Focus Forward: An Executive Function Podcast Ep 36: Beyond Distractions: How to Improve Attention and Transform Your Life
Could we really have a podcast called “Focus Forward” without eventually covering the topic of attention and focus? Of course not! Rest assured, today’s the day, and as a person with ADHD, difficulty paying attention is one of the most frustrating aspects of my brain. Most annoyingly, I seem to notice just about everything that’s happening around me but still end up missing so much of what’s actually important for me to remember. Luckily, I now know that this is simply a feature of my ADHD, but for most of my life, I thought it was some inherent character flaw. Can you relate to that struggle, too? Well, then this episode is for you. Today, we explore the critical Executive Function skill of attention and examine some of the most effective strategies for supporting focus in people of all learning profiles. I hope you enjoy and gain some valuable ideas to try out in your own life! If you do, be sure to leave us a review (and let me know at podcast@beyondbooksmart.com!)
In the meantime, here are our show notes for today’s episode:
Impact of Meditation on the Brain
Mindfulness Meditation Is Related to Long-Lasting Changes in Hippocampal Functional Topology during Resting State: A Magnetoencephalography Study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312586/
When science meets mindfulness
7 Ways Meditation Can Actually Change The Brain
Myth of Multitasking
Dan Crenshaw’s YouTube Video - Try the Myth of Multitasking Exercise!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eQyfirx2HA
Psychology and Neuroscience Blow Up the Myth of Effective Multitasking
Stop Multitasking. No, Really — Just Stop It.
Contact Us!
Reach out to us at podcast@beyondbooksmart.com
IG/FB/TikTok @beyondbooksmartcoaching
Transcript
Space Cadet
Airhead
Daydreamer
Absent-Minded Professor
Ditzy
Scatterbrained
She’s got her Head in the Clouds
Dreamer
Any of those names sound familiar to you? I can feel my own gut reaction to saying them aloud just now and know that I have either been called them by others or called myself them inside my head. As a person with attention and memory challenges, it’s bound to happen that I forget stuff or neglect to pay attention to stuff I really should notice. And, ironically and very annoyingly, I seem to notice literally everything going on around me and at the same time, not notice the important stuff when it’s really, really important for me to do so. Now I know that this is a feature of my ADHD, but for most of my life, I thought it was just a character flaw. Can anyone relate to that, too? Well, today’s episode is about the EF skill of attention, which as you may know already, is tightly connected to the EF skill of memory. They’re like best friends and worst enemies at the same time. Frenemies, as they kids say, wait how long has that word been around? Do people still say it? Am I dating myself by saying it or making myself seem cooler than I really am. Lemme look this up MAKE TYPING NOISE Okay, I just did a quick google search and “frenemy” was first used in 1953! It’s often attributed to Jessica Mitford, Queen of the Muckrakers and notorious Civil Rights lawyer who wrote in her 1977 book “Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford” saying that her sister came up with the word. Wait, what’s a muckraker…hold on. Ahh, wait, okay, Hannah pay attention and get back to the episode at hand. We can learn about muckrakers later on.
Okay yes, so, the connection between memory and attention. When I interviewed Dr. Sherrie All for episode 16 of Focus forward, which was all about memory, she said this:
memory is like the storage of information that gets into your brain. Right? That attention is the gateway, you cannot expect yourself to remember things that you didn't notice in the first place.
So, if you struggle with remembering stuff, it might be worth an investigation into your attention EF skill. That’s what we’re going to do today. We’ll take a look at how inattention can impact our lives and what we can to do set ourselves up for success. I’ll teach you some tools and strategies our coaches like to share with our clients and I’ll also spend a little time debunking the myth of multitasking. Sorry folks, it’s not a thing. At least, not for most of us.
Before we dive in, I want to talk briefly about the connection between EF skills and our emotions. As you have heard me say before and I’ll say again and again, our emotions are connected to our executive functioning. If we’re stressed, having trouble regulating our emotions, or in a crisis, our EF skills may be, will likely be, harder to access, especially the ones that we struggle with in regular times. So, if you find it hard to pay attention and your memory is anything like mine, go easy on yourself, especially in challenging times. Improving your attention can help with remembering more but the reality is that some people will still have challenges with memory, even if they are fully paying attention. Have some grace, some compassion for yourself. Listening to this episode, learning some strategies, and taking the time to learn and care for yourself is a good way to do this.
