Losing focus?
Harvard professor with ADHD shares tips that anyone can use to improve their concentration
Do you struggle to stay focused throughout the day, on work, or on whatever task is at hand? For most of us, the answer is yes, at least some of the time. For those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, it can be an ongoing battle.
Just ask Jeff Karp, Ph.D. In the seventh grade, he was diagnosed with ADHD, as well as a learning disability. But with patience, determination and an unwillingness to accept well-meant suggestions that he right-size his ambitions, Karp overcame those obstacles. He went on to earn a doctorate in chemical and biomedical engineering at the University of Toronto, then a postdoc in stem cells and advanced biomaterials at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s now a professor at Harvard Medical School, where his lab works on things like creating a tissue adhesive to repair the human heart.
He got there, he says, by examining his own ability to focus and think, trying different techniques to see what would help, a process he shares in his new book, “LIT,” which stands for “life ignition tools.” He tells Inc.: “It really was me figuring out that there are all these incredible energies and tools I could tap into to overcome the challenges that I was facing.”
Karp says we should all recognize what we’re up against. For one thing, the human brain evolved to be distractable. “Our brains are wired to wander, to scan the horizon for potential threats,” he says. And then there’s the effect of living in our modern, digital world, which is a mass of distractions. Marketing, social media, media and other elements of modern life are actually designed to play on our distractibility, he says. “This biologically-based mechanism for survival is now being hijacked. It’s not our fault.”
Here are some of the many tactics that work for Karp.
NOTE YOUR OWN DISTRACTIONS
Instead of just battling distractions, Karp tries to note them and keep track of them.
Often, during the workday, he’ll have a piece of paper on his desk with the word “Distraction” written at the top of it. Throughout the day, whenever he feels what he calls an attentional “pull” toward a distraction, he’ll put a checkmark beside the word.
Ninety percent of the time, he says, after writing that check mark, he no longer feels compelled to engage in the distraction activity itself, such as checking social media.
“It prompts me to go back to what I was doing and allows me to keep going,” he says. “I think it works because it’s intercepting an autopilot routine. It’s providing an access point to be attentive.”
Though we may not be aware of it, we spend most of our time functioning on autopilot, he explains, performing well-worn routines. “That’s one of the foundations of LIT,” he says, “It’s all about intercepting routine patterns to actively think and decide, versus jumping in with habitual responses.”
DO BREATHING EXERCISES
“One of the things that I experiment with a lot is using breathwork to switch from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system,” Karp says. (Both are continuously active, but the sympathetic nervous system comes to the fore during “fight or flight” responses, whereas the parasympathetic nervous system takes over when you’re in a more relaxed state.)
“If I’m in survival mode, I’m breathing faster and my heart rate’s up,” he says. “Then I’m more distractible.”
Karp has done breath work in yoga classes, but often he simply uses one of the many YouTube videos of breathing exercises designed to slow and deepen the breath. It’s really effective, he says, when he puts a bit of effort into it and makes sure he is breathing with his diaphragm. “Pretty much every time I do it, I experience a calming sensation within five or 10 minutes. It’s a tool that’s accessible to everybody. It’s free. And you can do it many times a day.”
CONNECT WITH NATURE — EVEN VIA VIDEO
Spending time in nature has been so well proven to benefit your mental and physical health that in Japan, it’s covered by health insurance.
But what if you can’t get out for a hike, or even a walk in a leafy park?
“There are a number of scientific studies that show that there is benefit from just watching videos about nature,” Karp says.
If you can plan ahead and find some friends to go hiking with you, that’s great, he says.
But if not, there are many soothing videos of nature on YouTube that can give you some calming effect, allowing you to focus more easily. “That’s one thing that people can easily build into their schedules,” he says.
BE WILLING TO EXPERIMENT
If you really want to focus better, Karp says, experimentation is the way to get there. What works for someone else might not work for you, or you may need a different approach. For example, Karp finds that exercising helps him focus — if he doesn’t do too much of it. A really vigorous workout can leave him exhausted and doesn’t help with mental clarity.
“We do have the potential to hyper-focus,” he says. “We need to realize that we can get there more often, and eventually on demand. That is a possibility.” But to get there, you have to have the right mindset. “Get in touch with the sense that, if I want to combat mind drift, or address it, if I want to really refine my attention, I need to experiment with different things and cultivate my attention skill.”
According to a new survey, how workers define career growth is changing.
For Randstad’s 2024 Workmonitor report, the Dutch multinational human resource consulting firm surveyed 27,000 workers from 34 countries and found what Randstad CEO Sander van ‘t Noordende describes as a “split workforce.”
Roughly half of workers worldwide tell Randstad they identify as ambitious, and roughly the same amount say they do not. However, while many workers are not interested in continually climbing the career ladder, the majority of workers (72%) still value learning new skills.
“Despite more complex attitudes to career progression and ambition, there is a continued thirst for training and development in both current roles and for future career moves,” reads the report. “Around a third (29%) would even go as far as quitting a job that didn’t offer adequate learning and development (L&D) opportunities.”
Randstad also found that workers in some industries prioritize training and development more than others. Workers in IT, construction and financial services were most inclined to say they wouldn’t accept a job if it didn’t offer L&D opportunities to future-proof their skills.
