so do you have any practical advice on
how I can improve my ability to
concentrate and pay attention to the
world around me often the Devils in the
details you know but some practical
advice is well regulate your habits try
to get up at approximately the same time
each morning I would recommend that you
get up approximately when other people
get up so that would be something in the
neighborhood of 7:30 or 8:00 in the
morning or perhaps earlier perhaps a
little bit later but you want to
stabilize that because your circadian
rhythms operate more fluidly and your
mood is likely to be regulated better if
there's islands of stability in your
daily routines human beings like daily
routines just like dogs like daily
routines and so regulate your sleep I
would say when you get up in the morning
eat breakfast that's a really important
thing to do I can't tell you how many
people I've treated in my clinical
practice whose proclivity for emotional
instability and depression anxiety
general hopelessness emotional pain and
gloom and doom as well as capacity to
concentrate were properly regulated or
inhibited or reduced by merely ensuring
that they ate a I would say a protein
and fat-rich breakfast relatively soon
after they wake up and that's especially
- if they're stressed and because it
turns out that if you stress yourself
after a fast which is of course what
you've undertaken if you haven't eaten
since the night before that your body
produces enough insulin to deplete the
sugar in your blood and then it's very
difficult for you to become regulated
properly with regards to your metabolism
until you sleep again and so regulating
your sleep and your breakfast eating
habits in particular can be a very
effective way of regulating your mood
and increasing your capacity to
concentrate the other thing I would say
is that spending some time scheduling
your time is also extraordinarily useful
and so I can tell you a little bit about
how to use schedules effectively so the
first thing I would say is that you
should develop a long-term plan
you have to set up your vision like
Geppetto when he's looking at the star
before
Pinocchio's transformation takes place
you have to set up your long-term vision
to have some vision of the good towards
which you're working and some vision
perhaps of the hell that you're avoiding
and then I would say once you set up
that vision so that you know how to
orient yourself then you should start
designing your days and you can do that
very effectively with a calendar like
Google Calendar many people say well I
hate using a schedule or I hate using a
calendar and what I would say about that
is is that if you hate using a schedule
or a calendar then you're probably using
it wrong what you're doing is using the
calendar as an external tyrant that's
telling you what you should do if you
were going to be a conventionally good
person each day so you load yourself up
with will say arbitrary responsibilities
but that's not really how you should use
a schedule what you should use a
schedule to do is to design the day that
you would most like to have and
obviously that's going to include
accepting some responsibilities and
undertaking to make progress on those
things that you have to make progress on
to keep your life from collapsing into
chaos but it should also mean that you
schedule in activities that make you
actually want to have that day and so if
you're using a schedule properly it can
be your friend and that can also be
something that can increase your
capacity to concentrate and then I would
say well if you're very scattered then
you can start to train yourself you
might say well I need to learn to read
without distraction okay well for the
next week I'm going to read 10 minutes a
day and I'm going to try to limit the
distractions and if you're successful at
that
then you could try 12 minutes a day and
if you're successful at that you could
try 15 minutes a day and the trick is to
set a goal for yourself that is slightly
beyond your current level of performance
enough to be challenging enough to be
worthwhile if you accomplish but not so
difficult that you're likely to fail and
then practice incrementally day by day
trying to inculcate the habits that you
want to end
and assume that it'll take you a number
of months or even a number of years in
order to become very fluent at the habit
the important thing is to start
improving incrementally because
incremental improvement pays off like
compound interest and so I would also
say that the trajectory that you're on
is more important than your starting
point and that's also an extraordinarily
optimistic observation because it means
that direction is more important than
current position and in current position
matters obviously but I don't think it
does matter as much as direction so if
you want to learn to concentrate more
define what constitutes concentration
break it into micro habits and then
start practicing instantiation of those
micro habits
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