Okay, so other than the direct impact on memory, how else can inattention impact our lives? Inattention can lead us to overlook important details. This can look like not noticing a negative sign in a math problem, missing a payment to the dentist, entering a wrong number on our taxes or maybe not even paying our taxes at all, missing a meeting with the boss, or putting the waistband on a pair of pants backward. That last one was me. I love to sew clothing and I did that once. Wait, I actually did it twice. In the same day. I noticed that I had put the waistband on backward and then unstitched it all, which if you’ve ever unstitched something, you know how tedious it is and then I did it AGAIN. So, inattention can have some real consequences on our grades, our finances, our time, and our self-esteem. It can also have a severe effect on our health and safety. In the kitchen, it can result in injuries or fires, while driving it could potentially lead to fatal accidents, while playing sports, we could hurt ourselves or others. We could miss cues our bodies are giving us and unintentionally delay treatment for a health condition. We could miss dangers in our environment, like when I walked head-on into a guy wire. The guy wire was fine. My knee was not. Wait a second. Is it guy wire or guide wire? I’ve always said guy wire but maybe it’s guide wire? Hold on…wait wait wait back to the episode, you can research that later, Hannah.
Anyway, there are a ton of other situations I’m sure you can imagine or pull up from your own life experience. The message here is that attention is a critically important, time-saving - and potentially life-saving - EF skill to work on. So, it’s good you’re here.
So, how can we set ourselves up for success?
There are a bunch of things we can do to increase our attention and reduce the chance of all that bad stuff I probably just depressed you with from happening. There’s hope, folks, there’s hope. And a lot of the things we can do are pretty simple. Of course, you actually have to do them, which is the hard part but let’s all give it our best shot.
First one is a magic trick. At least, for me, it seems to be a magic trick. It’s to slow down. Just slow down. It’s that simple. And yet, sooooooo hard to remember to do in the moment. But, really, slowing down can make a world of difference for your attention ability. When we rush, we’re more likely to miss things. Just this morning, my son was leaving for school and had to be there earlier than normal and had to bring some extra stuff with him. He rushed out the door and 30 minutes later, we got a call from him that he forgot the extra stuff. If he had slowed down, he would have noticed the bag we had oh so thoughtfully left right by the door. And earlier this week, I rushed to send an email to a large mailing list and then my colleague pointed out that I had forgotten to include the link I referenced in the email. In the moment, it feels like slowing down will waste time, but you can see in these two examples, we ended up having to use more time later to fix the consequences of rushing. It can help to repeat a mantra of “slow down” or “take your time”. Slowing down does not come naturally to many people and can take some time to build it into your life. But I think it’s a goal worth working towards because it helps us be more proactive and less reactive.
This reminds me of that quote by Viktor Frankl: “Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”
Slowing down allows us to expand that space and take advantage of the many benefits of this kind of thinking.
Okay, this naturally leads me to the next tip for improving our attention - mindfulness and meditation practice. I’ve talked about this before on Focus Forward and you’ve likely heard about it before. Studies have shown that meditation and mindfulness do actually strengthen our ability to pay attention, focus on what we’re doing, and, as you might expect, remember things. You can find links in the show notes if you’d like to learn more. When we meditate regularly, we strengthen the areas of our brain that support attention and focus. The prefrontal cortex actually changes structurally! And, meditation can lower your stress levels, which as you know, will make it easier to access your executive functions. As we learned from Rachel Hulstein-Lowe in episode 12 about maintaining progress during times of transition, mindfulness doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just taking the time to pay attention to the things we do regularly, to slow down and notice what we’re doing and the sensations we’re feeling. But, if you’re interested in a more comprehensive meditation practice, there are so many amazing resources out there in the form of apps, websites, and books. You could check out your local library, gym, and yoga studio to see if they offer meditation classes. If you are skeptical, rely on the science to convince yourself to try it. Your attention will thank you!
Okay, next up is something we always hear and probably just go “yeah, yeah, yeah” about. Sleep. Prioritizing it is critical for a bajillion reasons and attention is one of the most important ones. I’m going to be interviewing sleep and ADHD specialist, Marlee Boyle and our conversation will drop sometime in April. We met the other day and I asked her for her top five tips for maximizing our sleep quality.
1) Keep a regular wake up time. Sleep regularity improves sleep quality and helps us fall asleep at a regular time. Even if you have a poor night's sleep, still wake up at the same time to prevent throwing off your sleep schedule for multiple nights
2) Try not to stay in bed while you're awake. If you're awake for more than 20 minutes in your bed, try getting out of bed for 20 minutes and do something boring in low lighting until you feel sleepy and then return to bed.
