Transcript
Rob Dial (0:00)
This podcast is brought to you by Hotels.com make your next trip work for you. Hotels.com's new save your Way feature lets you choose between Instant Savings now or Banking Rewards for later. It's a flexible rewards program that puts you in control with no confusing math or blackout dates. Book now at hotels.com Save your way is available to loyalty members in the US and UK on hotels with member prices. Other terms apply. Savings csite for details between going to your doctor, paying your bills and finding a specialist, healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum is building digital solutions to connect the people and processes that make healthcare better. It means transparency into whatever your benefits cover. It means coordinating care between your doctors and the systems you use to manage health. It means simplifying healthcare. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Learn more@optim.com brought to you by the.
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer (0:57)
Capital One Savor card. With Savor, you can earn unlimited 3% cash back on dining, entertainment, and at grocery stores. That's unlimited cash back on ordering takeout from home or unlimited cash back on tickets to concerts and games. So grab a bite, grab a seat and earn unlimited 3% cash back with the SAFER card Capital One.
Rob Dial (1:17)
What's in your wallet? Terms apply.
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer (1:19)
See capitalone.com for details. Foreign. Welcome 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 in 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? If 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. 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. Just absolute laser focus locked in pure flow. I want you to understand that was you too. At one point in time in your life, you. 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 Spanish, what they're really saying is, my brain's been trained by overstimulation. And I've just never really trained my brain on depth. And 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. Don'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 going to 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. Companies literally build multi billion dollar empires by stealing your focus. Their. 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, 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. But 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 going to switch this thing. Oh, I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to look at this. Oh, my notification came in. You're training your brain, and your brain learns, hey, distraction is the goal. And 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, then 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, and 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. And so what you have to do is start smaller and we will be right back.