Do you find it hard to concentrate on your studies? It doesn’t really matter that whether you are a student, an employee, or a boss, you do need to concentrate on your tasks to achieve something from your work. Sitting down and trying to complete a task without any sort of concentration means nothing else but wasting your time. Concentration helps you to enhance the productivity of your brain and boost up your learning.
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Why do you struggle to concentrate?
If you’re studying or doing any other chore, it demands concentration. There must be a few thoughts triggering your mind like why can’t I concentrate? What stops me from studying effectively for hours? Or what hinders me from performing efficiently in my academic tasks? The most precise one-word answer to all these questions is “distraction”. It’s like any thought or object that causes a lapse in concentration.
Some of the main distractions that students face during studies are:
- Social media notifications.
- Text messages and calls.
- Physical or mental stresses.
- Disturbances in surroundings.
Tips to increase your concentration power
Are you facing difficulty in finding focus during your study hours? Here are some tips that will surely help you to increase the productivity of your work.
Visualization
Learning is always incomplete without the visualization of concepts. Have you ever wondered why do you find it easy to concentrate while studying subjects of your interest? The obvious reason is that you can easily visualize concepts in those subjects. But not everyone can do that. Only about 20% of the individuals on the planet can smoothly visualize something that they want to. Are you one of them who find it hard to visualize? If yes, then, first of all, you need to understand that visualization doesn’t only mean to sketch a picture. Visualization means to actually feel something you are trying to imagine.
Suppose that you aim to visualize an apple but you are unable to do so, you can proceed by asking yourself the following questions:
- What is the color of this apple?
- Does it have a stem or no stem?
- How many leaves are there on the stem?
- If you touch the apple will it be hard or soft?
- Where is the apple? In a bowl? On the table? Or in the air?
Such questions like how a thing will look like? How will it smell? Or how will it sound? Etc. make visualization much simpler and realistic.
Practice concentration
Attention is a muscle and just like any other muscle it needs training. Malcolm Gladwell said that, to become an expert at something you need to spend 10,000 hours learning it. You must be asking yourself that how can you practice concentration? Here is the answer to your question.
- Spare 15 minutes today in your day and find a room where you can study peacefully being alone.
- Make sure that you don’t keep your mobile phone or laptop in the same room.
- Take any book of your interest along with you but not more than one book.
- Start the stopwatch when you are ready to go and read actively.
- Read aloud and ask yourself some questions, do make some notes.
- After 15 minutes shut down the books, close the stopwatch, and step out of the room.
- Keep an increasing number of these slots gradually and then the length of these slots.
Healthy Body (sleep, diet and exercise)
A healthy brain needs a healthy body, and to keep your body healthy, you need to ascertain a few things.
Here are some tips to keep your body and consequently your brain healthy.
- Maintain a healthy diet, increase fluid intake, and cut down on sugars.
- Sleep is the food of your brain so; make sure that you have 7 to 8 hours of sleep daily.
- Good exercise increases blood circulation and carries oxygen to the brain, to help you concentrate.
Avoid Multitasking
Nowadays, multitasking has become a habit. Checking our phone while talking to someone, watching TV while having a meal, or scrolling down Facebook while studying, are some of the examples of brain multitasking. In multitasking, we are continuously shifting the focus of our brain from one task to the other. It hampers the productivity of the brain and makes it tough for an individual to focus on a single task at a time. Consequently, when you sit down to study, you can’t focus on what you are studying.
You need to train your mind to focus on a single task at a time and avoid doing multiple tasks simultaneously. This will boost up your concentration power to a considerable amount.
Zero Distraction
To attain complete focus on your academic tasks, you need to throw away all the distractions. Studying with a mobile phone in hand, or with noise around, is of no use because you can’t focus on the task in front of you.
According to a survey, 80% of the students agreed that the use of mobile phones during studies reduces their ability to pay attention.
Here is how you can avoid all the distractions to achieve full concentration.
- Get into a room all alone with no noise around.
- Lock the door and sit down on a comfortable chair with a table in front.
- Don’t bring your mobile phone along with you.
- If you need to use your laptop, make sure that you have blocked all the social media notifications.