3) Get outside in the morning and take breaks outside as much as you can when you're not sleeping well. Sunlight is a strong regulator of sleep so by getting daylight exposure (even on overcast days) will improve your circadian rhythm and help you sleep. And, I just want to add to Marlee’s tip here that if you work at night and sleep during the day, installing blackout curtains, using a white or brown noise machine to minimize sounds that might wake you, and using a sunrise lamp for waking might help improve your sleep.
4) Don't stress about not sleeping. If you're having difficulty sleeping, try not to let yourself worry about it because that will keep you awake longer.
5) Limit caffeine to just the morning time and use it strategically, rather than habitually.
Okay, that’s enough for sleep. Try to get more, okay? and come back in April to learn even more from Marlee.
Next up are two quick tips I like to teach my clients. Breaking large tasks down into smaller, more manageable steps and paying attention to diminishing returns. I’ve covered both of these in other episodes so I won’t get into them too deeply, but just a reminder that these two strategies can have a huge impact on your ability to pay attention. Okay, so first let’s quickly look at breaking things down. When the steps of a project are smaller and clearly defined, it’s easier to pay attention to the task. We are less distracted by worries about how long it’ll take or how hard it’ll be, the requirements of the task are clear to us, and we know there will be a stopping point relatively soon. Slowing down before you start a large task and breaking it down into these smaller steps will give you so much relief down the road. My second tip is to pay attention to diminishing returns - is your effort giving you an equal amount of productivity in return? Instead of setting a timer when you’re going to do work, try paying attention to how you’re engaging with the work. Are you finding it easy to focus? Keep going! Is your mind wandering and you can’t focus? Maybe it’s time to do something else or employ some other kind of strategy to support your focus. I recognize that many listeners may rely on urgency to get things done, so this strategy may not work for you. If that’s you, you might benefit from the procrastination episode I did - it’s episode 11 - awww, back when we were just a baby podcast.
I had a college student client who did poorly on a test in an astronomy class. He got half the questions wrong even though he paid attention in class and studied well. When we took a look at what he did during class, he mentioned that he was listening to the instructor but he wasn’t taking notes and was only relying on her handouts, slides, and the text for studying materials. He decided he’d try taking notes for the second half of the semester. He got only one question wrong on the final and reported that he truly understood and remembered the material in a way he had never before. Not only did he have more resources to use when he studied for the final, he was fully engaged in the class and because of that, found it more interesting and easier to pay attention. When we engage ourselves in what we’re doing, we’re less likely to be bored and distracted and we’re more likely to remember what we did. This same strategy can be used in a variety of situations - taking notes in a work meeting is likely to help you remember what the heck your boss said, asking questions during a boring conversation with your grandmother might make it more interesting, and taking notes in a class you find boring might trick your brain into actually learning something. Granted, I know this can be a Herculean task when it’s a topic you’re completely not interested in, but I do think it’s worth a try. And you never know, you might find out that astronomy is your jam! Like, did you know that a majority of stars we see are actually binary stars? It’s not one star, but two stars orbiting around a common center of mass. Amazing!
Ack, okay back to the topic at hand, Hannah - pay attention! Now, let's explore another tool for focus, and this one might not be for everyone: listening to music. Surprisingly, for some, it can enhance attention during focused work, as long as it's the right kind of music. Studies support this, even though it might spark disagreement among parents.
Many find lo-fi music ideal for studying. I usually listen to mellow tunes in a foreign language to avoid getting distracted by the lyrics. If music doesn’t work for you, be honest with yourself. It can be tempting to listen anyway, even if you know it’s detrimental to your ability to focus. Instead, consider brown or white noise to minimize distracting background sounds. Finding what works best for you is key to making potentially mundane tasks more manageable.
You might be wondering why I haven't delved into how phones can wreck our attention.I kinda feel like I don’t have to. We all know they're distracting, and it's a tough battle to win. Pretty much everything on that phone is designed to leave you wanting more. Instead, let's explore how we can use our phones to help us with attention. Planning apps, to-do lists, and reminders help us focus and break down tasks. Apps like Focus Dog and Forest motivate us to stay off our phones. Meditation apps like Headspace and Smiling Mind teach us to meditate. Note-taking, Pomodoro timing apps, and phone features like digital well-being settings enhance productivity and reduce distraction. Set alarms and timers for focused work without constantly checking the clock. Countdown timers can challenge you to finish tasks within a set timeframe. Embrace your phone as a tool for focus rather than a distraction.
