Let me first ask if everyone has similar questions like me:
1. From the beginning of the student, the concentration of concentration for a period of time begins to become distracted;
2. There seem to be countless ideas in my mind, but when I want to pour them out, I can’t catch the clues;
3. I always feel mentally exhausted and lack the motivation to do complicated things that require a lot of investment.
In fact, the above items are similar to everyone, but it is more or less a problem. Normal people can continue to concentrate for forty to fifty minutes, and after this period of time they start to think.
A small number of people can concentrate for several hours. This type of people is often not difficult to do anything. After all, most things in this world are essentially «invested time». If they participate in work at the same time, others will invest four or five times normal in three years. It is normal that people’s attention is better than others.
We just used «investing time» to simplify this question. Actually, time is not important. What is important is concentration. Someone sits at the table and reads a book for one minute and stays in a daze for three minutes. The effect may not be comparable to that of others for an hour at the end of the day. It is understandable. For the «core investment».
There are also a few people who can’t concentrate for even five minutes. They may have ADHD (Attention Deficit), that is, some people have the wrong line in their minds, and they can’t concentrate for a long time. It took many years to blame themselves if they were right. Not hard enough? Why did nothing happen? In fact, the problem may not lie in their own initiative. The more concentrated these people are, the more they cannot concentrate, and there is nothing they can do.
And you may not have noticed that «fatigue» is often not really tired, but «boring». I feel very much about this. I tend to be very tired from working all day but playing games again. I feel like the two are the best.
Even more extreme, when the SEALs are training, they are known for their brutality, such as 48 hours of high-intensity training and endless sleep, etc., think about it and collapse, but their instructors continue to emphasize that the body will not be fatigued. It’s your brain. You think you really can’t run anymore. If you force it, you can still run 10 kilometres. This is how special forces are trained in various countries.
A colonel of the Royal Air Service Regiment wrote a book after he retired. He said that the most painful experience in his life happened when he was selected for the Air Service Regiment. If they don’t withdraw halfway, the few of them who have survived are also exhausted, moving forward every step of the way.
Fortunately, I have seen the jeep parked at the end. The car is the future leader. This car will take away all the soldiers who have survived this round of trials. They are the real SAS (Special Air Service) members.
When he approached the car, the car drove a section forward along the road. This section was not two hundred meters, but ten miles (about 16 kilometres). In a state of extreme physical and mental collapse and exhaustion, this buddy went further ten miles.
This experience made him never completely forgive the leader. Every time he thought about it, the pain at that time kept gushing out, but he found that the limit of his body was indeed very, very high. This realization later saved him several times.
In other words, the brain has a «threshold». After running for a while, the brain feels that it can no longer run and is too tired; after reading a book for a while, the brain says don’t read it, it is already full. If you don’t listen, it will secrete a lot of stress-related hormones, which will make you miserable. It depends on who can resist it. So many times, what we understand as our own «limit» is actually the brain drawn a line by itself because it doesn’t want to work hard anymore.
Having said that, everyone understands that there are two kinds of «pain» in the human body:
One is a physical warning, which warns you not to kill yourself. For example, if you touch the switch, you get an electric shock. The essence of this kind of pain is a warning to prevent you from touching it repeatedly;
Another is that the brain is simply messing up. Your brain doesn’t want you to do serious things. There is no reason, but you don’t want it, it is troublesome, and you want to maintain low power consumption, and you are unwilling to change. Change is very resistant to the brain. Once it starts to resist, it will release stress-related hormones, making you uncomfortable with loneliness and cold, and you can’t do anything about it.
In addition, there are many problems, I want to go to bed early, and my mind is chaotic and all kinds of thoughts are turned over and over;
Go on stage and say a few words, repeatedly tell yourself don’t be nervous, the more you remind, the more nervous you are;
I always want to fill my brain with all kinds of irritating information, and I can’t stop when I play a certain sound and a hand;
From the research of the past few years, people can’t control their brains well. The thoughts in the brain run around in disorder, just like a chaotic market.
Our rational area is just a tenant in the brain building, and a bunch of bad people also live in this building. This is why our brains are rational for a while, sick again, calm for a while, manic for a while, and often do it. After a stupid thing, I started to wonder why I did that. The problem is that I will be stupid next time.
In addition, all kinds of information have been poured into the brain like a torrent over the years, and the brain likes this kind of short joyful content. The problem is that too much absorption of this kind of problem can easily lead to further distraction.
Many people become like taking drugs. Short and happy short videos raise the threshold of excitement. Normal content can no longer satisfy itself, which forms a vicious circle.
And some people’s brains are obviously much more sensitive than normal people. In the same environment, some people can concentrate on doing things, but some people can’t settle down. It can be seen that the gap between people is not only IQ but also «concentration», «stability» and «anti-interference».
Is there any way to make the brain healthier and less prone to irritability and prolong attention?
Of course! it’s meditation.
I heard about this stuff a long time ago, and the impression is very bad. I don’t feel that it is something serious people do. None of them are serious people doing it.
But later I saw him talk about it from Dalio, that is Qiaoshui. Some of his articles are very well written. He said that he and Jobs are the same age, and their common hobby is to engage in meditation. Meditation makes people even more serious. Easier to concentrate and has a calmer and more creative way of thinking. I haven’t read his articles less (the «Principles» is actually written on average, which is considered to be a middle-to-lower level in his articles). Began to pay attention to this matter.
