Dr. K, How Do I Focus?

the mind tells you not today not today not now not now we'll do it tomorrow hear all the thousand reasons you're not ready yet you could fail it may not be good enough dr k what do you do on days when you cannot seem to focus on the things that you need to do when do you just consider the day a write-off why does this happen seemingly with no explanation hey all i love to i have to write this article for a website and cannot for the life of me seem to focus today all i

have to do is edit it and change a few minor things but no matter how many times i sit down to do it i just can't focus i've done a number of things in an attempt to take my mind off it changed my surroundings sat in different places ran some errands cleaned the bathroom did the dishes mopped the floor went for a walk now it's late afternoon and i'm once again trying again but still with no luck look this person is unlucky right so i'm wondering at what point do you consider the day a write-off

how do you stop from judging yourself harshly for not working on whatever you needed to even though you gave it an honest try why are some days like this it's a great post fantastic post so sometimes you got to get some work done i really got to get this work done and you try to get the work done and you just can't seem to focus on it you sit down to do the work the work needs to be done and your mind is like yeah sorry bro i'm not just gonna do it today or sorry

girl not gonna do it today i just can't focus so then you're like well crap okay i just can't focus today so do i do i take an l do i just say to myself okay this day like is lost like i'm screwed okay i'm just not it's just it just ain't happening today because my mind ain't gonna do it right it's kind of weird then the other problem is that like you really got to do the work and you know that you sometimes can do the work like sometimes when you sit down your mind

is willing to do the work but on today is an unlucky day because that's what happens right it's rng it's like some days the mind is like yeah okay i'll do it other days it's like no matter what you can do or whatever you need to do your mind is like yeah i just ain't gonna happen today and so the other thing that happens is like on those kinds of days it's like okay like i don't waste the day so what am i gonna do i'm going to be productive today even if i can't do

it i'm going to try to change i'm going to run some errands i'm going to clean the bathroom do the dishes i'm off the floor went for a walk right i'm going to do all the right things now it's late afternoon i'm trying again no luck because that's what's supposed to work right i'm supposed to help the i mean if i clean things for a little bit then my mind will focus it's really confusing because our mind doesn't do what we want it to do and then comes this whole thing about like do i accept

that today is a loss because then it's like you get in this really tricky sort of situation where it's like do you beat yourself up for not being able to focus or do you go down this new age like positive emotion like acceptance like oh i'm sorry bro you couldn't just work today you did your best but you did it you did the best it just didn't work out you're unlucky it's not your fault don't worry about it love yourself accept yourself don't beat yourself up because you couldn't write the article that you need to

write it's like wait a second do i just accept this do i do i keep trying do i beat myself up do i accept do i you know do i is it toxic if i like beat myself up and like give myself a swift kick in the butt and make myself sit down and buckle down and work or do i accept that this is an l today and i'm not gonna do anything and do i practice self-love and self-compassion and then tomorrow like what if it doesn't happen again and do i self-love more do i

need more of a hug like how much self-love and cleaning and other kinds of distracting crap that is productive right because we don't want to waste the day because if we waste the day then we'll beat ourselves up and we'll feel guilty we don't want to do that so like what do you do like if you sit down and your mind doesn't want to do what you tell it to do like what do you do do you self-love do you hope for better luck tomorrow because that's what we end up doing right we just try

again tomorrow and hope that things work out so we're going to talk about this and i'm going to teach y'all what to do with your mind because the thing is the mind doesn't want to do the work and when your mind doesn't want to do the work what do you do about that so let's understand a couple of basic things let's talk about human performance for a moment so you've written an article before you know how to write the article and yet your individual performance at writing the article is highly variable so we have this

assumption that performance correlates with like knowledge or expertise so this is a conversation that i have with people that i work with in finance so a couple years ago i was working for a distressed investing private equity fund so this was a group of people who essentially take failing companies and try to figure out okay which of these failing companies are actually like have the potential to be very successful if we change management or if we do things like that and which of these companies are actually crap right so they're basically like the dumpster divers

of finance where sometimes there's like really good stuff in there that due to market forces or mismanagement or whatever like is crap and it's really interesting right because what these people are essentially doing is investing in failed businesses so the dumpster divers of finance in a good way and the cool thing is that like on a given day like if they make the right choice they can make a ton of money because there's actually like a really good company out there that just got unlucky but they really could provide a lot of value and things

