The brain is like a muscle. The more you practice certain things, the stronger the connection is getting and the better things work. Your brain gets better and better as you practice, because you’re strengthening the neural connections involved in that behavior. To achieve this you have to separate yourself for increasing periods of time from the sources of your distraction.
Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind at once. we’re very single-minded. We have very limited cognitive capacity. But rather than acknowledge this, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960’s computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things or more simultaneously. They called it Multi-tasking.
What we’re doing when we multitask is learning to be skillful at a superficial level. The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
Your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pickup and figure out where it left off - and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.
If you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do. If you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take 23 minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus. Scientist have shown that our collective ability to pay attention really is rapidly shrinking.
We have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth. If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature - and you build that into your daily life - you begin to train your attention and focus.
For a long time we took our attention for granted, as if it was a cactus that would grow in even the most desiccated climate. Now we know it’s more like an orchid, a plant that requires great care or it will wither.
Do one thing at a time
Sleep for at least 7 hours
Read books
Exercise at least 3 days a week
Eat nutritious food
Let your mind wander