Can You Elaborate on Concentration Calisthenics?

00:00:05.000 | Alright, we got a question here from Jules.

00:00:09.000 | Jules says, "My favorite nugget of wisdom from your book was something to the effect of

00:00:14.000 | if you begin craving distraction, the next 30 minutes of resistance can become a training session of concentration calisthenics.

00:00:21.000 | I love this idea of strengthening your power to resist. What more can you tell us about this training?

00:00:26.000 | Do you have a few stories from people who view the moment of resistance as training and how it slowly developed?"

00:00:32.000 | So Jules, the relevant piece of advice here comes from deep work, and it's where I recommend that you embrace boredom.

00:00:41.000 | And here is the whole argument. By embracing boredom, I mean expose yourself to boredom on a regular basis.

00:00:50.000 | So at least once or twice a day, have a period in which your mind is craving novel stimuli and you do not give it to it.

00:00:56.000 | It wants to look at your phone and you don't.

00:01:00.000 | I do not mean embrace boredom in the sense of think of boredom as an unalloyed good, something that's going to generate lots of good things.

00:01:06.000 | We should be bored. Bored is a good state. Boredom feels bad and we should take that seriously.

00:01:12.000 | Our body makes things feel really bad if there's a real reason it wants it to feel bad.

00:01:16.000 | So I don't think we should be bored all the time.

00:01:20.000 | The reason why I think you should be periodically, temporarily bored, however, is that it breaks the Pavlovian connection that so many of us have developed between boredom and distraction.

00:01:29.000 | If at the slightest hint of boredom, you always take out your phone and relieve it, your brain learns boredom means shiny treat.

00:01:38.000 | Boredom means shiny treat.

00:01:40.000 | So then what happens when you want to do something that's cognitively demanding, you want to focus deeply to write a chapter of a book or come up with a new strategy for your business, your brain will say this is boring because there's no novel stimuli.

00:01:51.000 | We're just thinking about the same thing again and again.

00:01:54.000 | Where's our shiny treat?

00:01:56.000 | And it won't tolerate it.

00:01:58.000 | It won't tolerate it. Your brain will go on strike and say, give me a phone.

00:02:01.000 | Come on, we don't do this.

00:02:03.000 | And then you can't actually produce things of value with your brain.

00:02:05.000 | So if on the other hand, on a semi-regular basis, you expose yourself to boredom, your brain gets comfortable with that option.

00:02:12.000 | And when it comes time to think deeply about something and you're lacking novel stimuli, your brain is not going to go on strike.

00:02:19.000 | It's like, okay, this is one of those times where we don't get the stimuli.

00:02:22.000 | I get it. Okay, great.

00:02:23.000 | Let's go back to writing this chapter and thinking through this strategy.

00:02:26.000 | So, yeah, it is like training.

00:02:28.000 | Your brain hates it.

00:02:29.000 | You want to get it to the point where your brain hates it less.

00:02:32.000 | That is going to give you a lot more flexibility to do things of real value with that brain.

00:02:39.000 | [Music]

Can You Elaborate on Concentration Calisthenics?

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