5 Tips To Improve Your Focus

• Practice meditation

Its good if you can allocate at least an hour or more for meditation, but a lot of people can’t. That doesn’t really matter; at any point when you are breathing, you have the opportunity to practice meditation. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by focusing on your breathing, really focusing on the air, how it touches your nostrils and upper lips as it enters, how it feels on the back ofyour throat, how it feels as it escapes. Just focus on this forsometime. You’ll find that you feel restless,that your mind wanders and there’s an endless and (sometimes absurd) chain of thoughts that will follow. Whenever you notice yourself drifting to other thoughts, gently bring your mind back to focusing on the breathing. Regulatingthe breathing not only calms down your circulatory system, but focusing will help you achieve a sense of ‘peace’ and a strange satisfaction. Its hard to explain the feeling,do it sometime and you’ll know. The greatthing is, you can do thisanywhere and anytime, whenever you have a bit of breathing time. So maybe on a commute, while waiting in the lift, while waiting for a code to compile, when you’re booting windows….whenever you have some time to kill.

• Drink More Water

A 2012 study in The Journal of Nutrition found that mild dehydration (so subtle that you don’t really feel it) can lead to inattention. When women were less than 2 percent dehydrated (in this case, from not drinking enough water after exercise), their ability to concentrate on a series of cognitive tests was impaired. “When the brain detects even the smallest changes in physiology, it may begin operating at a suboptimal level to get your attention,” explains study coauthor Harris Lieberman, PhD, a research psychologist at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. “Thirst is not the best measure of hydration, so a decrease in your ability to focus is an early warning signal that it’s time to drink up.”

• Get some exercise

Physical activity can help improve your attention and focus, as it releases chemicals in the brain that affect learning and memory. Even better than a cup of coffee, exercise can provide a short-term boost to your mental and cognitive performance, makingyou smarter and making it easier to focus.

• Work when you aremost comfortable

Some people work better at day, some atnight, Sometimes your environment may just not allow you to relax during the daytime. I don’t mean stay awake the whole night and workthe whole day. Get your sleep, but work when you find yourself to be the most productive.

• Listen to music (and I mean really listen)

Listening to music helps in improving your concentration and focus, but only when you really listen. Most people listen to it while doing something else; working, exercising, reading. Try and listen. After I started learning an instrument and really listening to the music, I realized that I could make out what was being played by the individual instruments, the patter of guitar strumming, the bass line etc etc. Thats when I really started enjoying classical music as well. A lot of people still don’t have the ability to focus only on a single instrument and figure out whats happening. Try it, it adds a new dimension to the music you listen to and expands your tastes. (When you clear your mind out and let it be filled only with music, its also another form of meditation, where you are essentially clearing the ‘clutter’ of your thoughts and focusing on one thing).

Collected: Internet