Two more practices you can implement into your daily routines are mechanical actions: repetitive behaviors you perform with your body that act to help your focus and thinking.
First, we come to doodling. Yes, doodling— the small scribbles or masterpieces you create in your notebooks or the tiny stick figures you draw in the margins. Apparently doodling isn’t as undesirable as we were once told in school.
A psychologist from the University of Plymouth, Jackie Andrade, performed a study to test whether doodling really did have an effect on memory and focus. The participants all listened to a monotonous recording, and half of them were asked to doodle while the other half were not. When asked to recall the information they’d just listened to, the doodlers demonstrated significantly higher recall that the non- doodlers.
It may seem that doodling would only serve as a distraction, as it might draw your attention onto whatever you’re drawing rather than the task you should be focusing on. However, Andrade argues against this.
“People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate . . . We might not be aware that we’re doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream.” This suggests that instead of distracting you and pulling you away from the task, doodling might just be grounding your thoughts with a subconscious activity that requires minimal concentration, while the rest of you absorbs information.
The scientists hypothesized that unlike daydreaming, which involves a significantly larger mental demand, the mental load required to doodle is quite small and doesn’t lead your mind entirely astray from the task you are supposed to be engaged in.
The small iota of your attention that is preoccupied with doodling actually appears to keep you focused and centered in the present time, giving you a release valve from the frustrations of an overly long or tiresome task.
This might also be due to the fact that we are very visual people; our entire world is centered on what we can see. A whopping 30 percent of our brains are devoted to processing visual information. While you’re being bombarded with information, a visual task such as doodling can help you form associations and therefore process things much better.
American author Sunni Brown is known for extolling the power of doodling. According to her research, doodling can help you “anchor a task.” This means it will keep you focused during a long meeting or phone call.
Concentrate on scribbling pictures or designs that reflect what you’re hearing or thinking. It doesn’t matter if they are funny or weird or have nothing to do with what you are discussing. Doodling will help keep your thoughts from straying, and you might be surprised at how much you will be able to recall of a conversation afterward.
If doodling won’t work for you, then use the general idea of visual stimuli to help you.
When you need to brainstorm ideas, try a pen and paper diagram with as many visual representations as you can come up with.
When you have a lot to do, write a physical to-do list and place it somewhere easily accessible so you will always have it in sight. Or even leave a notebook and pen beside you so that when you hit a stopping point in your work, you can try to reason it out visually. The point is that a visual model may help you organize and focus your thoughts so that you can reach ideas or methods of action.
The second mechanical action is... chewing gum.
How can something as easy as chewing gum help you improve your focus? Well, research conducted by the British Journal of Psychology shows that chewing gum increases the oxygen flow to certain parts of your brain that are responsible for your attention span—the prefrontal cortex, which resides over what are generally known as executive functions. This extra oxygen means that you will be more alert, and your reflexes will improve as well.
Seems too good to be true? Wait, there’s more. The increased blood flow also improves your long-term memory so you are able to store and recall more information. This is very helpful when you are trying to study or learn material for work, or if you need to remember specific protocols. Gum also injects a little bit of insulin into your blood. This little shot of insulin gives you an added energy boost, reinvigorating your brain and motivating you to get out of that slump you may find yourself in.
So gum is actually a truly effective booster of mental performance. Best of all, unlike many other mental performance enhancers, gum itself is responsible for all sorts of benefits without any side effects. The latest investigation into gum for brain health is from a team of psychologists at St. Lawrence University. They conducted an experiment to see the effect of gum on the brain and whether it actually did help to improve performance.
The experiment went like this: 159 students were presented with a number of very demanding cognitive tasks, such as repeating random numbers backward and solving challenging logic puzzles. Half of the subjects chewed gum (sugar-free and sugar-added) while the other half didn’t chew anything.
Here’s where things got interesting. The subjects who were randomly assigned to chew gum significantly outperformed the others in five out of six of the tests. The only exception was in the sixth test, which was in verbal fluency, where subjects needed to name as many words as possible from a given category, such as “animals.” The gum’s sugar content had no effect on the performance.
Even though it seems hard to believe, gum might just be the answer to your struggling work cycle. It’s a cheap and easy method to try to give you the added push to get you sucked back into your work. If you’re not a gum fan, you can still use this research to help you. Gum increases attention span because it increases oxygen flow to the brain. You can replicate this by taking short exercise breaks through your day—even just five minutes to tackle some stairs and you will be more alert. If you can’t exercise, sometimes taking a break to breathe very deeply for a moment or two can be more than helpful.
They improve not only your attention span, but also your memory. That’s not to say you’ll immediately be able to finish that mountain of work you’ve been avoiding for far too long, but gum may just be a quick way to help get you back on track and focused once more.