Later, I read the article and said that the results of Harvard University’s research showed that meditation for eight weeks can cause obvious changes in the brain, and the area responsible for emotions and memory can be visibly thickened.
And meditation can effectively reduce cortisol.
I have talked about cortisol before. The author of «The Essence of Poverty» took the blood test himself. The level of this thing in the blood of poor people is very high. The main function of this thing is to make people irritable, depressed, and depressed. If everyone I still don’t understand. Think about myself when I heard that someone told you that you were talking behind your back, that you lost money, and others did not increase your salary, and there was a water leak in your home. Part of the emotions in these situations is cortisol.
Some people usually have a high concentration of this hormone in the blood. They have low daily moods, don’t want to do anything, do everything negatively, don’t think about anything, but have a particularly good appetite, so fat people generally have high cortisol. Negative people often don’t do anything, and they are more negative a vicious circle.
In recent years, rigorous comparative experiments have confirmed that meditation training can reduce the level of cortisol and improve the emotional state of people.
And there is also sufficient evidence to prove that many functions of the brain are similar to muscles, and there are also problems of «exhaustion» and «fatigue» after exhaustion. For example, if you have made a great determination and will to lose weight today, you may not be able to do other things. Up.
The good news is that since the brain is like a muscle, it can be intensively trained just like a muscle. The muscles can become more vigorous and the brain can be more focused.
And the human body has two systems, a slow system and a fast system.
The fast system refers to some of your daily actions, or some routine things, that do not require attention and willpower. For example, you can even swipe a certain note during a meal without worrying about not using chopsticks. This state is similar to walking forward, with low energy consumption and no need to deliberately exert any effort.
But if you need to lose weight or learn new things, you need to «slow the system», you need to pay extra energy, you need willpower and concentration, these two powers are similar to the magic bar in the game, and it’s okay to maintain it for a short time. It can’t be maintained after a long time, and there is a cooling time. It’s a bit close to that kind of hard-working 100-meter race. It’s too exhausting and won’t last long. You have to rest for a long time when you’re done.
If a skill’s cooldown is too long, it’s basically useless. Some people force themselves to give up for a long time. This is also the reason. After the willpower and concentration are exhausted, it enters the cooldown stage. The skill is temporarily released, and the whole person is also Scrapped.
Research over the years has found that long-term meditation obviously helps to improve concentration, speed up skill cooling, fast skill cooling, and can be used more times. All the friends who have played the glory of the king know.
Now that I discovered that this thing is so serious, I slowly started to engage in it.
The operation is very simple, that is, you can find a posture (it is best to sit upright to prevent falling asleep), close your eyes, don’t fall asleep, and don’t think about anything, but if you don’t want to get distracted, you have to use something else Things filled their minds. The monks in the Himalayas first began to study their breathing, that is, staring at the triangle from their lips up to the nose. If they were distracted, they would pull back and continue to stare. When they reached a high-level state, they started slowly. Stare at all parts of the body.
The key to this process is that if the mind slips away, pull it back, repeat this training, and slowly focus on longer and longer.
I dare say that Liu Cixin has not studied this stuff less. There are many traces of this stuff in his «Three-Body». For example, the mathematician went to stay in the temple, and the old monk asked him to fill his brain with other things. Obviously, there are traces of meditation. The most obvious one is the «wall-facer». This thing refers to Bodhidharma sitting under a stone wall and meditating for nine years.
I started to practice this thing to quickly fall asleep during the nap. After a period of time, I slowly found a little change. It used to be difficult to concentrate for more than an hour for a long time. After I started to meditate, my concentration time became longer and longer.
And the key to meditation is to eliminate distracting thoughts and control thoughts, so as to train the brain. At first, the meditation time is relatively short, and gradually it can get longer and longer, and the top masters can do it like death.
I used to enter the Dhamma for a long time, but now there is nothing wrong with 20 minutes. The direct effect is that four or five hours of doing things often seem to pass in an instant, completely ignoring external interference, doing everything quickly, and Sleep time has also become shorter. Now five or six hours of sleep a day is enough. Every day you can meditate for an hour. Meditation can replace part of your sleep.
The most important thing is that you can’t sleep anytime and anywhere, but you can meditate for a while anytime, anywhere, even for a minute, it will have an effect.
Last year, I changed my eating habits for a while. I stopped going to bed at noon and stopped meditating. After a while, I found that something was obviously wrong, it was difficult to concentrate for a long time, and I was easily irritable.
Then I started picking up this habit again. Every day for ten minutes to half an hour, the state began to recover again. Every time I finished meditating, I opened my eyes and felt that the whole world became clearer.
Ending
What I said today, you may not feel immediately. It has been many years since I first heard about this stuff to practice, and now I have benefited a lot from the whole thing. If you have never known this stuff before, after listening to me today and paying attention, you will find that this is the habit of most of the big guys. Sooner or later you will try it a few times, and then stop. Not down.
And this thing is also a learning process. I’m talking about it today. I can’t even talk about getting started. I can only talk about something that I feel deeply. If you want to try it, you can try it and learn it at the same time. Feeling slow is similar to recognizing yourself.