How to improve your concentration with PandoraStar

Hello. I’m Sky Acamesis, one of the directors at PandoraStar, and today we’re going to be talking about how to use a light machine to improve your concentration and how to use some behavioral modification techniques and coaching strategies to help you focus and concentrate better.

Focus and concentration. It’s something that’s really being attacked a lot through social media and through advertising. It’s that we’re being given smaller and smaller amounts of time to focus, and the average concentration-time has actually gone down to less than five minutes. You can see the Facebook videos and Instagram videos going down and down and down in time. It’s 30 seconds, it’s 50 seconds, it’s a minute long, because most people are just scrolling. They’re conditioning themselves to focus on little bits of information over a prolonged period of time, but then their long-term concentration muscles start to atrophy and people can really struggle to concentrate.

Things that develop your concentration skills, creative hobbies. Creativity is amazing for developing your concentration skills. Whether you take up knitting, or painting, or writing, anything that uses your hands, anything which takes that journey with that distance, from the head to the heart to the hands, is really going to help you concentrate and focus, especially if it’s not a very mind-intensive task. Because that’s your job when you’re focusing, is to basically shut out the world, shut out all the distractions and concentrate on what’s going on.

The reason that it’s good if your hobby is not particularly interesting is because what you’re studying may also not be particularly interesting. If you’re studying your accounts, if you’re studying the different journals you have to do research for, for a video or for a book, if you’re studying patterns of behaviour, if you’re reading, or studying observing animals or stuff for a particular amount of time for a science experiment, or you’re trying to get a particular picture. All of these things take time and they involve you being able to overcome your boredom. So creativity is very, very important for that, and it literally teaches you how to become still and how to become introspective and how to allow that information to move from your prefrontal cortex all the way back to your long-term memory centres in your amygdala and limbic emotional centres of the brain.

So your hands help a lot, and doing things with your hands makes a humongous difference to how you can focus. This is why you get those stress balls. It’s why some people develop ticks. For me, if I’m concentrating, you’ll see me twirling my hair. It’s because you know on a subconscious level that the movement helps you somehow, that using your hands helps you concentrate and focus and helps literally to create a rhythm. Your heart beats in a rhythm and your brain waves work in a rhythm. So when you’re actually putting yourself into that rhythm of concentration and focus, it’s easier for you to remember, it’s easier for things to go in.

The other thing that you can do, which I used to do a lot when I was younger, obviously not good for school, but brilliant for studying at home, is humming while you work, because it literally makes both hemispheres of the brain work together at the same time. Then that song will always make you remember what it was you were studying. So get your favourite CD out and literally hum that song as you’re studying the different things that you’re studying. I would choose different bands for different topics. That’s what I used to do when I was in high school, university. I mean, literally when you start playing that band or that you’ll be amazed the stuff that comes back to you. I still remember advanced chemistry and calculus when I’m listening to Nickelback. Music really bypasses the part of the brain that you know would shut down you when you’re stressed. It literally makes the whole brain work together. It’s a very good way of concentrating or focusing.

The other really important skill to master, if you want to master a concentration and focus, is organization and time-management skills, and they come together. You need to know how long a task is going to take. Let’s say you want to prepare for an exam, you to know how many modules you have to study, how many topics you have to know, and roughly how long it’s going to take you to study those topics at least twice. The first time is just understanding and really getting to grips to what you’re learning, and then the second time is revision. You’re literally making sure it’s gone in three or four or five times into your subconscious mind so that you are able to be more fluid with the concepts and thinking in a different way.

This is where creativity comes in really handy as well, because if you’re literally working and studying and really focusing for 90 minute blocks, because 90 minute blocks are the best cycles to study in, you study for 90 minutes, you take a 20-minute break, you study for an 90 minutes, you take a 10-minute break. It just helps your circadian rhythms move in alignment with what you’re studying and that’s when you really can focus and concentrate. Then literally you take that break and if in that break you’re knitting or you’re doing a bit of exercise and going for a walk to clear your head.

This is why Steve Jobs, literally all of the meetings he ran, he ran walking. He literally had a circuit built around the building so that you could walk when you were doing your meetings, because the best ideas come from you focused, you studied, you know what you need to do, and then you completely let go and you exercise and you’re creative so that your subconscious mind can start putting all this together in better and more ingenious ways faster than your conscious mind can. And you’re really remembering it. You’re committing it to memory and committing it to mind on a subconscious level, and that’s where the creativity helps.

So you want to work with 90 minutes worth of focused, concentrated study, and then half an hour to 40 minutes worth of creativity and play to allow your mind to really make sense of and process and make that journey with that distance between the mind and the heart. Start to really light up those different neurons, start to really work for two hemispheres of the brain together, so that you can literally keep track of that information years and years and years after you’ve learned it, and you can actually make it useful in your life.

Now, the programs that help the most with concentration are Theta programs, Alpha programs, Alpha programs create this really clear state of focus and concentration without any stress, and Gamma programs create this really deep state of physical relaxation so you’re not holding tension in your shoulders, around your heart and your solar plexus. Where the energy goes is where the ideas and innovation flow. Your ability to believe in yourself as directly proportional to your ability to keep going and to be interested in a topic. If you’re trying to learn French and every two minutes you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, I’m terrible at languages,” or, “I’m never going to do this,” or “This is a waste of my time,” it makes it very hard for you to focus on what you’re doing. It makes it very hard for you to believe that you might not speak French today or tomorrow, but in six months you’re going to be pretty fluent at it.

So it’s the perspective. What PandoraStar does is it breaks the state by showing these amazing colors, mandalas, and shapes, and it puts you in this deep state of physical relaxation. It’s doing the hard work for you, of shifting your state, getting you to see different mental pictures and images than the ones you were showing yourself, and then it’s allowing you to literally stick on your headphones and listen to a hypnosis track or an affirmation track that teaches you how to believe in yourself, how to think about the work that you’re doing and how to organize yourself so that that work is sustainable and manageable over long periods of time.

It really is doable to train yourself to focus a lot more than you’ve ever focused before. It’s just a training process. It will take you three to six months to completely train your brain to focus for 90-minute intervals and to keep going even when you want to get up or move around or do different things.

That’s the other thing that helps me a lot with focus, and that’s the last one I’m going to leave you with, is getting yourself a standing desk. You really want to work for half the day sitting down, but at least a half the day you should work standing up. It makes it easier for you to jiggle around, maybe dance to some music that you have on in the background, stretch your feet.

It gives a different perspective and we’re not so influenced by the conditioning that we get in school standing up, because you were taught as a child sitting down so a lot of the patterns and conditionings that you have from childhood come up when you’re trying to work and focus sitting down. Whereas when you’re learning new things standing up, you’ll notice you learn them a lot faster, a lot quicker, and it’s a different frame of reference. You won’t have as many negative memories because you weren’t allowed to stand up in class or stand up in school. You’ve completely different memories of learning standing up than you do of sitting down. So for me, it really helps to focus. I can focus for hour standing up, but I struggle often when I’m sitting down.

Notice how your physiology affects your focus, and literally remember to do something creative, whether it’s your light machine, whether it’s knitting, whether it’s painting, whether it’s lifting some weights or some exercise inside those breaks, just to help keep your focus strong throughout the day.

I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to share with us some of your techniques about how you focus, please feel free to comment below and I’ll answer you as soon as I can. If you enjoyed this video, please follow and subscribe. And if you’d like to know more about PandoraStar, please go to www.pandorastar.co.uk. Thank you so much for joining us. Bye.