How to collect your thoughts when you have a lot of tasks in front of you, and there is a fog in your head? How to overcome forgetfulness and quickly retrieve the necessary information from memory? How to motivate the brain to act? Neuroscientist Takashi Tsukiyama dedicated a new book, “It’s just some kind of stupor!” to the answers to the most pressing questions of our time.
What to do if in the midst of a working day you realize that you can’t take on a single thing? If you re-read a letter from a client for the hundredth time and still cannot understand its meaning? We are forced to adapt to the demands of time, which requires us to multitask, maximize concentration, attention, and the ability to quickly switch from one problem to another. Sometimes it’s too difficult. The recommendations of the neuroscientist Takashi Tsukiyama will help you mobilize the hidden resources of the brain and keep working.
1. Start somewhere
When you don’t feel like working at all, you should still sit down at the table and try to do what seems interesting and / or simple. I start with simple tasks: reviewing our hospital’s receipts and expenses, sorting emails. All this is done in order to stimulate the activity of the nucleus accumbens. The psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin called the principle that some kind of activity puts the brain in a state of emotional arousal, “stimulation by action.”
2. Set a time limit
Do not force the brain to pore over one task for a long time – it quickly gets tired of this. Divide work into short, time-limited intervals. What is needed to make the restriction work even more effectively? Be sure to post the result. You can not sit for two hours and just think about solving the issue. It is necessary to extract information from the brain, at least sketching out the main thoughts on a draft. Since you have created conditions similar to an exam, please be so kind as to hand in your work on time, even if it is not perfect.
3. Do something that does not require long-term concentration
When you have been doing something for a long time and realize that you have reached a dead end, get distracted by tasks that can be completed quickly. Only not those that require no mental effort at all, like brushing your teeth or doing laundry – they are unlikely to help. Choose only activities that do not require a long concentration of attention and that can be quickly mastered by concentrating for only a short time. You can put things in order on the table, sort documents, do some arithmetic calculations. Quick action energizes the brain.
4. Plan
The brain is lazy and tends to idleness. Decide exactly what you want to spend his energy on. For example, outline a plan for today, for the first half of the day, for the next hour. When you feel like you’re losing focus, look into it. Let your brain clearly understand what you are going to do next.
5. Make the task “visible”
“Make visible” means not trying to organize your thoughts exclusively in your head. It is necessary to bring information out of the brain, to put it in a visible form, to solve the problem in detail, physically interacting with the information, for example, by painting everything on paper. When we “do not see” our “enemy”, we overestimate its danger and feel panic. Separate information from emotion by verbalizing it.
6. Decide right now what can be solved quickly
Often the source of our anxiety is unresolved problems that can be dealt with in five minutes. They rob us of our ability to reason. For example, we should have given some information to someone, but did not do it. This includes promises to get in touch, requests, responses to emails. Either solve such questions immediately, or write them out on a piece of paper and put it in a conspicuous place. Once you’re done with them, cross them off your Worry List. So you get rid of some more fears.
7. Change your approach or environment
If you have to think about the same type of tasks for a long time, periodically change the approach to work or the environment. For example, if you spent the first half of the day at the computer thinking about a solution alone, in the afternoon try to share your ideas with other people, get their opinion. Then transfer ideas to paper.
Or, for example, in the first half of the day you worked on a task, creating text, then in the second try to draw diagrams and illustrations. This will allow you to use different areas of the brain. For example, I often do this. Much depends on whether you are sitting in the office or walking in the park. The brain works a little differently in different situations. Therefore, it is useful to get out of the office and take a walk.
8. Focus on one specific task
By trying to force ourselves to think about two things at the same time, we miss both and become distracted. To prevent this from happening, you need to be able to deftly switch attention from one to another. It’s not as easy as it might seem. What will help? Put away all the things and documents with which you do not plan to work now and which remind you of the “other business”.
9. Put things in order
Sorting things is also sorting the information contained in the brain. For example, if you put document “A” and document “B” in the same folder, then the brain decided that they have some common points or these documents are somehow connected. If you put folder “A” and folder “B” on the same shelf, then you saw the similarity of the information they contain. By doing this sorting every day, you yourself will notice in what orderly order your thoughts will soon be.
10. Make an effort to memorize information
It is not enough just to read or hear something for this knowledge to become yours. You definitely need to make a conscious effort to remember them. A simple way to help make other people’s knowledge your own is the output of information from the brain.
Summarize what you read or heard orally or in writing (or better, both), write down what you encountered, or try to retell it as if you were telling someone. You will understand whether the information is stored in your head only when you try to reproduce it.
11. Extend the “shelf life” of information
No matter how much valuable knowledge you have learned over the years of study, at some point you will no longer be able to voluntarily extract it from the brain and use it if you do not repeat what you have learned at least from time to time. Information that you have never used will sooner or later become invalid. It is better to update it in different ways: write, pronounce, put into practice.
This will help you better understand the essence of what you have learned and effectively extend the “shelf life” of your memory, as well as share your knowledge with people. It seems to me that the practical application of their knowledge is one of the greatest pleasures that we have in our lives.
Read more in the book by Takashi Tsukiyama (Bombora, 2019).
About the author: Takashi Tsukiyama is a Japanese neuroscientist, MD, director of the Kitashinagawa Hospital, a practicing physician and neuroscientist, and the author of over a dozen books.