How to Get Your Brain to Focus | Chris Bailey | TEDxManchester

Your minds will release stray thoughts, making you more creative. It can be as simple as just standing in line. Or get a massage. Anything that lets you out. I love this photo. (Laughs) Anything you like to do. Here's my advice: Ask

your

massage therapist to let you carry a notebook during the massage session because ideas always come up and you're always thinking about things, so write them down so you can implement them later. But I think as we get deeper into the research, we have to make two paradigm shifts in how we understand attention. The first is that we believe that we need to integrate more.

There is a lot of buzz around “activism.” I am against activism. I'm one of the laziest people you'll ever meet. I think that's what gives me a lot of ideas that I can write and talk about. We don't need to integrate more. We are doing enough, but more than that. We do so many things that our minds no longer wander enough. This is sad. Because that is the moment when the best ideas and plans come to us. We need more space. If we look at which cars can pass on the highway. What allows cars to cross is not the speed at which they move, contrary to what we think, but the amount of space between cars that allows them to cross.

Our work and our lives move in the same way. The second change is: we believe that distraction is the enemy of concentration. But this is not true. Rather, it is a symptom of why we cannot concentrate, because our

brain

is in a state of overstimulation. I have a challenge for you. A two-week challenge, but it will put

your

brain

in a less alert state. So do you notice what happens to your attention? How many ideas will come to mind? How will your approach change? How many plans will you make? Therefore, make your brain less alert for two weeks.

There are many programs on our phones and devices that make it easier for us to reduce the amount of time we spend on devices. Use one of these features to not only learn more about how you spend your time, but also to learn how you can waste less time so you can think more. Create a ritual of disconnecting from the world every night. One of my favorite daily rituals is to completely disconnect from the Internet from 8 at night to 8 in the morning. My fiancé and I have another disconnection ritual: we disconnect from technology every Sunday, so we can disconnect from the digital world and connect with the physical world, the real world around us.

Rediscover boredom; You don't need to do this for a while. hour. Please don't call Air Canada, it's pure torture. But explore boredom again, just for a few minutes. Lie down on the couch, where does your brain go? And distract your attention. You will find things of great benefit in that state of alert. If something is true from everything I have studied in the world of concentration, it is that the state of our attention determines the state of our life. If we are distracted at every moment, these moments of distraction and hyperstimulation will begin to accumulate and conglomerate until they form a life full of distraction and exhaustion, as if they had no specific purpose.

But when we become less alert and calm our minds, we will reap the rewards in the form of greater productivity,

focus

, creativity, and a better life. Thank you so much. (applause)