like that and if you make the right choice it's like you make a ton of money so they were doing really well actually and so as we were talking about it's like how do you know which ones to invest in so that you can talk about analytics and number crunching and all this kind of stuff and like you they use all those kinds of tools but at the end of the day it's kind of rng i mean it's not truly rng but there's some things just a line within you and what i really found when

i was working with these people is that they sort of like it was like highly variable depending on how their brain is working that day so if their brain was working really really well they would be able to see the pattern right they were able to see the forest instead of the trees because the analytics are all the trees you can crunch the numbers i do my diligence for all 10 of these companies but then something about my brain and pattern recognition just clicks and i'm able to see it so the issue became about not

being more experienced or being more knowledgeable but understanding how to achieve a certain state of mind and controlling the mind to get it to do what you want it to do the other place that we see this is in esports and not even esports just playing video games so theoretically when i work with an esports professional every game they play they have more knowledge than the game before theoretically every game they play they should be getting better right because you've played one additional game but we tend to find is that performance is wildly variable so

what determines whether you're going to play well that day or whether you're going to play poorly that day you don't have to be a professional you can play dota league of legends cs go valor like whatever you want fortnite pub g vampire survivors whatever you want and what you'll tend to find is that theoretically you should be getting better every day but what we tend to see is people are hard stuck at their rank for like a decade and on some days they play well and on some days they play poorly the problem is that

they don't know how to cultivate the right kind of day they don't know how to cultivate the right kind of mind so we're going to talk about is how to train your mind to focus we're going to go to the heart of it the crux of it so we have a whole guide about adhd and how to do stuff where we talk about all these different complex factors we talk about environment we talk about the neuroscientific effects of cleaning your bathroom we talk about things like prioritization and organization and we talk about all sorts of

like how your mind works how to control distractibility in the mind we cover a bunch of different stuff in the in the guide and all that stuff is useful but what we're going to tunnel down into today right because we don't have time to do 20 hours of teaching today there's a lot of good stuff in there but we're going to focus on the crux up so let's start with a little bit of neuroscience so i have my mind mind doesn't want to focus and then there's this other part of your mind i need to

focus and there are times where like you kind of you know that your mind is not doing what it's supposed to so the first thing to kind of acknowledge is that they're like different parts of you so you know that you need to focus but your mind is like i don't want to so we're going to sort of say that there's a self this is actually a part of the mind too but i'm going to put it in the self column for now so the first thing to understand is that like you can direct your

mind but sometimes the mind doesn't comply now from a neuroscience perspective the ability for this to win involves essentially frontal lobes so frontal lobes are responsible for the things like impulse control they're also responsible for things like delayed gratification they're also responsible for things like directing our attention okay so we want to basically strengthen the frontal lobes but what i want you all to just notice is that there are different parts of your mind that are kind of conflicting and how do we make one win and the other lose because right now what's happening is

this part of the mind is winning right now the way that the equation is is like this right so let's try to understand what our options are so i've got work to do option number one versus and if i try to work i'm gonna be it's hard to focus if i don't work i'm going to be bored mine doesn't like being bored so i still want to be productive so even if i can't work let me be productive with like cleaning right because then the day isn't a whole loss that's good right and then some

of us maybe this doesn't apply to you but i know it certainly applies to me we'll do something that's dopaminergic so we'll do something like a video game so which of these does our mind hate the most which one does it want to avoid at all costs absolutely right so if we're going to rank these what does it want to do the most wants to do this first this second this third and this fourth the problem is that your mind knows that you will you can't tolerate this so your mind is playing a waiting game

with you where all i have to do is like i know that this person isn't going to accept boredom so instead what the person is going to do is they're going to move towards productivity right even if they stop me from doing the dopaminergic crap for a little while it's just the waiting game i know i'm gonna win this so like here's the options if i force this person to be bored if i don't focus on the work and i let the mind be distracted they're going to become bored and once they become bored they

can't tolerate being bored all i have to do is distract them from the work they're going to become bored then they're going to be like oh my god i'm wasting time they're going to be productive for a while they'll work for two to four hours right because we've got errands and stuff and then what are they gonna do then it's the afternoon oh no the day's a loss oh i'm trying again no luck okay well might as well just play video games and might as well just like take the day off so your mind is

playing a game of chicken with you and it's secret weapon is that it knows that boredom will control you and the more that you use your cell phone the more that you take a dump and browser at it at the same time the more dopaminergic stuff that you do the more intolerant to boredom you become right because when i grew up we used to still get bored we used to do this thing i don't know if you guys have ever done this before called playing outside and people may ask me they're like what did you

