or loving), then as abruptly as possible switch your focus to the feeling of your body. Go back and forth between these states of mind, attempting to ‘leave each one behind’ as you continually switch.

7. Don’t look in mirrors when walking past them.

8. Have a cold shower, but rather than tensing up, force your body to relax. Try to focus on your breath. It’s okay. You will be fine, and if you do it enough you will start to like cold showers as much or more than hot showers (for real).

9. Close one eye and try to focus on the dark behind the closed eye, rather than the sights coming through the open eye.

10. When you notice yourself going to habitually check your phone, don’t follow through.

11. Scan words on a page/screen but try not to comprehend them. The feeling evoked is a feeling of mental relaxation rather than mental strain.

12. Scroll through the front page of Reddit, reading all the headlines, but then close your browser without clicking any links.

13. Stand on one foot with your eyes closed while you brush your teeth. Work out your cerebellum which, in addition to improving balance and attention, may also help regulate anxiety.

14. When strong feelings for someone habitually interrupt your thoughts – and you notice that this is the case – perform a reality check to let yourself know that you aren’t dreaming. A reality check could involve counting your fingers, looking at a clock twice in a row to make sure that the time doesn’t change, or repeatedly glancing at words to make sure that they remain the same. Although this habit requires a good amount of mental discipline to lift one out of thoughts of a crush, it can reduce the time spent agonizing over thoughts of another human. Reality checks are good for focusing the mind away from strong distractions because, unlike most other thoughts, when performed repeatedly they highlight the fundamentally insubstantial nature of all waking phenomena. Plus, one is making one’s self more likely to lucid dream which offers further opportunities for loosening neuroses in life. The psychological freedom that comes with lucid dreaming is the converse of the psychological constriction that can come with a crush (which offers great incentive to stick with this concentration practice).

15. Expose yourself to stimuli that trigger the emotion of disgust, while trying to resist succumbing to any resulting visceral reaction. Such stimuli will likely be smells or sights. Feelings of disgust regularly stop us from thinking clearly on issues, so getting this emotion in check is useful. Examples of disgust running amok include the refusal to acknowledge the horrors of factory farming because the reality is too over-stimulating to think about, traditional views towards non-monogamous/non-heterosexual relationships, racism (demeaned groups are often portrayed as filthy sub-human animals), and the perception of racism/prejudice where none exists (as demonstrated by Ben Affleck on Bill Maher when he lost his capacity for rational thought – “It’s gross, it’s racist”).

16. When touching something, feel where the surface of your skin ends and the object begins. Notice that the thought of being able to feel a distinction here is an illusion – such distinction cannot be discerned when witnessing bare tactile sensation.

17. When hearing, notice whether sound is perceived at the ear or in the outside world. Sound appears to be in two places at once, depending on the attention that you bring to it. Louder sounds that can damage the ears tend to bring our focus to the ears themselves. Think about how strange it is that you can notice sound at your ears, while effortlessly forming some idea of where it came from.

18. Look directly at an object, then move it to your periphery and notice how it appears to shrink in size.

19. Notice how when you look away from a scene your brain forms a visual representation of that scene so that you remain oriented in space without needing visual input. Flash back and forth between the purely mental visual representation and the actual sight, paying attention to how much visual information is lost in the mental representation (despite the hazy feeling that your mental representation is fully detailed).

20. Notice how when you look at an object you often imagine how it would feel, even if only in the background of your awareness.

21. Post a comment online relating to a topic that you care about, then don’t check replies or don’t reply to users even if you know that you’ve got a good response. Overcoming strong urges, especially when they relate to the online world, is a useful skill.

22. When scrolling through Facebook, dating apps or the like, try to keep your breath at the forefront of your consciousness. If this is too difficult, try to notice how quickly your brain evaluates what is good or bad on social media and imagine how this reinforced snap evaluation carries over into the non-online world.

23. When it’s dark, try to precisely spot where light ends and darkness begins. This is surprisingly difficult to do.

24. When you want to change tracks to another song, don’t. Notice how once you start paying attention to a song, the urge to change it lessens.

25. When listening to music, focus on instruments that you don’t normally notice. So often, we think our way through songs – by focusing on drums, bass, or accompanying instruments, we catch more layers of the music.

26. When driving, notice how you can always see the dash. We spend thousands of hours driving, most of them with wandering minds. Driving – when roadways aren’t challenging – provides excellent opportunities for building concentration.

27. When you go to check your phone, first take five to ten breaths. Notice the anxiety and difficulty with which you are faced to make it through just a few breaths. If your phone can affect your mental state this much, why not try to distance yourself from it?

28. Tune your mind into the suffering of others. At some level, most people are suffering most of the time. By paying attention to the ways that others suffer, we lift our minds out of our own troubles while brewing compassion for others