I just want to say one more thing about phones and attention. Please, please get off your phone while you’re driving. I totally get how easy it is to do. I promise you I’m not trying to preach or act like I’m innocent - I have totally done it myself, but truly - the people in your life need you to stay alive. Other people driving or walking on the roads need to stay alive for their people. So keep your attention on your driving and not your phone. Distracted driving can be more devastating than you could ever imagine.
Okay, so let’s move on to debunking that multitasking myth. I’m the bearer of bad news for those of you who self-identify as multitaskers. You’re actually switch-taskers. We know you can’t actually do two things at once and quickly switching back and forth between things may SEEM like multitasking but it’s actually still switch tasking. Although, I have to say that when my kids were little, I think I might have actually been able to multitask - somehow I could open a yogurt smoothie bottle for my daughter and answer the never-ending “why” questions she was asking me while cooking dinner and cleaning off the counter and adding new socks for her little brother to the mental list of things I had to get at the store and also wondering when I had last washed my hair. Can anyone relate? Okay, so other than parents of young children, no one is truly multitasking. Every time we break from a task to switch to a new one, we lose focus, which, as we know, slows us down or causes us to miss stuff or make mistakes. Here’s a little test you can try to see this in action. I learned this from Dan Crenshaw, whose YouTube video is linked in the show notes. Okay, so You’re going to pause me and do two things: one, get a pen and paper and two, open the stopwatch on your phone. Then, come back and I’ll tell you what to do next. See, I’m breaking down the task into smaller steps! Practicing what I preach, baby. Okay, hit pause now and come back when you’re ready.
Yay! You’re back! Okay, hopefully you’ve got your pen, paper and timer ready. Alright, you’re going to pause me again and write the alphabet down on your paper. Then, below that, write the numbers 1 through 26 under each corresponding letter. So, when you’re done, you’ll have two horizontal lines - one with the alphabet and one with numbers 1 - 26. Be sure to time yourself doing it, okay? Alright, go do it, I’ll wait again.
Okay, yay, you came back again! Okay, now you’re going to do the same thing again but this time you’re going to write A and then 1, B and then 2, C and then 3, D and then 4 and so on. So the result will look the same - a line of the alphabet with a line of numbers under it, but you’ll be switching back and forth between the letters and corresponding numbers. Got it? Okay, do it now and don’t forget to time yourself again cuz otherwise this is just a big waste of time.
Welcome back! So unless you’re magical or a parent of small children, your second time should be longer than the first time. You may have even made or almost made some errors while you were doing it.
My point is, if you can, try to work on one, just one, thing at a time. You’ll hopefully find it easier to focus, get more done, feel less tired when you’re done working, and make less errors. Granted, if you’ve been really embracing the multitasking life, you’ll likely find it challenging to drop this habit. But, give it a shot! You may find you need to use strategies to support this - maybe use a timer to keep you on task, use one of those focusing apps for your phone, or if you meet virtually, try keeping your camera on so you can’t sneak off and send an email during a meeting. It can also be motivating to keep track of how you feel when you don’t multitask - are you noticing any improvements or benefits? Check out the show notes for more ideas on beating multitasking!
Okay, so hopefully you’re still with me and I haven’t lost your attention yet! And yay for you because you’ve made it to the end of this episode! I hope it was not too boring and you were able to learn something new. There are a ton more things about attention I could have written about but frankly, I was getting a little bored of this topic myself and was losing my own attention, so that’s our show for today! Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen! Please share this episode with anyone who might find it useful which is probably everybody. We’re so grateful to everyone who has shared Focus Forward! Word of mouth keeps us alive. If you have questions or topic suggestions, you can reach out to me at podcast@beyondbooksmart.com. Please subscribe to Focus Forward on Apple and Google podcasts, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for our newsletter at www.beyondbooksmart.com slash podcast. We’ve got some super special stuff coming up for our newsletter subscribers, so get your name on that list so you can find out what we’re up to. Our patient and kind editor and producer is Sean Potts and our brilliant content marketer is Justice Abbott. Thanks for listening and I wish you all a healthy and happy new year. Oh, and it’s guy wire, in case you were wondering. A guy is a rope, cable or cord used to steady, guide or secure. And a muckraker describes a journalist who worked to search for and expose real or alleged corruption, scandal, or the like, especially in politics. Roosevelt used the term as an insult to these writers in a speech in 1906. Hahaha, aren’t you glad you paid attention until the end of this episode??