What Is Focus And Why Should You Care?

When you are able to focus at will on anything that you want you will have the power to transform your life and get anything that you want. You need a good level of focus to achieve anything worthwhile in your life.

 

Having the ability to focus on something for as long as you need will improve your productivity considerably. You will be able to get far more done than you could before. Being able to focus on the important things will enable you to accomplish anything that you want.

 

Focus Defined

 

In simple terms, focus is a thinking skill which enables you to get started with any task without any procrastination. With a good level of focus, you will be able to concentrate fully on a task until you have completed it.

 

Once you develop a high level of focus it will be a lot easier for you to pay attention to a task in spite of distractions and any setbacks that you may encounter. You will have the energy required to focus and re-focus as necessary and ensure that the task gets done.

 

Every Time you Think you Focus

 

It is not possible to think about something without focusing on it. Focus is required to provide perception, make decisions, solve problems, recall things from your memory and more. If you cannot focus then you will not be able to do any of these things.

 

Of course, we all have some power of focus, but many people have a wandering mind which causes them problems. You need to increase your focus to overcome your wandering mind so that you can be more productive and achieve more each day.

 

Attention comes in Three States

 

There are three different attention states that you can be in when you are trying to focus on something. These are:

 

1.    Selective attention

2.    Divided attention

3.    Sustained attention

 

Each of these has a part to play with your focus. It is usually not necessary for you to focus too much when you are driving a car for example. This is especially true if you have been driving for some time. You use divided attention here as you can drive almost on autopilot.

 

As people age it is possible for their divided attention to diminish. By using proven methods to increase your focus you can prevent this from happening. Divided attention is important to have as it enables you to process several different sources of information at the same time.

 

Selective attention is where you can shut everything else out to concentrate on one thing. The ideal state to master is sustained attention which will enable you to concentrate on something for a long period of time.

 

When it comes to sustained attention, your brain will use a process called “sensitivity enhancement”. This will ensure that all sensory information is intensified such as sounds and lights to make sure that you can process things in the correct way.

 

Efficient Selection

 

Your brain is amazing and it will use the efficient selection process to filter information that you receive and determine if it is important or not. If the efficient selection process deems something to be important then this gets moved up your priority list. The same process will suppress interruptions and distractions and move these to the bottom of your priority list.