How to Train Your Attention Span

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast and you want to get some inspirational tips, tricks, mindset stuff sent directly to your cell phone and you live in the United States or Canada, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, we're going to be talking about how to train your attention span. because do you ever sit down to work and two minutes in, you feel this pull to check your phone or literally do anything else but the thing that you need to focus on?

0:48If so, I want you to realize that's not just a bad habit. That is your attention span. And if you're like the average human nowadays, it's shrinking every single year. What used to be an hour of sitting down and being focused is now 43 seconds before our brain wants to be somewhere else. And the worst part is that you probably don't even really notice how deeply distracted you've actually become in your own life. But the good news is that it's fixable. So if you are willing to retrain your brain, you will be able to break out of the distraction loop that you have been stuck in for years. And so real quick, I just want you to understand if you rewind back to a moment where you've ever been with a toddler and they're playing with building blocks or whatever it might be, they'll sit there and they can play with the building blocks or they can play with their book and they could be there for 45 minutes.

1:41Just absolute laser focus, locked in, pure flow. I want you to understand that was you two at one point in time in your life. You were born with deep focus. You were not born distracted. You were trained to be distracted. What happened? Well, we've unconsciously been training ourselves to be distracted, to scroll, to toggle between 37 tabs on our computer, to check our phone 96 times a day, and we just call that normal. So when people have a short attention span or they say, hey, I have a short attention span, what they're really saying is my brain's been trained by overstimulation and I've just never really trained my brain on depth.

2:26And that's okay. That's all. So the challenge that I have for you is to actually try to get yourself to be focused. Know that it's something that you can train and that's what we'll talk about today. I have another challenge for you real quick. I want you to try this and maybe 5 % of the people out there listening to this episode are actually gonna do it. I want you to set your timer for one hour today or tomorrow, sometime this week, one hour. And I want you to click start and then I want you to close your eyes and sit there. and do absolutely nothing. Don't listen to music. Don't have your eyes open.

3:01Don't move if you can. And just watch your brain. Watch how anxious you've become. Watch how distracted you've become. Watch how you can say, I'm gonna focus on this one thought. And then two seconds later, you're thinking about another thought, right? And I want you to understand that this is really important for you to do because you really don't notice all of these things that are happening behind the scenes until you sit down with zero stimulation and you cannot run from it. And that will show you how wild your mind has become and how your attention span has been hijacked. And I want you to understand, your attention span being hijacked is not really your fault.

3:42Companies literally build multi-billion dollar empires by stealing your focus. Their product isn't the app that you downloaded on your phone. You are the product. like you are the product for them. And so the product is your attention and attention is worth so much nowadays. It's the notifications, it's the emails, it's the alerts, it's the infinite scrolls. They are all designed to hijack your dopamine system and your brain. It has adapted to it. You know, we 15 years ago, we didn't know what a smartphone was. And so we didn't really know that this thing was going to be coming through and just hijacking everything inside of our brain and our focus to shorten our attention span.

4:26But now we know there is scientific evidence that proves that being on your phone so much is shortening your attention span and it is stealing your focus. And so every time you interrupt yourself to check your phone or switch tasks or skim through something instead of sitting there and actually reading it, you're training your brain to focus distraction over depth. And if you want to become more focused and make your attention span longer, you need to actually favor depth over anything else. Let me say it again. Every time that you switch, your brain learns distraction is the goal. Now, that's not your actual goal, but when you decide, oh, I'm gonna switch this thing, oh, I'm gonna do this thing, I'm gonna look at this, oh, my notification came in, you're training your brain and your brain learns, hey, distraction is the goal.

5:17And guess what? we've become really incredibly good at distracting ourselves. And mind you, I have found myself here. Years ago, I realized that I had like no focus and so much anxiety. And I was like, I need to work at this because if I can be more focused and I can bring more of my brain into everything that I do, everything that I do is going to be better. And so we wonder like why we can't finish everything that we start and why our brains can feel like, you know, sometimes it feels like static on a TV screen, right? You're not lazy. You're not broken. You are just so untrained in the direction that you want to be trained.

