How to get a laser focus - Meditation - Shawn Achor

Here's a great talk by psychologist Shawn Achor talking about how to get a laser focus.



I did this with Adobe CEO and senior leadership staff and take their hands of the keyboard for 2 mins a day and just watch their breath go in and out. they are breathing anyway so we just made them watch it. What they are doing is they are trying to get their brain to do one thing at ta time and as everyone in this room knows it is quite difficult because you are balancing so many balls at the same time.  Your brain is creating a Tetris effect of multitasking and a Tetris effect of a form of cultural deficit disorder, where it is very difficult to focus on  anything for a long period of time. We thing that's good but adolescents are much better at multitasking than anyone in this room for the most part because they play all these video games and have all these stimuli.  They are better at multitasking on average but by definition, even the best multitaskers drop their  success rates on both tasks by multitasking and significantly raise the stress on their systems and the best multitaskers in the united states are exactly the ones we have banned from driving and talking at the same time because it  quadruples the chances of an adolescent getting in a car accident. We find that multitasking is one pattern of dealing with multiple tasks but there is a better cognitive strategy to do multiple tasks by doing them with the entirety of your brain's focus by shifting form one to the other. You have to practice and train your brain to not split your cognitive resources and  mediation is the fastest way we have found to do that. For 2 minutes a day of watching your breath go in and out you can  undo the negative effects of multitasking and start getting your brain give you a focus like a laser on tasks instead of having a diffuse light of your intellectual  resources shined on it.