Make Mindfulness Part of Your Routine To Increase Mental Focus

There are many times in our daily lives when we feel fully overwhelmed by personal and professional duties. We strive for work-life balance on a daily basis, yet we are just human. We go about our daily lives without pausing to consider what we're doing and why we're doing it.

To be fully aware of your emotions, you must first comprehend your mental process. If you're experiencing a strong feeling, such as anger or sadness, and you know what idea or action prompted the emotion, you'll be able to cope with it more effectively and avoid acting rashly. Practicing such mindful habits can help you deal with a challenging situation in a new way and can significantly improve your attitude.

Our consciousness is always focused outward. It constantly reacts to our environment. And this sometimes leads to a build-up of stress, the strain on mental energy, and weakened focus. To ensure that you stay away from the negative impacts, it is important to practice mindful habits.

The practice of mindfulness aids the development of new neural networks in the brain. You're essentially retraining your brain to find better and new methods to handle activities and cope with stress and emotions through creating neural networks. You're also assisting yourself in improving your focus.

When you are mindful, you are fully aware of every thought, emotion, and action that occurs in your life. You concentrate on the present time before reacting rashly. Mindfulness is essential for ensuring that we have clarity on the many things for which we are responsible in our life.

Researchers reviewed more than 200 studies of mindfulness among healthy people and found mindfulness-based therapy was especially effective for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. Mindfulness can also help treat people with specific problems, including depression, pain, smoking, and addiction. Researchers believe the benefits of mindfulness are related to its ability to dial down the body's response to stress.

Here's how to make mindfulness part of your regular routine:

1. Focus on Your Breathing When You Feel Distracted

As per research, slow, regulated breathing was found to be associated with improved feelings of wellbeing, relaxation, and mental clarity. Adult volunteers trained in diaphragmatic or "belly" breath exercises for eight weeks had a significant decrease in the stress hormone cortisol, as well as an improvement in their ability to pay attention for long periods of time.

Use the 4-7-8 breath when you feel distracted. Inhale deeply while counting to four, then hold your breath while counting to seven, and then exhale slowly while counting to eight. There will be a total of four times this pattern is repeated. Simply return to the breath and the counting whenever you find yourself distracted during the mindful meditation.

What Can You Do Now

Find a peaceful spot to sit for a few minutes. Try closing your eyes and keeping your back straight. Meditate with the 4-7-8 rhythm with this video:

2. Try the Reel It In Method

Reel It In Method is a practical strategy that you can apply to overcome your distractions.

Besides helping you to immediately transform a distraction into something useful, practicing this method as a mental exercise helps you to strengthen your focus muscle.

This method is for the 90% of distractions where you have a choice -- whether to click on that Facebook notification, reply to the WhatsApp message right away, or worry about that thing you have to do next week right now.

With the “Reel It In” Method, you’ll be able to make the right choice to take every time.?In fact, with each new distraction, you’ll make a choice even more concrete.

Step 1: Clear Your Mind

Let’s begin with a little mental exercise and go through a typical distraction scenario:

Say a distraction comes from an external source like an email notification, a Facebook?post on your feed, or a?message from a friend;?or from an internal source like?a stray thought,?a lingering worry at the back of your mind, or?something you suddenly remembered.

Your snap/default reflex is to quickly jump to the distraction. To read that email, scroll through Facebook, etc.

Now imagine this time you STOP and practice a little bit of mindfulness.

Before you act, do a quick and simple breathing exercise that only takes a few seconds instead:

• Close your eyes.
• Take a deep breath and hold it in for a count of 5.
• Then exhale. And as you exhale, imagine your mind releasing all the things it's holding on to.
• If it takes more than one breath, then take a few more. Each time you exhale, feel your mind releasing.

Step 2: Gain Instant Presence

Bring yourself back to NOW -- this moment.

Imagine that your mind has lines connecting to different things that are drawing your attention. They could be things you're worried about, things you have to think about, or things you have to remember.

Now imagine reeling these lines back in... like a fishing rod.

You are returning your attention back to yourself. Recentre your focus.

Tell yourself:?"Nothing matters except this moment."

Instant presence is important because you are literally living in this moment. The past is the past. The future hasn't happened yet.

Too often, we act based on?the past, which we can't change; or?future fears/worries which we are not set in stone.

What you do now is what really matters. This moment is your reality.

Now, to refocus, ask yourself these questions:

• What are you doing now? Why are you doing it?
• What do you need to achieve so that your time isn't wasted?
• What’s the most important thing I could be doing right now?
• Is this distraction urgent? Do I need to divert attention right now?
• Do I need to care about it? Why?
• Will I regret spending time on this later?

Step 3: Make A Decision

To put away a distraction for good, you have to process it. That means you have to make a decision about it so that your mind can be at peace about it.

If you don't and just ignore it, it will just resurface and bother you again until you do.

What Can You Do Now

1. Make a “Distraction Follow Up” to-do/task list?-?It's dedicated to processing the random distractions that come up during the day.?Use it to write down whatever needs to be done.?The idea is that once you write it down into a task. You tell your mind to forget about it.
2. Set yourself some time each day?-?To process your accumulated random to-dos, like 30 minutes after lunch and 1 hour before getting ready for bed.?The idea is to clear your list as you go through the day so that you don’t feel overwhelmed.
3. Schedule a time to focus on it?- You don't ignore it. Instead, you commit to it but just not right now.

Bottom Line

When you start to develop these mindful habits, you will realise that you're training your focus muscle and your focus will gradually increase.

Learn more practical hacks to increase your mental focus for better productivity in my guide: How to Increase Mental Focus and Stay Sharp

Leon Ho?is the Founder and CEO of?Lifehack?– a productivity blog he started in 2005. He was listed as Business Week’s #4 “Top 24 Young Asian Entrepreneurs” and has grown Lifehack into one of the most read self-improvement websites in the world – with over 12 million monthly readers. Get yourself The Full Life Planner to manage your time and energy better to stay focused.