CS-CV0005 - Mind & Study - toolbox for being well in studies, Lectures, 26.2.2024-21.4.2024

TEST YOUR CURRENT ABILITY TO FOCUS

The questions below describe situations in which various concentration challenges often occur:

1. Is focusing on a single thing at a time often difficult for you?
2. Do you feel like you have lost your ability to wind down?
3. Do you find it difficult to wind down in the evening before bed?
4. Are you constantly fiddling with your phone while watching a film or a TV series?
5. Is reading an (exam) book so boring that your mind starts to wander even before you have finished the first page?
6. Is your mind constantly flooded with unfinished tasks?
7. Are you often disorganised in your everyday life or constantly making careless mistakes?

(Adapted from Huotilainen + Moisala, Keskittymiskyvyn elvytysopas, 2018)

WHAT IS CONCENTRATION?

In psychology, concentration is referred to with the term attention. The ability to focus attention is a key skill, particularly for university students, because when you study, you need to acquire and memorise new skills and knowledge. Concentrating allows you to learn and ensures that your memory works optimally. In student life, many learning tasks, such as reading articles, writing essays and listening to lectures, require long-term and intensive concentration.

Attention is like a spotlight that we focus on something either consciously or unconsciously. This spotlight may be stolen by almost unnoticeable external stimuli or mental processes that distract us. When this happens repeatedly, we start to notice that concentrating becomes a challenge. For instance, as I started writing this text, I first scrolled on my phone for about 10 minutes. When I caught myself doing something other than I should, I was able to shift my focus back on the task at hand, that is, writing this text. You might recognise similar scenarios in your student life.

THE ABILITY TO CONCENTRATE EVOLVES AND CHANGES: Why should we practise our concentration skills?

The ability to concentrate develops from childhood to adulthood as the frontal lobes of the brain develop. These parts of the brain keep maturing until early adulthood. Nonetheless, the brain develops throughout life and the connections we use repeatedly are strengthened in the brain. This means that it matters what type of activity and concentration habits we train our brain in. Do we train our brain to shift focus repeatedly and to look for quick pleasure rewards for those shifts rather than to stay focused for longer in order to get rewarded later on.

In the 1990s, an American doctor, E.M. Hallowell coined the term ADT (attention deficit trait) to describe his patients who had concentration difficulties similar to ADHD without having ADHD. Hallowell inferred that their concentration difficulties of these patients were associated with their ways of life: they had led busy lives without breaks, jumping from one task to the next and trying to do many things simultaneously. Hallowell noticed that even when these people were given a peaceful space to work in without external distractions, they still had much difficulty concentrating, because their own thoughts kept interrupting them. 

Since Hallowell’s time, the world has become even more fast-paced and full of stimuli and distractions. We are constantly surrounded by an influx of information, and students often seek information using mobile equipment, for which information is segmented into concise and dense pieces that are presented in written or video format. Various notification sounds capture our attention many times a day. In addition, the media is filled with tips on how to be more effective and optimise your performance, which makes burnout a more common phenomenon than ever. In other words, staying focused on one thing is not something that is actively encouraged in today’s society.  

BRAIN-FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT AND PRACTICES

As we discussed in the chapter above, the surrounding society, the world of work as well as student life are in many ways not helping us to concentrate, and our brain has not developed at the same pace as the surrounding world. Many jobs require high-level problem-solving and analysing skills and comprehensive understanding of an issue, which are all rather demanding tasks for our brain and require deep concentration. Cognitive ergonomics means that in our ways of working and organising the environment, we take into account the characteristics of the brain and aim to adapt our working or studying practices to make them effortless, healthy, and safe for the brain.

Distractions

Distractions related to work or study refer to audio or visual noise. Studying may be distracted by talk, notification sounds, people moving nearby, and push notifications with images. While reminders and notifications are needed for studying, sudden stimuli capture our attention very easily and thus prevent deep concentration. Distractions add to brain strain. Distracting talk weakens your performance particularly when the task involves linguistic functions, such as reading, writing and discussing. Movement and visual noise, on the other hand, complicate visual and spatial tasks in particular. Notification sounds or motion even at the edges of your visual field often take your attention away from the studying task that you were supposed to be working on. The more tired you are, the more you tend to get distracted.

• Where do you work? What is the best concentrating environment for you when you are doing something that requires deep focus? What about when you are taking care of miscellaneous tasks that require less focus? 
• What is the best place to work on a group assignment for you?
• How much of audio or visual noise do these environments have?

Multitasking

Multitasking refers to doing multiple (brain-straining) tasks at the same time. From the viewpoint of the brain, we can only focus our attention on one thing at a time, which means we have to keep shifting focus from one thing to another when we are doing multiple things at the same time. While doing so might often make us feel efficient, multitasking is in fact slow, error-prone and straining on the brain. We are more productive when we focus on one thing at a time.

You may think to yourself: ‘I can do the dishes and listen to the lecture at the same time.’ It is true that we are able to do such things simultaneously that are automatic for us and do not require much effort or learning new things. For instance, an experienced knitter will have no problem knitting while listening to a lecture. Instead, a person who is only learning to knit will not be able to focus on the lecture while learning this new skill. Multitasking strengthens those connections in the brain which are associated with a fast change of stimuli. The more you multitask, the more prone you are to distractions.

• Do you find it hard to focus on one thing at a time?
• Do you often realise you have started multiple tasks simultaneously during the day?

Interruptions

Studies have found that all in all, reorienting to a task after an interruption takes about 2 hours of time each working day. This means that working on demanding coursework may be very inefficient if you are interrupted many times. An interruption is when you have to stop doing a task for either an external reason, for instance, if your friends start talking, or for an internal reason, such as an unrelated thing popping into your mind. Shifting focus from one task to another without advance planning increases time pressure and makes you more prone to errors and strain. What is more, we often do not get back to taking care of the interrupted tasks on the same day. 

Some interruptions may be necessary. For instance, if you are studying together with your peers, asking questions may benefit both parties: the person who asks the question gets to move on in the task and the person answering the question has a chance to be helpful and test their knowledge on the topic. Making a joint decision on when you will study without interruptions and when you are allowed to interrupt each other will help you control the number of interruptions.

• How often do you get interrupted during a typical day of study?
• When you are studying together with friends, do you agree on when it is suitable to interrupt others?
• Are you often interrupted by thoughts popping into your mind?

 Smartphones and concentration 

In the light of research, it is not clear-cut how the use of smartphones influences concentration. However, smartphones and other technical devices have features that encourage us to use them in ways that do not support our concentration. You should take a moment to think about how and when you use your smartphone. Research shows that even the existence of a smartphone in the sight makes concentrating more difficult, because you have to resist the urge to look at it.

Here is a list of things you can go through to review your smartphone use and make it less harmful for concentration:

1. What kind of notification sounds do you have on? Silence all unnecessary notifications.
2. What kind of push notifications do you have on your phone? Turn off all unnecessary push notifications.
3. When do you usually put your phone on flight mode or silent? Could you do it more often? What about leaving your phone out of sight?
4. Could you take time off from using social media or your phone? You can start by trying out what it feels like to travel from home to the university without looking at your phone even once.
5. Do you use all the applications on your phone? Remove all the applications you do not use.