Attention lost! A reward is offered to the finder!
When it comes to technical trainings, attention is crucial, without attention you don’t build memory. So, you either pay attention when you are in a training or you just pay the price.
Learning attention and attention loss are the most important factors that influence our learning and also employees’ training. When we are paying attention to learning there are things that we should not do, but nevertheless, we do. And there are things that we should do and we don’t do.
According to this simple classification, we will see what are the attention’s bad habits that we have to quit and what are the good habits that we have to build:
- Avoid attention loss (the wandering mind)
- Learn to pay attention
In this article, I will discuss only the “bad guy”, the one that steals our attention when we want to learn. And I will give some short tips about how to regain control over your mind when that happens.
What is attention loss?
Attention loss or concentration loss is also known as mind-wandering or the monkey mind because it jumps all over the place.
Why does it happen? Are we able to control it?
Yes, we can. Before getting too excited and then disappointed about how to control the wandering mind, I want to make a warning here: the process takes time and it involves activities you might not have time for, like walking in nature or meditation 😉.
What is in your opinion the most disturbing factor when it comes to concentration:
the voices of the people talking outside or the voice from your own head?
Manifestation
Have you noticed that there is a voice in your head?
It usually pops up uninvited and tells you things that are task-unrelated and stimulus-independent:
“That was a foolish thing to do!”
“What shall I wear at the party?”
“Why did he call me now, after such a long time?”
This is the wandering mind, the mind that wanders uncontrolled from one thought to another. Even more in situations when it shouldn’t, like when you are trying to learn. Or read or when you attend a lecture, training, or presentation.
It feels relaxing to be able to wander on sunny beaches, while sitting in your office chair, as a reward for finishing a complex task. The kind of daydreaming that allows us to release the stress after a meeting with a client.
Although this activity of the mind is essential, it has its drawbacks. It activates uncontrolled and also when you don’t want that. Like when you paid a significant amount of money for a training/workshop that is crucial for your work. It might do it also when your wife talks to you. But since I am self-instructed in learning and not on marriage problems, I am going to focus on fixing issues disturbing your learning.
There is something even worse than the fact that it activates during learning. When practiced very often, it is associated with depression, anxiety, and even schizophrenia.
The default mode network DMN of the mind
The neuroscience explanation of the wandering mind is: our mind has a default mode. The default mode of the brain gets activated when the person is not engaged in a specific task. Or during automatic behavior: motor behavior without conscious self-control, like brushing teeth or driving.
A simple association is just like your laptop screen saver (or saving energy mode) which is activated after a period of time of not using it. In neuroscience, this mode is called exactly default mode network (DMN) and anatomically is the medial frontoparietal network. So far so good! It means we are not sick (in the brain) and we are all daydreaming. Some more some less, depending on the level of “busyness” and self-control.
This syndrome is also called the wandering mind. But in order to avoid building a wrong image based on the wrong usage of the words, I must tell you that in this case, it is not the mind that is wandering, but your awareness. Your awareness moves from one thought to another.
In order to excel at concentration, you have to train your awareness to stay focused on the topic you want, for an extended period of time. Concentration can be trained, just like any muscle. The more you use it the stronger will be. In order to do that, you have to understand what are the reasons why you lose attention and try to find a find proper solution.
McMillan, Kaufmann, and Singer (2013) have divided the mind wandering into three subtypes:
- guilty fear of failure
- positive constructive daydreaming
- poor attentional control
1. Attention loss due to guilty fear of failure
“Time goes from present to past.” (Dogen-zenji)
Mind-wandering of this subtype is the voice in your head that rewinds discussions, meetings, and behaviors that did not go so well. It tells what you should have said, how you should have reacted.
In order to avoid failure, the mind makes preparations for events, meetings, and discussions that are scheduled in the future. Or is being preoccupied with your main worries/fears “How will I pay my debt?”. In short, those are the worries for “to-dos” or unfinished tasks.
Attention loss in employees training
The Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik formulated a postulate about how unfinished tasks/worries are affecting us.
