5 ways to remain focused throughout the workday
Whether you are in full-time education or you work from home, it can be difficult to remain focused and motivated when applying yourself to a task. Here are five ways that can help to boost your energy and focus to finish the task at hand.
1. Your day starts the night before
You know that feeling just before you go to bed and you’re intrinsically motivated for the next day? It goes something like this;
“Tomorrow is going to be great! I’m going to get up at 6:00 am, I’m going to go for a run at 6:15 and I’m gonna eat kale for the first time!”
What happens? You end up waking up at 8:30 am just to lay in bed on Instagram for 30 minutes and then finally get up to eat chocolate spread on toast for breakfast. WHY?!?!
This happens because the part of your brain you’re using at 10:00 pm is different to the brain you’re using at 6:00 am, and you don’t have an awful lot of control over this. Your morning brain is fuelled by dopamine, it’s the primal part of you that is immediately looking for sustenance, more sleep, safety, and comfort. In order to have more control over your morning impulses, you need to prime your morning brain with your nighttime brain through visualization. Just before you go to sleep when your brain is in a theta state, visualize yourself naturally waking up at the time you want to wake up, doing the things you want to do.
Do this every night and you will begin to notice how easy it is to start your day off on track.
2: Gradual and incremental dopamine hits
This ties into the last tip in that you want to refrain from giving your brain too much dopamine in the morning and then you can gradually increase the amount of dopamine fuelled activities you do throughout the day.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that is responsible for making us always look for the next thing by using our reward circuits. One of the biggest hindrances of getting tasks done is from getting distracted by smaller tasks that make us feel good in the moment — e.g, Instagram, TikTok, coffee, sugary foods, TV…literally anything that gives us instant gratification and a boost in the short term. If you live your life solely fuelled by dopamine you will end up feeling drained and low energy, because as long as you’re getting those frequent dopamine highs you will be getting those frequent energetic lows.
Another thing to note is that serotonin is the hormone that is responsible for stabilizing our moods and generally making us feel happy and fulfilled, which in turn has a huge effect on how we make decisions and our motivation to actually get to where we want to be. Dopamine and Serotonin are mutually exclusive in that when dopamine increases, serotonin decreases. Therefore we want to allow room for Serotonin by decreasing our levels of dopamine.
3: Light foods until 4:00 pm
You know those dreadful couple of hours after you eat lunch during a workday and you’re sitting at your desk feeling like a bag of steaming cr*p.
This is because around the hours of 2:00–4:00 pm in the afternoon, we naturally have a dip in brainwave activity making us feel lethargic and low energy. For some people this is more extreme than others but because this is naturally occurring it’s kind of unavoidable; the best thing you can do to help curb the effects of this is to not eat a heavy lunch before — I’m talking no heavy carbs or fast releasing sugars as this will just exacerbate that low feeling and make you feel unmotivated. You also don’t want to be eating heavy starchy foods in the morning as our stomach acid is most settled then so your body is not just able to digest those foods efficiently, and ultimately will use up more of your energy stores to help digest whatever it is you have eaten. Making you feel low energy and blahhhhh…
So stay light on your toes and maintain sharp focus by eating easy-to-digest, high-protein foods. And walnuts, they’re good for your brain!
3: Maintain a high frequency
‘Of what?’ you ask…
It’s definitely time to eradicate any dogma or stigmas surrounding the topic of spirituality by bringing it out of the taboo and into the norm.
So if I am ever having a stint of feeling low energy during my day, first I will approach it by asking myself why. And then I realize that I’ve been sitting hunched over my desk for 3 hours, staring at a bright computer screen and thinking about the same things over and over and over… This is what we call LOW VIBRATION, people!” Quite often all you need to do is get up, do some star jumps, move that energy around your body, poke your head outside to get some fresh air and you will feel instantly better.
It is so easy to mistake the feeling of having no energy due to lack of sustenance for the feeling of being in a low vibrational state.
Sometimes it can get so bad that you can't even get yourself to get up, in that instance I meditate. How we think ultimately manifests into how we behave, therefore we need to start with what’s happening in our thoughts. There are some great guided meditations for raising vibrational frequency which can be a reliable option. If I want a quick boost, I close my eyes and breath heavily in through my nose and out through my mouth to get the energy circulating throughout my body, with every inbreath I take I imagine myself getting higher and higher and more energized…until I can physically feel the energy coursing throughout my body.
5: Enjoy yourself
Honestly, this one is a little cheesy but it’s something that we all need to remember throughout our days. We are all here on this planet for a limited amount of time so never let yourself get bogged down in something that isn’t serving you and always try to see the light side of everything. If right now you’re working a job that isn’t what you want to do in the long run but is still what you need to do right now…enjoy it. Notice all of the things that make you feel happy while doing it, lessons that you’re learning, people that you get to engage with. Never let any of it go to waste by feeling uninspired; both happiness and love are two of the strongest driving forces that enhance motivation and inspiration