If you struggle with anxiety, you will know that sometimes making decisions is really hard. Your thought processes are always working and switched on, and being able to shut your brain off is really hard. So making decisions is also hard when decision fatigue sneaks in.
Today’s article is about concentration training. We’ve talked about relaxation training where you counted through different muscle groups in your body and breathed out stress.
In concentration training we are helping you learn how to repeatedly narrow and widen your focus. It’s something that will help train your brain to focus on what you want it to focus on. Sometimes a thought comes into your brain and you focus on that thought, but you really have something else that is more important that you want to attend to. This will also be beneficial if you’re an athlete and you have a really important game coming up. This concentration training exercise will help you bring your best self on game day.
Step 1:
Step one of five is to go through that relaxation script and to calm your body down. Remember that a calm body is a calm mind. There’s no reason for your mind to think that there’s anything wrong or that you’re in danger if your body is truly calm.
Step 2:
Listen to what you hear by taking each separate sound, identifying it, and then mentally labeling it. This can be voices or footsteps.
Next, attend to all the sounds without attempting to identify or label them. Listen to the group of sounds as you would music, where verbal thinking falls away.
This is using your sense of hearing and trying to pick up individual sounds, label them, hear them and let them go.
You then want to hear all the sounds all at once and not identify each individual piece.
Step 3:
Now become aware of your bodily sensations such as the feeling of where the chair or the floor supports your body. Mentally label each sensation as you notice it before moving on to another sensation. Let each sensation linger for a moment while you examine it, consider it’s quality and source.
Next, feel all the sensations simultaneously without identifying or labeling any particular one.
This compels you to go to the broadest possible internal body awareness.
Step 4:
Attend now only to your emotions or thoughts. Let each thought or emotion appear gently without being forced.
Identify the nature of your thoughts and feelings, remain calm whether the thought is a helpful and happy one, our unhelpful and unhappy one. Feel one and then the other.
Now try to tune in to only one and hold your attention there. Let thoughts and feelings come and go. Feel the bodily feelings and the emotions, hear the thoughts and let them go.
You’re not trying to stick with any one for any length of time. You’re just trying to be present with how you feel in the moment and notice the feeling or thought that you are feeling.
Step 5:
Open your eyes and pick an object across the room that is directly in front of you.
While looking ahead, see as much of the room and the objects in the room as your peripheral vision will allow you. Also observe the entire room and all the items in it.
Picture now a broad funnel in which your mind is moving. Centered in the middle of the funnel is the object directly across the room from you.
From there, gradually narrow your focus by narrowing the funnel so that the only small thing at the end of the funnel is the object you’ve chosen to focus your attention on.
Expand your focus little by little, widening the funnel until you can see everything in the room.
Think of your external focus as a zoom lens. Practice zooming in and out, narrow and broadening your focus according to your wishes.
That five step process is a concentration training exercise and experience. You can do this at any time and in a safe space. It will help you zoom in and out to focus in your concentration.
I hope this is helpful to you.
