The Trained Brain

You Need Mental Exercise

by Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Walk through any big box store in January and you’ll see two types of things: bottles of health supplements and exercise equipment. Yesterday I saw a lady who appeared to be in her 80s trying out a very expensive piece of weight training equipment because we humans love trying to make a new start. As the new year starts, people feel motivated to get healthier and start exercising in response to feeling less than their best after a few long weeks of eating extra treats and lounging about more than often.
Starting a new semester is the perfect time to consider our mental health routines. We all likely do things differently in the deepest part of the winter and feel less than our best mentally. How do we get our mental health back and start training our brain? Enjoy three steps that anyone can do for free.

Start

Choose your biggest distraction and decide to defeat it. I’ll help. If you have unfettered (or even just slightly reduced) access to technology (phones, tablets, games, TV, etc.) presume it is your biggest obstacle because app developers have made it their business to make you hyper-focused on their product while you become hyper-distracted from completing much else. Most of us know it is a problem while at the same time we don’t really want to change. That’s what an addiction is! Imagine regaining 30-40% of your time each week. “What good is that,” you might opine, “if I’m missing out on everything online?” If you want a trained brain—one that is far more efficient at reading what you like to read and thinking what you prefer to think—it is indeed a very good thing to regain your time.
If you live in a digital-free home or a relatively digitally diminished life, congratulations. You can skip to the next step because no other distraction is as debilitating as technology.
First, don’t change anything but do track your time for at least three days. One of those days should be a weekend and two should be weekdays. Work out how you distribute your time. Be precise because you are doing this for yourself, not somebody giving you a grade -- though you’ll soon find that it makes a difference in that area too. Track yourself in terms of 10-minute blocks rounded up.  If you wake up but spend 23 minutes looking at your phone, don’t count those as 23 minutes sleeping but 30 minutes on screen time. If you are on the phone every time you eat a meal, count that time as screen time, not eating since it is likely you didn’t even taste your food or keep track of how much you ate. If you can’t take a walk without looking down at your phone the whole time, don’t count that as exercise but as screen time.  Do a little math and find out your average daily time investment on different tasks. Remember, anything that you do that includes screen time only counts as screen time. Most will quickly discover why your life is passing by with limited returns. The five hours you claim you are spending on mental work is closer to around 32 minutes.
It is time to train your brain. The fastest way to reprogram yourself away from distractions is to find a good book, preferably one that has more than one volume in a set. Moving from one type of distraction to another will simplify your predicament while extending your ability to focus. Depending on how deep your addiction is to digital distractions, you may need to start at 2 minutes, but most can make if for 5. Use your phone or device as a timer. Set it for 5 minutes and 10 seconds. The extra 10 seconds is added so you can set the device and leave it in the next room while you go to a part of your home that has no digital entertainment whatsoever. For some, this might be your closet. Pick up your book and read it for five minutes without getting up to check any device. Some will have few problems. Others will only make it a minute or two before they want to grab their phone. Repeat this 5-minute process as many times as you need until you find you are a bit surprised when the timer goes off. Next try 10 minutes, then 20, etc. Once you can keep reading for an hour without reaching for a device, maintain that level for at least a week or, better, two. Congratulations! You’ve now restored your ability to focus and you might even want to finish reading the whole series now.

Advance

Now you can concentrate on a different entertaining distraction but that doesn’t mean you are mentally productive yet. Cajole yourself into reading something you do not yet enjoy. Instead of just using the timer to get yourself to read more about calculus or history or 18th century literature, engage further by taking notes. What you write, how you write, or the elegance of your letters makes zero difference. If all you do is write out a proper name, date, fact, or important term on your chicken-scratch notes for each page you read, you are training your brain. Do not replace note-taking with highlighting the book nor underlining things. Doodlers: don’t just doodle unless your image relates to the text. Writing out relevant words and very short descriptions means you must track with the material to a greater and extent. You don’t need full sentences (unless you find words to live by). Expect to be irritated at first by how slow you write. You might have to train your hand as well. You’ll quickly discover why people used the almost lost art of cursive. Printing takes a lot longer than cursive writing which was the original point of cursive.  Once you can get all the way through an assigned reading without getting distracted, well done! You’ve come a long way.

Enjoy

So now you’ve trained diligently and won a few victories. How do you know when you have a nicely trained brain? Success is when you stop craving the petty distractions (for most alive today that would be something on a phone, gaming, or TV but some are hooked on sports or music or a zillion other things). If you swap zillions of 2-minute videos of people doing dumb things for being able to ready for an hour without interruption or distraction, you are going to begin to do things that will surprise you. As your taste for reading expands, you’ll begin to think and communicate in more and more complex ways that mimic the type of things that you like to read. Vocabulary will grow, ideas will increase, and your writing will speed and improve in quality. Maybe your new focus tool is building something. Congratulations! Now you have a useful skill! Perhaps you decided your focus tool is art, animals, exercise, or writing. All of these things will continue to develop your ability to enjoy life in ways that are far more meaningful than watching strangers on short videos.
It is worth it to train your brain. Try it.