5:55And you're so trained in the opposite direction that you want to be trained. And so it's fixable. You have accidentally trained your brain to be distracted. Now you need to train your brain from this moment forward for focus. And so you have to understand focus is like a muscle. You know, if you want to train your attention span to be longer, it's the exact same way that you would train yourself in a gym. If you've been, you know, mentally out of shape for years and you've never trained your focus, then sitting down to focus for 90 minutes on day one is like trying to deadlift 400 pounds after not stepping into a gym for over a decade.

6:36And so what you have to do is start smaller and we will be right back. And now back to the show. And just like reps at a gym, you can add a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more so that your focus becomes stronger the same way that your muscles become stronger. And so the first thing I want you to do is the first drill that I have for you is to do 25 minutes of focused work. Now, mind you, I understand. 25 minutes, I was like, I can do that. No big deal. I'll set my timer for 25 minutes. And then four minutes in, I'm like, I got so many things I got to do and I'm going crazy and I've got to do this and I've got to do this.

7:15And oh my God, I should check my phone and my emails. And I realized, holy shit, I can't even do 25 minutes. And so for some of you, you might be able to get to 25 minutes. For a lot of you, 25 minutes is already going to be a push. But what you want to do is every day, just have one 25 minute block of deliberate, distraction-free work on one task with your timer on, with your headphones on, with your phone in another room, with no podcasts, no switching tabs or any of that type of stuff. And then when you're done at those 25 minutes and the alarm goes off, you stop. That's one rep. It's not going to be easy, but challenge yourself, right?

8:01You want to challenge yourself to do it. Deliberate distraction-free work. This is called the Pomodoro technique, 25 minutes on, five minutes off. But I don't want you to get three or five reps. I want you to get one rep, just one. Just fight to get 25 minutes time. And you do this every single day, at least once a day. And then you can increase your time over weeks. So for me, it was really hard to get to 25 minutes. My brain was so unfocused. And then a couple of weeks in, I was able to get to 25 minutes. And I was like, actually, 25 minutes feels pretty easy now. Let me go to 30 minutes. And I went to 30 minutes.

8:30It was a little bit hard. And then I trained myself to get to 30 minutes and then 35 minutes and now 40 and then 45 minutes. And so now what used to be a 25-minute Pomodoro for me of deep focus is now 45 minutes. That's a huge difference. When I used to struggle at four to five minutes and now I'm at 45 minutes, that's the difference between walking in and barely being able to bench press 45 pounds. And then six months down the road, you're benching 200 pounds. These are neural reps. You're training your brain to become more focused. You're literally building your brain's capacity for depth and for focus.

9:08This will change your entire life. Now, I do want you to understand this. The first six minutes are usually pretty hard to get into. Your brain does this process without going too much in the neurology of it. Your brain does this process of taking about six minutes to warm up when you go into a new task. It releases something called acetylcholine and epinephrine, which is adrenaline in your brain. That's what your brain does when it starts to warm up. And acetylcholine and epinephrine come from the stress mechanisms and agitation mechanisms in your brain, which is why when you're doing a task and you're trying to, the first five minutes can feel like stress and agitation.

9:45It's actually because your brain is releasing the chemicals that it needs to to focus. So when you start to feel, oh my God, this is so frustrating. And you're in your first five minutes, remind yourself, this is actually the precursor to focus. and you just fight through it and eventually your brain will lock in. So that's the first thing, 25 minute sessions. The second drill I want you to do is to have some dopamine downtime. If your brain is constantly rewarded with stimulation, it forgets how to sit still. It really does. And that's why you feel agitated when you sit down in silence. That's why you grab your phone when you're sitting at a red light and it's only 15 seconds until the light turns green.

10:24You're not bored. You're addicted to stimulation. the same way that a drug addict is addicted to their drugs. We all have become addicted to stimulation because our brain, when you pick up your phone, releases dopamine and dopamine, like the most highly dopaminergic drugs on earth are the most addicting drugs on earth. And our brain releases dopamine whenever it gets that agitated and needs to do something or we wanna check our phone at red lights. And so here's what you wanna do is you wanna set up dopamine downtimes and create your own, whatever it looks like for you. So like one can be like no phone mornings, you know, 30 minutes, 60 minutes after waking up, no phone, no input.

