Focusing Pt 4/4: One method to rule them all
We’ve gone over a lot these last couple weeks.
Based on these letters you’d think all that training takes up a crazy amount of time and organization.
You may be wondering, “isn’t there any way to work on all that at once in a manageable space of time?”
Yes there is! And you’re probably not going to like it.
But first as always…
⚠️Disclaimers⚠️ because I care about the spicy meatballs between y’alls ears:
I am not a mental health expert in any capacity. The strategies I talk about in this series are just what I experimented with on myself.
I do believe what I’m going to be talking about is important. But ONLY if it DOES NOT JEAPARDIZE your mental health. There’s a difference between learning to work with distractibility and doing mental harm.
Working on this stuff is difficult and can be taxing, I won’t deny it.
So please please PuhLEASE for the love of the gods do not push yourself to the point of burning out. I promise any amount of progress you do get from running yourself into the ground is not worth it and minimal anyway so there’s legit no reason to subject yourself to that.
Also I have been diagnosed with ADHD (as much as my imposter syndrome likes to deny it). But that does not make these strategies, “ADHD strategies”. It also does not make me an expert on ADHD. I’m only an expert on my ADHD. I phrase lots of things in absolutes. That doesn’t make them law. I just don’t want to type “I think” 8 million times.
I’d also like to remind you of the Focus Training Ground Rules
Accept these strategies take PRACTICE and REPETITION
Self compassion is a MUST
Moderation is MANDATORY
If you’d like to read over the specifics for each and why they’re important, click here.
Now that’s out of the way, welcome back to my Focusing series!
As a reminder here’s the game plan:
Part 1: Non-negotiable rules and why
Part 2: The different parts of focusing
Part 3: Strategies I use for each aspect
Part 4: The ultimate training technique that you’re going to hate (⬅️ you are here)
If you missed Part 1, 2 or 3 you can click it to be taken to the web version.
We’re finally at the last part in this series. One method of training everything we’ve gone over. And please keep in mind I did warn you that you’d hate it and me for suggesting it.
Meditation!
Yes I know, everyone is preaching about meditation these days. I have no doubt you’re sick of hearing about it.
But I think about meditation differently than how I see others talking about it. Not that they’re wrong. I just had to think about it differently to get it to work for me.
To start, meditation was not relaxing at all in the beginning. For like a while.
My mind is hardly ever still or quiet. At least not without effort.
And it still doesn’t feel like some incredible connection to the divine (although I’m determined to keep working on that part).
For me, meditation is training.
Not only my mind, but my relationship with my mind.
Meditation is one of those things everyone hates to be told to do because it “just doesn’t work for them” or seems “pointless”.
I challenge those beliefs with, were you actively practicing something mentally while you were meditating? Or were you just sitting in silence expecting your brain to be quiet?
There’s a reason it’s called “practicing” meditation. It does not come easy to the majority of the population. Including myself.
Why is it good focus training?
First: On bad brain days, or if you’re new to meditation, you get to practice recognizing distraction and redirection like freaking crazy. There’s many days even now where I’ll spend my whole session reminding myself over and over to get back to what I was doing. Literally every 10 seconds or so (core focus concepts 2 and 3).
Second: If you’re having a good brain day, you can practice the “existing in the present moment” aspect of meditation. In other words, aiming to hold onto a single state of thought for as long as possible without getting distracted (core focus concept 1).
Third: no matter what kind of day you’re having, meditation is boring and uncomfortable. I’m not going to sugar coat it. Especially in the beginning. When you sit with the sole intention of doing nothing, it does get boring. And that boredom is uncomfortable (adjacent skills).
But I understand the apprehension. Especially because most calls to meditation hardly ever go into how.
Some tips
It’s easy to tell someone to find a comfortable quiet spot, focus on their breathing, and empty their mind. Actually doing it is another matter.
So I wanted to share some specific things that really helped me.
I’ll start with some obvious ones.
Music
Right off the bat I’m going to recommend listening to some kind of music. Especially if you’re a beginner. You do not have to be in complete silence to get the benefits of meditation.
The music you listen to is up to you. Personally I like songs that are slow, have no singing, and ideally no loud or intense beats. I know myself, and I know those things tend to distract me. So I pick playlists that fade into the background easily.
Position
What position you choose does not matter much. Now I like to sit on a pillow with my legs crossed. But I’ve also leaned against a wall, sat in a chair, and laid down. I’m a fan of all of them. It’s not a big deal if you don’t like the typical criss cross apple sauce.
