The "five more" rule

The “five more” rule is a very simple, but effective, aid to concentration…

Whenever you feel like quitting – just do five more – five more minutes, five more exercises, five more pages, five more sums, five more verbs – and build on it.

The “five more” rule is effective because it pushes you beyond the point of frustration and helps build mental endurance. It’s also a form of training as well as being a way of getting something accomplished.

The “five more” rule is a manageable amount and can be built on. It creates its own reward so it’s satisfying, and it’s a way of sustaining concentration.

Concentration is an act of endless practice; the occasional effort that becomes a habit.

Give it a go, and see how much more you can achieve.

What is the art of concentration?

Put simply, art is the product of human creativity. In this context, the art of something – be it medicine, conversation, or concentration – is a skill improved upon by study, observation and practice. It becomes a product of that personal creativity and application.

We may understand how the brain works and what it needs to concentrate. We may also have quite a clear idea of what we habitually do to prevent it from concentrating!

Those are the facts. We can now choose whether to apply this knowledge – and that is when it becomes an art.

The art of concentration is to apply the knowledge we have of ourselves – our abilities, our personality types, what works for us, and what we do to prevent ourselves from concentrating, and what we could do to create a better chance of concentrating – through study, observation and practice. It becomes an active choice, and something we can have control over.

Some people may find that the art of concentration comes more naturally to them than to others, but it’s probably just as much a learnt skill for them as it is for the rest of us. They may just have learnt it more readily, perhaps because of their personality type, their style of learning, or their motivation – whatever it is, they have found it and are benefiting from it and the rest of us can, too.

Teachers often write on school reports – must learn to concentrate better – implying that through study, observation and practice, we can all learn the art of concentration.

And we can.

www.theartofconcentration.co.uk

Are you tired but wired?

Finding it hard to switch on may be because you are finding it hard to switch off.

Chronic lack of sleep means that all those awake hormones – adrenalin and cortisol – are going into overdrive to compensate for lack of down time. Persistent reliance on your own reserves rather than taking time off to recuperate means that your body gets used to feeling wired. Feeling wired begins to feel normal – except you also begin to feel jangled, irritable, and less able to concentrate.

But it’s a vicious circle because, once you’ve reached this state of hyper alertness, fuelled by an excess of hormones, it’s really hard to switch off.

But it’s important to recognise these early signs of physical adaptation to what is a pattern of chronic stress, because in the end, being constantly on ‘red alert’ begins to affect not only your capacity for concentration, but also your health. Insomnia may be the first obvious sign, which further compounds the problem. The more tired you become, the less able you are to sleep.

In the short term, we cope. In the long term, it is very stressful physically and emotionally and damages our ability to concentrate and function well, and our relationships and health.

Six steps towards alleviating this problem and enhancing your ability to concentrate:

· Reduce distractions – turn off your mobile, iPod, email alert, music. It will feel odd at first, but stay with it – aim to do one thing at a time without background stimulation

· Focus on your breathing. Calm your inner body and you will help calm your mind. This takes practice

· Go for a walk outside, even if it’s for 20 minutes around the block during your lunch break. Some fresh air, natural light, physical exercise – these all help to break stressful patterns

· Factor in some regular, but calming exercise three times a week – no pumping iron at the gym – walking, yoga, t’ai chi, swimming – for a minimum of one hour. No iPod, just focus on what you are doing physically so you can reconnect your mind and body

· Eat nutritiously and regularly and cut out caffeinated drinks altogether for the moment – that’s tea, coffee and colas – and other artificial stimulants

· Clear your bedroom of TV, computers, music systems – it should be your calm refuge, designed for sleep: peaceful and dark. Go to bed and get up at a regular hour to re-set your sleep/wake cycle

The myth of multitasking

Now let’s be clear here, there’s multitasking and there’s multitasking.

Listening to the radio while washing-up, driving or knitting can be classified as multitasking, as can walking and chewing gum, but it’s the sort of multitasking that constantly interrupts the brain’s ability to process information that’s really at issue here.

The myth is that we can multitask and still be proficient at learning a new skill or new facts. Truth is, while the neuroplasticity of our brains makes it possible to multitask, it comes at a cost.

By constantly switching back and forth between tasks that are concerned with visual processing and physical co-ordination, we distract the brain from its ability to utilise the higher centres of learning and memory.

"Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn," said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of a study published in 2006. "Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialised, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.”

"The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember," Poldrack added. "Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don't learn as well as if you had paid full attention."

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/8354

So while it’s perfectly possible to, say, write a report, do your maths homework, or revise for an exam while checking emails, conversing on MSN, or sending and receiving text messages, the constant interruptions mean that although you can probably get the work done, you won’t remember much of what you did 24 hours later.

With constant interruptions, it takes longer and is less effective. Concentrate well, and you probably only need to do it once to remember something. Constant distractions probably mean you will – in the long run – waste time, having to do it over and over before it “sticks”.

Your brain can do what you ask of it perfectly well, as long as you don’t keep on interrupting it while it’s doing it.

Study shows older brains become more vulnerable to distraction

A series of memory tasks, carried out by three different age groups - 20-30 years, 40-60 years, and 65-87 years - while using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), showed different patterns of brain activity between the age groups, and that we become less efficient at ignoring distractions as we age.

So what can you do? By being aware that we are more easily distractible as we age, we can take steps to ensure that we focus more attentively when we want to concentrate, whether this is to help us learn something new, or to retain information better.

"Older adults should try and reduce distractions in their environment and concentrate on one task at a time. It may be as easy as turning down the radio when reading," says senior Rotman Research Institute scientist and lead study author, Dr Cheryl Grady.

It's also important to remember that what's good for the body, is also good for the brain - regular exercise, nutritious food, enough relaxation and sleep, adequate mental stimulation - all of which will enable the brain to function as well as possible in spite of possible age-related differences.

http://www.baycrest.org/videos/videopages.asp?video=ttux3467h

Does concentration deteriorate as we age?

One of the things that make it easy to concentrate is novelty. To a baby, his toes are a novelty - what are they? what do they do? why are they there? - and babies can be transfixed for hours, or until the next novelty comes along. Certainly, the novelty of our toes wears off sooner or later.

The older we get, the more used we are to what happens in life, and the less novel it is. The first time you take a bus as a child, it’s an exciting event. The more times you do it, the less interesting it becomes until, over time, it’s just a routine backdrop to your life and you hardly register it.

So, day-to-day events hardly warrant the sort of attention we originally gave them. We can do a whole sequence of things with hardly a thought. Then we leave one room to collect something from another, and realise we’ve forgotten what we came for. Help! Is our memory deteriorating?

Sure, the most notable psychological feature as we age is short-term memory impairment and lengthening of response time, so we take a little longer to retrieve and process information. But remove the differences that these two factors contribute to tests based on vocabulary, general information and well-practised tasks, and results show negligible differences between older and younger adults.

What’s more likely is that you've got out of the habit of concentrating on what you were about to do – because most of the time with routine tasks you don’t have to.

So, time to get back into the habit of concentrating. Time to stop multitasking and asking your brain to juggle six things at once. Time to concentrate.

Does lack of sleep affect concentration?

In February 2010, BBC's Newsround, a children's TV programme, published the results of its sleep survey. One thousand children, aged nine to 11 years, completed a questionnaire on their sleep habits. Most said they went to bed around 21.30, but up to a quarter said it was 22.00 or later. Half of them said they weren't getting enough sleep.

Scientists and health experts have linked a lack of sleep to problems with concentration.

This is hardly surprising. Lack of sleep is quite physically stressful to the body. To compensate, we produce more stress hormones - adrenalin and cortisol - and these give us a boost over the short term. But persistent levels of these hormones can make you feel a bit jumpy - much like an excess of caffeine - and this reduces the ability to concentrate.

We all need enough deep, slow-wave sleep, so that the brain moves into Delta wave pattern, the sleep that restores us physically as well as mentally. For children, of whom we demand such a lot during the school years, this is especially important.

So much so that Glasgow City Council is asking a sleep counsellor, expert Nikki Cameron who works with Sleep Scotland, to work in four of its secondary schools.

Advice will include winding down schedules before going to bed, relaxation activities, and removing TVs and computers from bedrooms.

"Sleep is important for emotional and physical wellbeing, and for learning, because that is when memories are processed and the brain can store the learning," says Cameron.

They also cite research from the University of Minnesota that found A-grade students had, on average, 15 minutes more sleep a night than those achieving mainly B grades.

The same probably applies to the rest of us. If you want to concentrate better, make sure you're getting enough sleep.