How To Improve Focus and Concentration | Jordan Peterson | Best Life Advice

So, do you have any practical advice on how I can improve my ability to concentrate and pay attention to the world around me? Often the devil's in the details, you know, but some practical advice is well regulate your habits Try to get up at approximately the same time each morning I would recommend that you get up approximately when other people get up So that would be something in the neighborhood of 7 30 or 8 in the morning or perhaps earlier perhaps a little bit later but you want to stabilize that because your circadian rhythms operate more fluidly and Your mood is likely to be regulated better if there's islands of stability in your daily routines human beings like daily routines just like dogs like daily routines and so Regulate your sleep. I would say when you get up in the morning eat breakfast. That's a really important thing to do I can't tell you how many people I've treated in my clinical practice whose Proclivity for emotional instability and depression anxiety general hopelessness emotional pain and gloom and doom as well as capacity to concentrate We're properly regulated or inhibited or reduced By merely ensuring that they ate a I would say a protein and fat rich breakfast relatively soon after they wake up and that's especially true if they're stressed and as it turns out that if you Stress yourself after a fast which is of course what you've undertaken if you haven't eaten since the night before That your body produces enough insulin to deplete the sugar in your blood and then it's very difficult for you to become regulated properly with regards to your metabolism until you sleep again, and so regulating your sleep and your Breakfast eating habits in particular can be a very effective way of regulating your mood and increasing your capacity to concentrate The other thing I would say is that spending some time Scheduling your time is also extraordinarily useful. And so I can tell you a little bit about how to use schedules effectively. So The first thing I would say is that you should develop a long-term plan You have to set up your vision like Geppetto when he's looking at the star before Pinocchio's transformation takes place You have to set up your long-term vision to have some vision of the good Towards which you're working and some vision perhaps of the hell that you're avoiding and Then I would say once you set up that vision so that you know how to orient yourself Then you should start designing your days and you can do that very effectively with a calendar like Google Calendar Many people say well I hate using a schedule or I hate using a calendar and What I would say about that is is that if you hate using a schedule or a calendar then you're probably using it wrong what you're doing is using the calendar as an external tyrant that's telling you what you should do if you were going to be a Conventionally good person each day. So you load yourself up with we'll say arbitrary responsibilities But that's not really how you should use a schedule what you should use a schedule to do is to design the day that you would most like to have and Obviously that's going to include Accepting some responsibility and Undertaking to make progress on those things that you have to make progress on to keep your life from collapsing into chaos But it should also mean that you schedule in activities that make you actually want to have that day And so if you're using a schedule properly It can be your friend and that can also be something that can increase your capacity to concentrate And then I would say well if you're very scattered Then you can start to train yourself. You might say well I need to learn to read without distraction. Okay? Well for the next week I'm going to read 10 minutes a day and I'm going to try to limit the distractions and if you're successful at that Then you could try 12 minutes a day and if you're successful at that you could try 15 minutes a day and The trick is to set a goal for yourself that is slightly beyond your current level of performance Enough to be challenging enough to be worthwhile if you accomplished but not so difficult that you're likely to fail and then practice incrementally day by day trying to inculcate the habits that you want to inculcate and assume that it'll take you a Number of months or even a number of years in order to become very fluent at the habit The important thing is to start improving incrementally because incremental improvement pays off Like compound interest and so I would also say that the trajectory that you're on is more important than your starting point And that's also an extraordinarily optimistic Observation because it means that direction is more important than current position and I don't mean current position matters obviously But I don't think it doesn't matter as much as direction So if you want to learn to concentrate more define what constitutes concentration Break it into micro habits and then start practicing instantiation of those micro habits