play outside we didn't play something we just played outside every day after school between like three and six o'clock we would just go and play things sometimes it would involve balls and bats and basketballs but sometimes it didn't we personally played this game called multi-type we made up our own game called multi-type and we would play multi-type and it was like relatively fun but the rules were kind of rigged right so this is the key thing if you want your mind to focus on a particular day there's one simple thing that you can do understand

this but understand that all of the mind's power over you revolves around boredom so when my dad was in medical school he had a rule for himself that if he didn't feel like studying and he taught me this rule by the way if he didn't feel like studying he wouldn't study he was allowed to sleep as much as he wanted to he was allowed to sit there and do nothing as much as he wanted to but those were his only two options besides studying that's it nothing else this was off the table this was off

the table he's got two choices work boredom or in his case sleep that's it if your mind doesn't want to work that's okay we don't need to work if you can't focus no big deal we're just going to sit here and do nothing for the next eight hours and whenever you're ready to work we can do that but if you don't want to work no big deal we can take a nap if you're feeling tired or you're tired let's go lay down it works incredibly well incredibly well i did it myself i didn't feel like

working i wake up in the morning make myself some breakfast it's time to work i don't feel like working okay you can go lay down what but what am i supposed to do when i like you can sleep if you're tired like if you're tired like obviously you need energy then when i'm done sleeping i get up i sit down at my desk and i stare at the friggin page and if i don't want to stare at the page i don't have to stare at the page i can close it and i'm just going to

sit there that's it eventually what'll happen is your mind will focus on work as long as the mind knows that there's no alternative because here's the thing you can actually tolerate boredom better than your mind can your mind is going to be completely sol if it's bored it's the one that's suffering not you and that's where we go back to the sense of self the self can tolerate boredom fine like what is meditation it's sitting there doing nothing with a no mind state like isn't that boring no like it's actually wonderful we love that if

you really sit down and do it so if you want to learn how to focus what you've got to do is like practice focusing and the way that you practice focusing is you keep doing it until your mind starts listening and if you get bored you get bored we're not gonna come up with fake stuff to do we're not gonna come up with dopaminergic stuff to do and you may say but what what about the stuff that i do need to run errands so this is where it's really important are you deciding to be productive

because you feel bored and you don't want to waste the day or did you set out with a schedule to do this stuff on this day right there's a big difference is your productivity an antidote to boredom or is it stuff that you actually need to get done someone earlier was asking what about doing things like working out so i have to like cook i'm going to shower i'm going to exercise so that's fine like i can even run errands for an hour too but that's going to not be an antidote to boredom this is

really important to understand because the moment i make it an antidote to boredom what i'm actually doing is giving in to my mind i'm not actually controlling it it's controlling me it's just tricking me with a more it's just sweetening the poison right there's like it's just like poison without the guilt but it's still giving into the distraction of the mind so what should you do if your mind doesn't listen to you you're gonna sit there and you're gonna be bored until it's ready to work and when it's ready to work we can work and

then something magical will happen once your mind understands that you're not screwing around and it will you will literally have it sit there for 12 hours and do absolutely nothing it'll start working it'll start working you will have taught it how to do what you tell it to do you'll sit down and you'll say we're going to read this thing now there's also like a couple of other like tips here about intentionality so if you're struggling to do your work you know i would sit with the self we'll talk about this kind of like this

is almost like a meditation of sorts right so i want you to start by noticing your mind i don't feel like working and then what i want you to do is sit down and and prepare yourself for work and see what i don't feel really is is this a feeling or is what's happening i i'm looking at the page but my thoughts are wandering and then like this is going to create another feeling like frustration i'm wasting my time whatever and then what's gonna happen is as we're feeling frustrated and wasting our time let me

go clean and as i go clean what am i actually giving into who's in control here my frustration i cannot tolerate frustration and as i can't tolerate frustration i lose control of my life because think about that two people one can tolerate frustration one can't who's screwed in life and who's going to do well it ain't difficult so sit there and look at yourself close your eyes the next time you need to work and look at what does i don't feel like working actually mean and then what i want you to do as the self

let's say you have to write a paper can i write a single sentence well i don't know which sentence to write that's what the mind rebels with so notice that as well you want to notice all these thoughts as they come up i don't know what to write okay what do you need to learn so that you can write the first sentence how do we get to the first sentence what's getting in the way of the first sentence right is it research is it just putting something out there is it something like what like what

