FOCUS
How to feel focus
A shift from distraction to focus allows you to do what matters.
Superpowers used: idling, introspection, creativity, sound
Other superpowers may be used as well. View all powers to shift states here.
How to Shift from Distraction to Focus
Our complex survival mechanisms have helped us become the dominant species on Earth.
But in the modern world, they're the source of many problems.
When life was more dangerous – before houses, weather prediction, guns, cities – humans faced threats on a daily basis.
To be prepared, we had to be highly attuned to anything out of the ordinary. And since our brains can't possibly process every single bit of information in the environment, it must choose what to focus on.
The moment something appears as a potential threat, something we weren't anticipating, or a possible reward, we dedicate our attention to it to ensure our wellbeing.
The scary thing is, it's not conscious but an automatic reaction.
Becoming conscious of a threat and then deciding what to do could take too long and the threat could kill us. Instead, our attention goes directly there without our having to do, or think anything.
It's highly effective. If we were walking through a field 50,000 years ago and saw something move in the distance, we could easily detect it no matter what else we were doing. We wouldn't think about it – it would just happen.
Now we live in a world where corporations are spending billions of dollars to hack these survival mechanisms and gain our attention.
The internet, our phones, television, magazines, billboards, movies, video games – they're all extremely complex attention extractors built to hijack us to focus on what they want to say.
Our minds, still functioning under ancient survival mechanisms, jump from one distraction to another without conscious awareness.
Since our brains have the remarkable ability to change, we're discovering incessant distractions are actually rewiring our brains – so even after eliminating them, we can still have difficulties focusing.
Don't worry, you can reclaim your ability to focus. After all, millions of years of evolution is on your side.