11 Exercises That Will Strengthen Your Attention

This article was originally written by Brett & Kate McKay for artofmanliness.com

You’ll never get big muscles from sitting on the couch all day, and you’ll never develop amazing powers of concentration from exclusively reading Buzzfeed and watching Tosh.O. Your mind muscles, just like your physical muscles, need resistance; they need challenges that stretch their limits and in so doing, grow their focus fibers. Below we outline exercises that will beef up your focus so that you can start lifting heavier and heavier cognitive loads.

1. Increase the strength of your focus gradually. If you decide you want to physically get in shape, but are starting at ground zero, the worst thing you can do is to throw yourself into an extreme training program – you’ll end up injured, discouraged, or both, and you’ll quit before you even really get started.

Likewise, if your attention span is currently quite flabby, it’s best to slowly build up the weight you ask it to lift. In this series, we’ve mentioned trying the “Pomodoro Method” in which you work for, say, 45 minutes straight and then allow yourself a 15-minute break. But for many of us, 45 minutes might as well be a mind marathon!

So start out with a pretty easy goal and work your way up from there. Set a timer for 5 minutes and focus completely on your work/reading for that time period. Then take a 2-minute break before going at it again for another 5 minutes. Each day, add another 5 minutes to your focused work time, along with an additional 2 minutes to your break time. In 9 days, you should be able to work for 45 minutes straight before you allow yourself an 18-minute break. Once you get comfortable with that set-up, you can work to lengthen your focus sessions a little, while shortening your break times.

2. Create a distraction to-do list. Because the internet has made any bit of information instantly accessible, we tend to want to look something up the moment it crosses our mind. “I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow?” “What year did that movie come out?” “I wonder what’s new on my Facebook feed?” Consequently, we’ll toggle away from what we’re working on the instant these questions or thoughts pop into our minds. Problem is, once we get distracted, it takes on average 25(!) minutes to return to our original task. Plus, shifting our attention back and forth drains its strength.

So to stay on task, whenever something you want to check out pops into your head, just write it down on a piece of paper next to you (or perhaps in Evernote for you tech types), and promise yourself you’ll be able to look it up once your focusing session is over and your break time has arrived.

3. Build your willpower. Voluntary attention and willpower are intimately entwined. Our willpower allows us to deliberately ignore distractions while staying focused on the task at hand. It would serve your attention span well to review our in-depth article on strengthening your willpower.

4. Meditate. Not only does meditation help keep you cool, calm, and collected, research has also shown again and again that mindfulness meditation can boost your attention span significantly.

In one study, 140 volunteers took part in an eight-week course in meditation training. After the eight weeks, all the volunteers showed measurable improvements in attention span, as well as other executive mental functions.

You don’t have to spend your days meditating in a monastery to take advantage of its attention-boosting power. Research has shown that just 10 to 20 minutes of meditation a day will do the trick. What’s more, you’ll even see improvements in your attention after just four days.

So if you want the power to focus on your studies for hours at a time, start your mornings off just focusing on your breath for a few minutes.

5. Practice mindfulness throughout the day. In addition to dedicating 10 to 20 minutes a day to mindfulness meditation, attention experts recommend finding opportunities to practice mindfulness throughout your day. Mindfulness is simply focusing completely on what you’re doing, slowing down, and observing all of the physical and emotional sensations you are experiencing in that moment.

You can practice mindfulness when you eat as you take time to really chew your food and concentrate on its flavors and texture. You can practice mindfulness when you shave; as you smell your shaving cream, note the pleasure of applying a warm lather to your face, and slowly drag the razor across your stubble.

Incorporating short sessions of mindfulness throughout your day will strengthen and expand your attention span for the times when you really need it.

Mindfulness can also help you push back against distractions as they arise. If you’re working on a task and feel that restless itch to go do something else, think to yourself, “Be here now.” In that moment, bring your awareness to your body and your breath. After a few seconds of focusing on your breath, you’ll notice that the distraction is no longer present and that you’re ready to get back to work.

6. Exercise (your body). Not only can you compare exercising your mind to exercising your body, doing the latter actually directly benefits the former. Researchers have found that students who engaged in moderate physical exercise before taking a test that measured attention spans performed better than students who didn’t exercise. The researchers found that exercise primarily helps our brain’s ability to ignore distractions, although they aren’t exactly sure why. I would venture to say that the discipline it takes to push through the pain of a workout strengthens the same supply of willpower that we use to ignore the itch of distractions in order to keep working/focusing.

7. Memorize stuff. We’ve talked about memorization on the site before. Besides being a cool bar trick and providing you a fount of poems to recite at the drop of a hat, memorizing stuff is an excellent way to exercise your mind muscles. Make it a goal to memorize a poem or a verse of scripture each week.

8. Read long stuff slowly. Fight the TL;DR culture. With the rise of tablets, e-readers, and smartphones, some studies indicate that reading of e-content, in general, has gone up nearly 40%. This is a good thing, right? You’d think so, except that Slate recently did some research with the help of website analytics company Chartbeart that determined that only a paltry 5% of readers who start an article online will actually finish it. What’s more, 38% of readers never scroll beyond the first few paragraphs. So to say that reading, in general, has gone up would be misleading. What we’re actually doing is more scrolling, and less engaging.

At the same time, we’re reading fewer books; a recent study showed that 25% of Americans didn’t read a single book last year.

This is truly a shame. While long definitely does not automatically equal better, there are certain complex ideas that are impossible to condense into short list posts and require an entire book (or several books) to flesh out. To skip something simply because it is long is to miss out on a whole world of knowledge available only to those willing to dive deeper. There’s definitely a place for skimming online and learning a little about a lot. But you should also make room for plunging into a few subjects whole hog.

If you haven’t read a book in awhile, I challenge you to pick one up tonight. Really try to dig into it. Learn how to read a book properly; it’ll change your life.

Besides books, make an effort to read one or two long articles a week. Longform journalism, as it’s called, is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, and the amount of quality, in-depth content available is at an all-time high. A few of my favorite sources of longform articles:

• Longreads.com
• Longform.org
• Arts and Letters Daily
• The Economist
• The New Yorker
• The Art of Manliness (Always strives to publish comprehensive posts that are as useful as possible. Also, I hear its founder has a glorious mustache.)

9. Stay curious. The more curious you are about the world, the greater the stamina of your concentration will be when it comes to any endeavor. William James suggests a simple experiment to test how staying curious about the object of your attention can prolong your ability to stay focused on it:

“Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself successive questions about the dot,—how big it is, how far, of what shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of associates,—you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time. This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows.”

Charles Darwin was a master of this concept. His contemporaries marveled at his ability to spend an entire day just staring at animals and plants. Darwin’s secret was his unflagging curiosity – he could discover more and more about a single object by homing in on various details, examining it in different ways, asking new questions. Bit by bit he would peel back its layers.

10. Practice attentive listening. The focus isn’t just useful for intellectual endeavors. It’s also an essential interpersonal skill. The ability to be fully present with a loved one or friend builds your rapport, intimacy, and trust and with them. At the same time, making an effort to focus all your energy on someone else strengthens your concentration muscles overall. It’s win-win. So next time you’re talking with your main squeeze, put away your phone and listen as attentively as possible.

11. Perform concentration exercises. The above exercises not only boost your focus but offer other benefits as well. Every once in a while, however, it’s good to do some exercises that are aimed purely at boosting your concentration. Here are twelve to try.