is it that's getting in the way now here you have to be a little bit careful because if you're not careful you'll end up somewhere over here because they'll be like oh we need to do more research we need to do more research we need to do more research we need to do more research because oftentimes i don't know what to write is actually i'm not confident and then you're looking for some kind of research research research so that you start to feel confident and then you know what to write sometimes what you have to

do as the self is tell it well too bad i understand that you're not confident we're going to write anyway we're just going to write something crappy but you're going to sit there until you start writing put words on a page and if it's wrong we can fix it later because here's the thing that i want you all to understand is you do this process as you sit and really pay attention to your mind what you'll notice is that your mind is incredibly slippery and it'll come up with whatever excuse it can to keep you

from doing what it doesn't want to do and your mind knows it's a waiting game because if it can stall if it can stall if it can stall you'll become frustrated you'll give up on the day you'll be able to take a loss you'll practice some self-forgiveness oh no it's okay it's okay baby it's okay beta oh it's okay you tried so hard today you tried for four hours to write so now that you tried so hard and you failed now we can go play league of legends for the next 10 hours it'll come up

with all kinds of things oh we need to we're not ready to start we need to do more research just notice what what you need to do in this like this like a meditation technique as you sit and you close your eyes notice how it will twist and turn and give you as much stuff as it can but there's always going to be one conclusion don't write all roads lead to one place don't write and once you see that you'll begin to realize it's all bs it's all bs and then you sit down and you

start writing if your brain is like i'm not ready yet okay then we're going to sit here until you are we're not going to be but we'll like we're going to waste the whole day let's do it this needs to get done no but we can be so much more productive if we do this other stuff that actually doesn't fix the problem this article needs to be written so you have to be able to like the whole point is that the mind tricks you like people will waste their entire lives because of the trickery of

the mind the mind tells you not today not today not now not now we'll do it tomorrow here all the thousand reasons you're not ready yet you could fail it may not be good enough not today not today day goes by i've been there i literally saw it happen in my life year after year it started around that age i was 15 straight up almost failed out of college was on academic probation my freshman year and still my mind was like not today not today year went by a second year went by a third year

went by it could play this game all day long and why because it knew that it was in a game of chicken with me and i would give in because i was not willing to waste a whole day and in that i almost wasted my entire life if i'm not going to get any work done i might as well have fun i was not willing to waste a day and when you're willing to waste a day then your mind will start to listen you're like we're gonna sit here until we do it but what about

this that's okay you're gonna waste the day okay i'll waste as many days as i need to to get this done and once your mind understands that it's going to get in the line does that make sense holding yourself hostage you're not holding yourself hostage good point in its you're holding your mind hostage here's the tricky thing in your mind there's a set of bars there's a cell one of y'all is on the inside one of y'all is on the outside the self is on the inside or the mind is on the inside you get

to decide right now it's holding you hostage yoshio is asking a good question why do you consider the mind and the self two different entities because of experience so if you close your eyes you will be able to observe the actions of the mind so do i consider myself different from my hand is this hand me well sort of i'm me even if something happened to my hand let's say there was a terrible accident and i lost my hand that would be awful but i wouldn't stop being me the mind is a part of your

being but it's just a part and as we start to like peel back the layers of the self what we end up with is like there's like a pure self in there that is actually not the mind at all and once you meditate you'll be able to realize this because once you experience existence without mental activity then you'll understand what the self truly is is the self your consciousness basically yes that's one way to put it is the mind a separate con conception of the brain no well a separate conception of the brain the mind

is not the brain right so the brain is a physical organ the mind is not a physical organ so adhd is not real no adhd is definitely real why would you conclude that adhd is not real from this we're not saying the mind is false we're just saying it's not the self we're not saying that your brain is incre doesn't exist ninja first class is asking if you lost your brain are you you that's a fantastic question i don't know the answer right so that's it i still think you will be you so this is

where i haven't had let me think about this yeah i i think you would still be you without your brain there are absolutely severe brain injuries where people will change personalities drastically so we're not saying that the mind is completely independent of the brain but they are different right so we know for example that like just like in in what we just explained today we talked about the correlation the neuroscientific correlation between some of these mental functions and directing the mind versus the self and the frontal lobes we can even map some of those mental

functions to particular parts of the brain now a biological reductionist will posit that all of the mind is a manifestation of the brain i think that that's sort of true but also incomplete because i think that in the way that there's like matter and energy right the experience of consciousness is different from physical form so like the experience of taste or pleasure may be mapped onto the brain but there's a difference between a physical object and an experience from like what's it called a i'm not good at philosophy but a quali there's like some there's

