The Reason You Can Never Focus and What’s Holding You Back From Your Potential.
By: Vinh Pham
Tags: Self Improvement, Boredom, Technology, Focus

Just as a goldfish mindlessly wanders in circles, young adults, although filled with many aspirations, constantly distract themselves and end up moving with no direction. They swim in a sea of technology where at one moment, they swim towards some goal and at another, they do the opposite. Like an ambitious goldfish trapped in its tank: always moving, always yearning, yet never progressing.

As we tech-addicted Millennials are aware, we spend too much time using our phones and as a result, we are losing our ability to focus. We constantly distract ourselves any time we feel even a tiny inkling of boredom.

Like impulsive rats, we turn off our brains and constantly scavenge for some delicious novelty.

Small moments of boredom may seem unimportant, but every moment of boredom presents a crucial opportunity to develop ourselves. Boredom lets our brains work out the problems we have encountered throughout the day and this is when we reflect on who we are and who we want to be. Humans are blessed with an incredible ability to reason and shape our identities and our environments. Unfortunately, we have been slowly rotting our brains and we don’t even know it.

Picture the following: You wait in line for your usual morning coffee and what do you do? You diddle around using your phone with no rhyme or reason other than to satiate your boredom. Any time you get a brief break from the daily buzz of life, you immediately reach for your phone because boredom begins to creep up on you. You hate that feeling, but is your hatred justified? Is boredom holding you back?

Why should we feel bored?

Boredom is very important. In fact, suppressing your boredom may be holding you back. Imagine the most determined people you know who always manage to get their work done and always seem to be driven. What are these people driven by? Boredom. Although it may not be super flashy or glamorous, boredom gets the job done. We are biologically wired to constantly search for ways to better ourselves and our surroundings, and boredom drives us to do just that. Every time you cut this boredom short of doing its job, by pulling out your phone, you rob yourself of very valuable time. Time that would allow you to better understand not only yourself, but also your surroundings.

But being bored still sucks. As great thinker, Erich Fromm, once said, “I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.” Furthermore, others have also shown to hate boredom. A study published in Science in 2014 found that participants, when asked to sit in a blank room for 15 minutes with an electric shocker, decided to shock themselves to reduce the boredom. They chose pain over boredom. The choice for pain over boredom is the physical equivalent to what you do when you pull out your phone while waiting in a line. A study published in the journal, “Academy of Management Discoveries“ found that boredom sparks individual creativity and productivity. When bored, you see nothing to do in your surroundings so the only place else you can go is inside your own head. Venturing into your own mind and exploring your thoughts boosts creativity as you are forced to come up with new ideas to keep yourself from getting bored. Productivity and focus increases since being comfortable with boredom prevents you from seeking distractions when work could otherwise get done.

Another study finds that boredom can make you more altruistic! The study claims boredom can encourage you to engage in more altruistic tasks like giving blood and donating to charity. Being bored may make you feel miserable, but at the same time, boredom helps people who need help. Boredom helps us overcome minor inconveniences (like pain) for meaningful experiences (saving a life).

How do we embrace boredom?

Knowing that we should could down on our phone use and embrace boredom is good and all, but how do we actually get ourselves to change? Knowledge does not matter unless it results in change. Embracing boredom simply comes down to self discipline and practice. Train yourself. When waiting for a class to start and everyone around you is pulling out their phones to past the time, resist the urge to distract yourself! Catch yourself and let yourself enjoy the moment! When waiting in line getting coffee at Dunkin and you feel an itch to reach for your phone. Resist! Stay in the moment!

Fighting any addiction is tough, no doubt. The first step to fighting addiction is paying attention to yourself as much as you can. You must realize when you are getting bored and when you are subconsciously trying to distract yourself. How else can you fix a leak unless you see the hole leaking! From here, pay attention to yourself and keep watch for distractions like a guard stationed outside a great vault, for your focus is nothing trivial. Once you find yourself with a distraction, say to yourself, “You are nothing more than a distraction and you do not control me.”. Then, look within yourself and find that you have the strength, endurance, and patience to guard against this distraction. Brace yourself and do not chase this distraction. However, do not be fooled into thinking you can simply ignore the distraction, you cannot ignore something once it has already entered your mind and, in fact, the very attempt makes getting rid of the distraction that much more difficult! For example: try thinking about a white bear. Now stop thinking about it. Hard right?

To truly get rid of a distraction you must turn your attention towards an alternative. The alternative can be anything such as your environment or, if you are engaged in a task, the task at hand! Additionally, if you wish to stop thinking about a distraction, you can observe the thought instead of acting on it and simply let the thought go like watching a leaf gently float down a river. Continue to drive out the distractions, in this way, over and over until it becomes habit. Once it becomes habit, you will be relieved as you can now rest and keep watch with barely any effort at all while enjoying your newfound laser sharp focus!