Apps
Meditation apps are great. My favorite is Insight Timer (not sponsored, I use their free version) because you can make timer presets. I have a few for different lengths of meditation or yoga. One of my favorite parts of the app is in a preset you can set interval bells. So if I’m doing a longer session (20+ minutes) I can have a bell go off at halfway to kinda let me know where I’m at. I have shit sense of time otherwise.
Time
Frequency matters more than length of time.
It really does not take much. While my focus journey started at 10 minutes, my meditation journey started at 1.
Yes I seriously would set a 1 minute timer, and practice sitting in the present moment.
Did I see massive mental health benefits in the first month of consistent practice?
Hell no.
But I did get better at meditating.
And guess what happens when you get better at meditating.
You start to get mental health benefits.
Now I’m up to 10 and sometimes even 20 minutes.
And some not so obvious ones
The actual act of meditation can be hard to describe because I think it’s different for everyone.
For myself, it’s often the quality of really feeling and being in the present moment.
But telling people to do that is about as helpful as just telling people to meditate.
I had a really hard time figuring out how to do this. I’ve found specific visualizations to be extremely helpful
When I first started I really liked the “cars on the highway” comparison. Imagining you’re sitting next to a road or highway, and all the cars going past are your thoughts. You see them, but you don’t hold onto them. You let them pass at whatever speed they’re going. A similar one is imagining your thoughts as clouds.
But my head is nuts and the traffic jam was stressing me out. So I went with more of a shuffled card approach.
Y’know when you were a kid and you shuffled a deck of cards just by spreading them out all jumbled over a table?
That what I imagined my thoughts were. And I would imagine looking for a small gap in the “cards” to dive into. Because those gaps were quiet.
Short. But quiet.
Like driving under an overpass while it’s raining.
Those worked well initially. But I still had a hard time really getting it.
One of the first that actually helped me came from an Instagram reel. I wish I still had it so I could link it but I lost it. It was one of those constantly shifting images back when AI art was still kinda rare and new.
The voice over talked about imagining you just appeared where you are now. Absolutely no memories of the past. And since you had no memories of the past you didn’t have any thoughts about the future (because there’s no past experiences to influence those thoughts). That quality of being so here and now was one of my first insights into how meditation really felt.
That thought influenced a game I liked to play while I meditated. I called it the past future game. While I sat and tried to be in the here and now, of course thoughts came up. As soon as I recognized I was having a thought, I’d ask myself if it was past, now, or future. Thinking about mistakes I made were my most frequent past thoughts. But my anxiety likes to hide future thoughts in “preparing”, so this game helped me get really good at identifying them. Things like recognizing my stomach was rumbling, or hearing the birds outside were now thoughts. That’s where it was best to hang out.
The visualization I paired with that was imagining I had a pane of glass on either side of me. When I was thinking about the past or future I was on the outside of those panes. So I’d imagine staying between them for as long as possible.
Everything I described here might not click for you at all. That’s totally fine. But be on the lookout for any mindsets or visualizations that do click for you.
I didn’t have all of these visualizations when I started.
And honestly I don’t think I really would have understood them anyway (they’re all pretty hippy woo woo I know).
But each one seemed to build upon the previous to deepen my understanding and practice.
We’ve made it to the end
So to recap…
Focusing is made up of a few different parts:
Holding attention in one spot
Recognizing distraction
Redirecting back on task
And a few addition skills to enhance those parts:
Being bored
Being uncomfortable
I don’t think the root of distractibility is something that can be entirely trained away. But that doesn’t mean other things around it can’t be improved.
There’s many things you can do to practice all these skills. Timers help a lot. And meditation is my favorite time efficient way of working on all 5.
What I practice and develop during my meditations bleed to all other aspects of my life.
The patience and mental control I practice in my mind shows up in my relationships, my work, and even my self talk.
Granted I know meditation isn’t for everyone. Nothing is. That’s why I never said it’s mandatory.
But if what I’ve said about meditation had given you even a sliver of doubt that maybe you aren’t in the “it just doesn’t work for me” crowd, then I encourage you to explore it deeper. Because it may just be the best decision you make for yourself.
Shoutout to Maria for being interested in hearing me talk about focusing! I cannot tell you how happy I was to see that reply. Actually made me tear up a bit 🥹 because I’m dramatic. This was a topic I actually really enjoyed talking about.
If you have a topic you’d be interested to hear my thoughts on send me an email! I read all replies and I’m always looking for things to blabber on about. Until next time!
