Breathe - Part 3 to 4

Your mental clarity is dependent on your physical health.

The energy crisis is all over the news. We debate the future of fossil fuels, and look to the promise of renewables. It’s clear the earth’s energy is precious and we need to conserve it.

Yet, when it comes to our own reserves of energy, we’re far less mindful. In fact, we sometimes take perverse pleasure in depleting our energy. We drink to wind down, instead of spending the time we need to meaningfully refresh our minds and bodies. We run on no sleep, slamming double espressos to get through the day, and reach for sugary snacks to ride out the afternoon slump.

There’s no point honing mental clarity and refining mindful thinking techniques if you’re not taking corresponding care of your body. A healthy body is the path to a calm, uncluttered mind.

If you’re feeling distracted, unfocused, and all-around mentally exhausted, you’re likely physically exhausted, too. Sleep is essential for physical and mental energy. Ideally, you should get at least one hour of sleep for every two hours you’re awake.

Let’s say you are getting enough sleep, but you still can’t shake that mid-afternoon malaise. Well, you might not be meant to shake it! Our body’s rhythms enter a natural slump during this time. You could try and fight it, or you could try a power-nap. 

If you’re napping, you’re in good company: Leonardo da Vinci, Salvador Dali, and Winston Churchill were all habitual nappers. In fact, Churchill swore that naps were the secret to his legendary productivity.

Of course, until the workplace catches on to the power-nap, you might not be able to have an afternoon snooze. Don’t turn to coffee or sugar for a quick energy hit! Nourish yourself with brain food. Wholegrains release energy slowly and sustainably into the bloodstream and brain, keeping you alert for longer. Other brain-friendly foods include oily fish and blueberries, both of which are rich in vitamins that are essential to brain function.

Eating right and sleeping well are necessary for our well-being. Relaxation is another necessity yet many of us treat it as a luxury, or try to fast-track it. 

Unwinding properly takes time. Are you taking shortcuts to relaxation, like drinking a glass of wine or spending a few hours in front of Netflix? There’s no need to cut these pleasures out of your life, but don’t let them crowd out deeper, more mindful forms of relaxation, like meditation, a long walk or bath, or an hour’s reading.

Mental focus is a muscle you can exercise.

Did you know you’re the custodian of a resource so potent and – potentially – so profitable that start-ups, apps, and websites spend millions trying to squeeze it from you? That resource is your attention. Are you making the most of it?

If you’ve never found it difficult to settle down to work or looked up to find that you’ve spent 45 minutes down an internet rabbit-hole, you can go ahead and skip this blink. It sounds like you’ve honed your focus to perfection! For the rest of us, however, there’s no need to despair. Refining your powers of focus might be easier than you think.

Let’s begin by defining how focus should look. Many people think that applying themselves to a task with focus means approaching everything with the intensity of solving a complex physics equation. But this laser-focus is actually only one mode of focus. Just like a camera, we can zoom in on granular details and also zoom out to capture a panorama. Finding your focus doesn’t mean losing your perspective.

Similarly, finding focus doesn’t mean ignoring all distractions. Sometimes, our tendency to distraction is actually trying to tell us something. If you sit down to do something but just can’t focus, ask yourself why. Is there a deeper reason? Perhaps you’re afraid of failing, and need to address this fear before you continue. Or perhaps you don’t want to tackle the task because you know, subconsciously, it’s not a good use of your energy.

Nevertheless, distractions can stop us from using our time and attention wisely. If you often feel like distractions prevent you from making the most of your days, try a simple time management technique like the pomodoro strategy, developed by entrepreneur Francesco Cirillo. Set a timer to 25 minutes – the length of a pomodoro interval. At the end of the pomodoro, take a 5 minute break. After a few pomodoros, take a longer break. The idea is that it’s easier to sustain focused, distraction-free bursts of work over shorter intervals. 

But working on your focus doesn’t need to stop at a pomodoro. To achieve deeper, more profound focus, try meditation. Yogic meditation was actually developed to hone mental focus. And this ancient practice has modern credibility: neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, have found that meditation improves our ability to ignore distractions and to shift from one task to another without losing focus in the meantime.