some philosophical term for this qualia right so the qualia of substance and the qualia of experience to me feel fundamentally different so i agree with that philosophical branch and that too is based on kind of experience there's like a different stuff to like you know touching something and like experiencing something anyway great great conversation i mean like some of the stuff gets into like the fill philosophy spirituality call it whatever you want to at the end of the day though what we're talking about is how to get your mind to focus and if you guys

want a lot of different methods there are all kinds of stuff that does help so cleaning your room for example does help because of top-down and bottom-up processing in the brain there's a bunch of different stuff if you guys are interested in that that's the guide that we're working on so we're really struggling for a while to figure out okay what should we do next and what i realized is what our community needs more than anything else is like how do you do stuff like how do i do stuff it's such a simple question but

it's something that we struggle with so much so we made dr k's guide to adhd and doing stuff it's like how does stuff get done like what are the different components neuroscience psychology spirituality that involve doing stuff so today we sort of got a a how can i say this a slice of the process of doing stuff on a very fundamental level of like how does the mind work and like why does it trick you and like what is what techniques does it use to trick you but there's a lot of other stuff too there

is neuroscience there's even clinical medicine right when it relates to adhd and then there's sort of like this yogic perspective on like how do you control your attention why did we combine adhd with doing stuff because ultimately doing stuff is about controlling your attention so when i sit down and i try to study and i can't what does that technically mean when i can't study what that means is that i my attention is not going where i tell it to go i sit down and i try to study and my attention goes elsewhere i can't

stop playing video games let's think about that why can't you stop playing video games because my attention is constantly on them i think about them and the only time i feel at peace is when my attention is stuck in the video game so it all comes down to attention and this is where people will say weak willpower willpower is a piece of it but i think willpower is actually a it's an unsophisticated term so this is something that we go into so there's all kinds of neuroscientific calculations that are going on that when those calculations

are not proceeding properly it looks like quote unquote weak willpower the interesting thing is that you can actually manipulate those calculations to create more motivation which looks like willpower but the interesting thing is it's not it's not that the person has increased their willpower they've actually increased their motivation and remember when you're motivated you don't need willpower willpower is what you use to overcome motivation and so you may be asking what do you mean there's some calculations i'll give you just a really simple thing so we have this video on something called the action success

calculation where your brain constantly and there's studies on this so there's something we understand very well constantly decides what to do and it integrates all kinds of information one of the key parts of that action success calculation one of the key parts of figuring out whether to motivate you or not is actually the success likelihood of a task so if i think i can succeed at something i'm going to be more motivated to do it if i don't think i can succeed i'm going to be less motivated who here thinks it would be cool to

own a yacht who here is motivated to build a yacht well why don't if you want a yacht why don't you build one because i don't think i would be successful right there's like zero motivation for building yachts even though we all want yachts so that's like an extreme example that's so extreme that it almost doesn't make sense but basically like even if you look at like studies of people who will ask other people out what you tend to find is that you're more likely to ask someone out if you think they're within your league

what does that mean that means that the action success calculation is telling you hey go ahead and ask this person out because we have a decent chance of being successful now how do you manipulate that calculation to create motivation very simple self-worth is a huge part of that calculation so this is why we see this in coaching where people will come into coaching and they'll say i'm not motivated and what we'll do is we'll work on their ahamkar their ego their sense of self we'll work on their confidence and then seven weeks later they're doing

stuff they're like yeah i did it and then the coach is actually really confused they're like they don't say to their client but then they'll come into case review and they'll talk to me about it they'll be like i'm really confused i thought this person this person we've been talking about this for seven weeks they haven't done anything for seven weeks and then suddenly they wake up one day and they're like doing stuff and it all goes down to these different kinds of like neuroscientific techniques so when someone becomes more confident in themselves it alters

their perception of the chance of success as it alters your perception of your chance of success in our dating example this becomes very simple if i have low self-worth i think i'm in a low league i'm in the amateur league and once i work on my self-worth i realize oh i'm confident i'm actually like a valuable human being who can offer something in a relationship and then suddenly i'm able to actually ask out people that i'm attracted to instead of asking out people that i think i can end up with who are willing to accept

me and it revolutionizes the way that you live your life and it all comes down to neuroscience there are literally basic science studies on schizophrenia and motivation that once you look at all of these like end psychological studies about dating and relationship recession and then you combine them with like brain scans of people with schizophrenia you can map out how the system works once you map out everything from neuroscience to psychology you also get an understanding of like how the equation is written and once you understand how the equation is written then you can start

to alter certain variables and then you can almost like calculate motivation you