Staying Focused

More focused or less distracted?

The Middle English definition of the word attend is “to apply one’s mind and energies.”

The root word of “attend” is adtendere, which is Latin for “to stretch.” 

It’s interesting to think about how flexible our attention is, and the many things that stretch our attentional bandwidth. Our attention is a powerful asset, focusing our mind and energy toward specific thoughts, actions, or stimuli in our environment and lives at large. Other times, however, our attention is stretched broadly, shifting between a variety of internal and external experiences, processing vast amounts of information, and making us susceptible to distraction.

In order to harness the power of our attention, we have to recognize where what we are attending to, and subsequently, where our energy is going. If we want to stay focused, we have to ask ourselves: what’s stretching my mind and energy? 

In sports and in life, high performers are driven to more. To be more focused is a goal shared by many. 

But what if less is the goal? 

Instead of striving for more focus, what if we aimed for less distraction? Not just on the field or the court or in the office, but life in general. What can you cut out of your life that doesn’t need (or deserve) your mind and energy? What are you giving too much attention to? 

In her book, Peak, Amishi Jha writes that attention is not like a gas tank. It doesn’t get depleted over time. We always have the same amount of attention, it just gets used differently depending on the context. 

By actively choosing to remove distractions, we can focus more of our mind and energy to the things that really matter.