As workers’ priorities have changed, “training, learning and development has become even more important,” says van ‘t Noordende. “And if you look at the skills that people are looking for, technology in general — and AI in particular — (is) very high on the agenda.”
When asked to list their top three most desired skills, these are the five skills workers worldwide say they are the most interested in learning: l Artificial intelligence. l IT and tech literacy. l Well-being and mindfulness.
l Communication and presentation skills.
l Management and leadership skills.
The skills that are most important to workers vary slightly from country to country. For instance, in the United States, workers say management and leadership skills are the most important. The next most-valued skills that U.S. workers cite are well-being and mindfulness; AI, IT and tech literacy; coaching and mentoring; communication and presentation; and programming and coding.
In China, however, workers want training in AI and data science the most. Plus, 81% of workers in China say their employer is already helping them develop future-proof skills in fields like AI — compared to just 52% of workers globally.
When asked who is responsible for training workers, 23% of all respondents say workers hold the responsibility and 42% say employers are responsible.
“This means that for companies, it’s now even more important to work with every individual employee to say, ‘What’s your level of ambition? How has your performance been? Where do you want to go? What’s the kind of training you’re looking for?’ ” van ‘t Noordende explains. “You have to make the whole career experience even more individual, more personal.
“Which is, of course, easier said than done.”
I’ll be completely honest from the start here: I follow essentially zero professional sports. Which means I had never heard of ex-Colts quarterback Andrew Luck before today. But I have spent 15 years writing about psychology and performance — so I do know a great mind hack when I come across one.
And it just so happens that Luck is the poster child for a clever trick to throw your rivals off their game and increase your chances of success — not just in football, but in business too.
WHY BEING SURPRISINGLY NICE CAN HELP YOU WIN
As you might have guessed from the intro to this piece, I didn’t stumble across this trick while reading about retired NFL players in my free time.
Instead, I stumbled across Luck while browsing Scientific American.
Recently, the magazine featured an interview with Rafi Kohan, author of the entertainingly titled new book “Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.”
In the conversation, Kohan drops all sorts of interesting info about trash talk, from how our bodies respond to it to how to resist it (deep breathing should be your first line of defense).
But one insight stuck out to me as particularly valuable for business owners looking to get the upper hand in negotiations and other tough conversations while maintaining their standing as decent, upright, likable members of the community.
Kohan calls it polite trash talk. He explains that the goal of all trash talk is to distract an opponent from focusing on their own game.
You can do that by saying something rude about their abilities or their mom. But you can also do it by being surprisingly nice.
“Polite trash talk is effective simply because it is so surprising. Attention is critical to performance, and one terrific way to steal someone’s attention is to do something unexpected,” Kohan explains. “Complimenting someone on their shot or their serve or just congratulating them on a good play or being generally charming and asking them how their offseason has been — these things can also cause people to downregulate and relax.”
WAIT, THIS CAN’T WORK, CAN IT?
My response to this bit of interview was to scratch my head and wonder, this can’t possibly work, can it?
Kohan’s logic seems sound enough, but in a high-stakes environment like the gridiron of the boardroom, certainly tough professionals can’t be thrown off their game by something as simple as unexpected kindness, can they?
But a little research turned up at least one walking, talking example of this idea in action. You guessed it: Andrew Luck. Multiple articles from his time in the NFL mention his oddball strategy of being super nice to opponents and the surprising way this unexpected kindness worked to his advantage.
“Luck has become famous for congratulating — sincerely and enthusiastically — any player to hit him hard,” the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Clark reported back in 2014. “When New England pass rusher Rob Ninkovich pulverized Luck last month in a Patriots 42-20 win, he got the customary congratulations. As Ninkovich tells it, he found himself paralyzed with confusion by the well-wishes.”
Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Nolan Carroll sounded equally perplexed by the tactic, saying: “You know if you hear a quarterback get mad, you are in his head. With Luck, you thought you hurt the guy, you hear ‘good job’ and you just say, ‘Aw, man.’ ”
“Luck seems like a good guy, so he is probably very genuine when he praises opponents during games. However, he also went to Stanford. That means he is smart enough to know this kind of trash talk can mess with a defender’s head, which can give his team an edge,” Bleacher Report speculated at the time.
POLITE TRASH TALK CAN WORK FOR ENTREPRENEURS TOO
All of which points to the fact that polite trash actually works, even on hardened NFL players. When rivals are expecting hostility and power plays and are instead met with kindness, their mental scripts for the interaction are scrambled. This provides an opening for the canny sportsperson. It also suggests that the technique is worth considering in business settings.
In particular, I wonder if this strategy might benefit women, who are often more harshly penalized for coming off as “mean” or “overbearing,” research shows. Other studies suggest that niceness is expected from women, so their kindness might not come across as such a destabilizing surprise.
But Luck’s example is enough to suggest that the tactic is worth trying for entrepreneurs of either gender. Next time you’re faced with a high-stakes interaction that both parties expect to be contentious, try throwing out a genuine compliment and see how it is received.
If Luck’s experience is anything to go by, you might find the shock of kindness enough to shake up the situation in a way you can use to your advantage.