“People remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks”
Accordingly the Zeigarnik effect: “an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled”. This means that your interrupted tasks will make you lose concentration by interrupting you during other tasks.
This is one of the reasons why employees lose concentration during their training. The training interferes or has nothing to do with their ongoing tasks. HR schedules the training based on the trainer’s availability. In order to attend the training, the employees put on hold their ongoing tasks. They try to focus their attention on training although they might have problems with their work packages.
Solution
In order to avoid loss of concentration due to interrupted tasks, try as much as possible to learn when all urgent and ongoing tasks are closed. If you have tasks that are scheduled in the future or you cannot finish but are still consuming attention bandwidth, have a notebook at hand. Everything that concerns you, take them off your mind by writing them down.
Try the concept and see how you can increase your attention only by releasing your mind from interrupted tasks. And not only when it comes to learning but also for focusing on whatever you are doing.
2. Positive constructive daydreaming and poor attentional control
In order to avoid distractions of this kind, you have to fight the distraction at the same moment when it appears. Daniel Goleman in his book Focus, states that it is pretty difficult to catch the moment when the mind starts wandering. Because the brain circuits that should catch the mind when it is wandering are part of the neural circuit that allows the mind to wander. Is it just my feeling or indeed a bug was strained in this system? The watchdog falls asleep each time the thieves are coming.
Solution
So you have caught yourself daydreaming, what should you do to regain concentration as soon as possible? Engage the mind in short activities that request focus, like counting down from 100 with a decrement of 7, saying the alphabet in reverse, saying the months of the year in reverse etc.
Solutions for controlling the attention
Here are some long-term practices for better control of mind and awareness in order to avoid attention loss:
1.Don’t let yourself distracted
Examples of modern distractions that kill focus are emails, smartphones, and notifications. Schedule time for those must-have “distractions”, like when you intentionally switch between tasks. Don’t allow them to mess with your focus when you are in the middle of a task/learning.
”We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news- it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task”. Gloria Mark lead author of a distraction study made at a University in California.
Multiply 23 minutes by the number of distractions per day and wonder how much “brain time” you can save by only avoiding the modern world’s distractions.
2. Don’t engage in multitasking
Why not?
Because of the Zeigarnik effect: “an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled”. Your focus and concentration on the current task might be disturbed by recalls related to the former interrupted one.
When doing multitasking “you have to completely shift your thinking, it takes a while to get into it and it takes you a while to get back and remember where you were”. (Gloria Mark)
No, not even when you have breakfast or lunch (even if you eat alone). Don’t do your to-do list for the day, don’t scroll on social media. Use the time to de-clutter your head, and just eat your food aware and enjoy the taste.
“The lure of the screen and myth of multitasking are among the most dangerous fabrications of our digital society” (Stanislas Dehaene)
3. Practice awareness
Concentration is the ability to keep your awareness of one thing for an extended period of time. The best thing that you can do for your attention (and for your eating habits) is to practice awareness (while eating). If you are doing something else while eating, your rewards regions in the brain might punish you for not eating aware because they missed the pleasure (offered by the taste). Have you experienced that when you eat unaware, a short time after, you have the appetite for eating something “good”?
Here is an exercise that I dare you to take in order to understand the benefits of practicing awareness while eating. Put a raisin into your mouth and chew it one whole minute before swallowing it. How many flavors have you discovered?
You can practice awareness not only while eating, but also whenever you are doing house chores. Just focus on what you are doing, being fully there, and dismissing any thought, do not let the default mode take over. Or do the automatic things slightly different to force your mind to focus on the activity: like brushing your teeth with the other hand.
4. Walk in the nature
After having your mind guarded for a while, allow time frames where it can wander at will. Rest your attention while taking walks in nature. Enjoy being aware the colors and the noises that nature offers as free stress healers. Everybody should walk daily for 20 minutes, except for the stressed ones who have a lot of work to do. They must walk ONE hour every day.
