After working for 8 hours a day 7 days a week I can in fact confirm that I’ve more or less got it down to a T. Regardless, in an age of brain rot short form content, where our attention spans are a commodity bought and sold by social media corporations and advertisers, possibly the best thing we can do for ourselves is to learn how to wrestle back control from the jaws of digital subservience. Which brings me onto my first bullet point:

SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

Or some other form of logic that appeals to you. If you’ve got a tagline for your study, it starts to feel a lot less like it’s those alpha wolf motivation videos with an Imagine Dragons song to soundtrack your ultimate Chad-ness. If you can get to the root of exactly why you want to study you can use it to drive you forward. Of course, if your study is more motivated by fear of your parents disapproval that’s not going to help, so maybe what’s more helpful is to attack the desire to procrastinate at its root. 

SELF- ANALYSIS: 

Most of the time the urge to just doom scroll mindlessly overcomes me, and while the reason isn’t clear initially I often find that actually stopping to consider why I want to subject myself to the Void of Content™ helps me avoid it. Are you anxious about the revision you’ve got to do? Are you tired? Bored? These things all have solutions that aren’t scrolling for the next two hours. More often than not, it has to do with stimulation levels not being met. 

STIMULATION LEVELS:

Look at me actually using actual psychology research. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that everyone has an “Optimal Stimulation Level”, in terms of their responses to environmental stimuli, which depends on factors like personality and exploratory behaviour. Supposedly, when this “OSL” is below optimum levels for an individual, we will seek to increase factors like “novelty, ambiguity, complexity etc”, but when we enter it, we are so immersed that time doesn’t matter. This has more to do with the nature of tasks we are doing though, so it means you shouldn’t beat yourself up if you can’t spend 3 hours at a time on calculus, but you could work into the night on a creative writing project. It’s okay not to “get into the flow”!

Instead, Psychologist Gloria Mark talks about “focused attention rhythms”, in late morning and mid-to late afternoon where people find it easier to be engaged and challenged by a task. At other times, however, people are in “rote activity”, where they are very engaged and not very challenged. So, optimise times where you will be better at completing challenging tasks, and save simpler ones for rote activity hours. By switching between tasks too fast, she also says we incur “switch costs”, which deplete mental resources. In other words, by seeking to increase stimulation levels from boredom or exhaustion, we are actively tiring ourselves out and making it more difficult to focus. That said, you can’t expect to literally work for eight hours straight, though you do have to choose when you break and what you do effectively. 

BREAK POINTS:

Back to Gloria (because she’s cool and knows a lot of things), who says we need to replenish energy and attention capacity throughout the day. That said, we need to take meaningful breaks, and hold ourselves accountable to when and how frequently we do that. She says it's important to stop at a natural “break point” in a task, where it’s easy to come back without expending energy to reconstruct what you were doing. So, it’s better to focus more time on one thing, rather than chipping away aimlessly at lots of different tasks, tiring yourself out and ultimately not getting anything finished.

Works Cited

Mills, Kim, and Gloria Mark. “Speaking of Psychology: Why Our Attention Spans Are Shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD.” Apa.org, American Psychological Association, Feb. 2023, www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans.

Raju, P. S. “Optimum Stimulation Level: Its Relationship to Personality, Demographics, and Exploratory Behavior.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 7, no. 3, Dec. 1980, p. 272, academic.oup.com/jcr/article/7/3/272/1820892, https://doi.org/10.1086/208815.

Sports are globally known to be good for people’s physical health but often the mental benefits aren’t highlighted. The reason people return to exercise despite it being physically and mentally challenging is because exercising releases endorphins in the brain, creating mood boosts in the mind. In fact, according to the better health channel people who exercise regularly have better mental health and emotional wellbeing as well as lower rates of mental illness. 

There are a lot of advantages in relation to mental illnesses and exercise, one of which relates to ADHD. The medication prescribed for ADHD (Adderall and Ritalin) help to release chemicals in the brain such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin to improve concentration, motivation and energy. These same chemicals are released when exercising, so those who have ADHD can actually benefit a lot from regular exercise.

Exercise also has benefits for memory and thinking, because the endorphins which are released also help you to become mentally sharp and more efficient when doing tasks. On top of this, it also helps to stimulate the production of new brain cells, reducing the effects of aging.

Furthermore, sports can also impact confidence and self-esteem. Seeing the progress in your sport, reaching goals and understanding how to move within your body can improve your confidence. According to Kipsta the best sports to build self-confidence in, especially in kids and teens, is martial arts and combat sports as they allow for the building of physical and mental power creating a balance in the mind and body. Also, it teaches children about the importance of respect as it plays a large role within the mixed martial arts industry.

It can be challenging to implement exercise into your busy daily life. It’s not necessary to surrender hours of your day to exercise; just about 30 minutes of moderate exercise, such as walking, is enough. Even if someone finds it tricky to make the time, you’ll find the more regularly you walk, the easier it will be to start and continue and you’ll be able to walk longer as time goes on. The hardest thing is starting!

Sources:

• https://www.helpguide.org/wellness/fitness/the-mental-health-benefits-of-exercise

• https://www.kipsta.com/which-sports-are-best-for-very-shy-kids-or-teens#:~:text=Martial%20arts%20and%20other%20combat,confident%20in%20their%20mind%20too.

• https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/exercise-and-mental-health