11:06You focus on your own life and not being distracted. You can also create what I call no input zones. And so what that would mean would be like, go for a walk without music. Go, you sit still without listening to a podcast. Drive in silence. It used to drive me crazy to drive in silence. And now I force myself to do it because I'm trying to train my brain not to be distracted. Another thing I recommend, boredom training. Just train your brain to be bored. Boredom and wanting to do something is the equivalent of you starting to go through withdrawals by wanting to do something. It's literally like a drug addict.

11:44And so when you're sitting there like, I got to do something, I got to do something, I hate being bored, I hate being bored, I hate being bored. That's you basically having withdrawals from being addicted to stimulation. And so can you sit on your couch for 10 minutes with nothing but your own thoughts? Sound uncomfortable? Good. That's the point. That's where your growth is. The third drill is to build a focus-friendly environment. Build your environment to make it easier to focus. Willpower is overrated. If your environment is full of temptations, you're going to lose. So just restructure your entire environment so that your environment is designed to be focused.

12:19Like I know some people that take their work desk and they put it inside of a closet that's in a spare room in their house so that there's literally nothing except for their computer screen and their computer. Their phone can't go in there. Nothing else can go in there. So it's like, what else are you gonna do? The only thing that you can do is work. You know, if I'm trying to write a book, hey, I'm gonna take my computer, my computer screen, I'm gonna put a desk inside of a closet. If I have a closet with enough space, turn on the light and then I'm gonna turn off my wifi so I can't look at anything.

12:50My phone's gonna be in another room. The only thing that I can do is write that book. And so restructure your life. Use app blockers like Freedom or Opal. Put your phone in another room. Leave your phone outside of your office so you can get stuff done. You can designate deep work spots in your house where no phone is allowed. So maybe it's like your studio or maybe it's your office. Like if you're a painter, then maybe it's your garage where you go out and you do your painting or maybe you do some sort of like create pottery. Well, yeah, then you're gonna have deep work spots where your phone is not allowed.

13:26And then it's just sacred. You don't go in there. Or like your kids' rooms. You wanna be present with your kids? Your phone's not allowed in your kids' room. Like you wanna make distractions inconvenient. That's the hack. That's the thing. You're trying to add more friction to getting to your phone, right? The less friction that's there, to access your phone and to access distraction, the more likely that you are you're going to do it. So add friction. Create friction on purpose. And the reason why this matters, just so you know, sure, it's productivity, but it's so much deeper than productivity.

14:02If you take a step back for a second, this isn't just about doing more and being more productive. It's about being more present in your own life. Like finishing what you start, trusting yourself again, like being physically present, mentally present, emotionally present when your child who is going to be outside of your house one day is talking to you and wanting to play with you. Stop being so fucking distracted. Like what's at stake when you lose your focus and you're distracted all the time? Well, your creativity is usually shot. Your ability to sit still with your thoughts is usually shot as well to not panic.

14:43You're not as present with your kids, with your partner, with your friends. You're not actually fully present in the one life that you get to live because you're too distracted. And so anytime that you're like, oh, let me just check this real quick. You're actually saying, let me give this precious moment in my life to someone else's agenda and to check something on my phone. Like, to be honest with you, that just cannot be okay with you anymore. And so here's what I want you to do over the next seven days. I want you to reboot your focus. I want you to commit to a couple different things. Number one, 25 minutes of focused work block with zero distractions, one task.

15:22Okay. Number two, no phone for at least 30 minutes after you wake up. Number three, I want you to set a 10 minute block of no input time. No phone, no music, no screens. You just sitting on your couch or looking at a wall or sitting on your back porch and staring at trees. Just 10 minutes. It'll be okay, I promise you. And then just start to notice the moments of resistance. And instead of reacting to those moments of resistance, sit through them. You feel the urge to check your phone? Breathe, let it pass. You will not die if you don't check your phone. That's what you have to understand. you're trying to build your brain to be focused so that yes you can be more productive but more than anything else you can be present in your life so that's what i got for you for today's episode if you love this episode please share it on your instagram stories tag me in at rob dial junior r-o-b-d-i-a-l-j-r if you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast you can go ahead and go to coachwithrob.com once again coachwithrob.com and with that i'm leave the same way I leave you every single episode make it your mission to make somebody else's day better I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day