 |
 |
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 Contact Us | Privacy Statement |
|||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
Quick Links: Find Your Focus Zone Resources | Articles | Past Newsletters | Additional Links |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 Table of ContentsRead Chapter 1 |
What is Your Focus Zone? We’ve all been there – enjoying music, art, travel, conversation, a favorite project, sport, or book. You feel relaxed, alert, and fully engaged. Concentration comes easily and energy flows. You’re in your focus zone. In today’s world, distraction and overload knocks you out of your zone. Constant work demands are over- or understimulating. It’s hard to find the range of just-right stimulation between boredom and feeling overwhelmed, where attention is at your command. But simple yet powerful strategies can help you stay in your focus zone. High achievers like Olympics athletes use these methods, and you can too. Why do you have your best attention when you're in your focus zone? Brain chemicals called neurotransmitters are responsible for attention. Neurotransmitters in the adrenaline family rev you up. You need some of these adrenaline-based brain chemicals to keep you alert. But too much adrenaline makes you hyper, causing you to burn out. Does everyone have a focus zone? Yes. Everyone has a focus zone. But it's different for different people. It's even different for the same person from activity to activity. You can learn to identify your focus zone as you move from task to task. How can your focus zone be different for different activities? If your activity is mostly physical, you need more adrenaline. If it's mostly mental, you need less. You can see this in sports, for instance. A game like football requires more strength than skill, so you need lots of adrenaline. Your focus zone is at the high-stim end of the range. But a game like golf or tennis requires more skill than strength, so you need less adrenaline. Your focus zone is low-stim. In the information age, most work activities are mental and require less adrenaline, not more. But constant interruptions, distractions, and pressures make you pump more adrenaline, not less. Why has it become important to understand your focus zone? In today's fast-paced, high-tech, quick-click world, everyone is prone to attention swings. Always-on technology kicks you into a high-adrenaline state of over-stimulation. Then ordinary life feels boring by comparison, so you drop into a low-adrenaline state of under-stimulation. You skip right over the state of just-right stimulation: your focus zone. Old ways of paying attention don't work any more. You need new psychological skills to stay in your focus zone. Tips To Stay in Your Focus Zone
Get more tips and tools in Find Your Focus Zone. Back to top |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Find Your Focus Zone Resources Here are the resources from the back of the book — and more. Last updated May 2007. Introduction "How Much Information 2003?" was produced by the School of Information Management Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapter 1: What Is Your Focus Zone? The Yerkes-Dodson law was first published in R. M. Yerkes, & J.D. Dodson, "The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation," Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, (1909), 459-482. On the state of flow, see Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). Get step-by-step instructions for Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation technique. Chapter 2: Bored, Hyper, or Both? On the inner game, see W. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis (New York: Random House, 1997). Chapter 3: Attention in the Digital Age Malcolm Gladwell explains rapid cognition and thin slicing in Blink (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005). The analysis of increased violence on TV was reported by the Parents Television Council. Chapter 4: What Are We Doing to Our Brains? For a review of neuroplasticity studies, see Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). On Richard Davidson's research of Tibetan monks' meditation, see John Geirland's "Buddha on the Brain," Wired, 14.02 (2006). The study on western subjects, "Meditation Experience Is Associated With Increased Cortical Thickness," by Sara Lazar and her associates is in NeuroReport, 16, no. 17, November 28, 2005. The brain science of multitasking is explained in Claudia Wallis's "GenM," Time, March 27, 2006: 48-55. Chapter 5: Emotional Skills On emotional learning, see Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition (New York: Bantam, 2005). Your adrenaline score is based on the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale (SUDS), introduced by Joseph Wolpe in Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958). The study of children playing GameBoy while waiting for surgery was conducted by Anuradha Patel at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Chapter 6: Confronting Fear and All Its Cousins On procrastination, see Piers Steel, "The Nature of Procrastination," Psychological Bulletin, 133, no. 1 (2007): 65-94; and Jane Burka, Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004). Chapter 7: Mental Skills Read more about Erik Erikson's developmental stages throughout the lifespan. Watch a video of the 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address by Steve Jobs or read the full transcript. Chapter 8: Structure Without Pressure Research on recalling the names of supportive friends by James Shah was reported in "Automatic for the People: How Representations of Significant Others Implicitly Affect Goal Pursuit," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, no. 4 (2003): 661-681. Chapter 9: Behavior Skills The study linking TV watching in toddlers and attention problems later in school, "Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children" was conducted by Dimitri Christakis and published in Pediatrics, 113, (2004): 708-713. Read the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics. James Rosser's study demonstrating the benefits of videogames to train laparoscopic surgeons is described in Michel Marriott's "We Have to Operate, but Let's Play First," New York Times, February 24, 2005. For more about Benson's relaxation technique, see Herbert Benson and Miriam Klipper, The Relaxation Response (New York: HarperTorch, 1976). On people's attitudes toward risk, including a readable account of Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, loss aversion, and endowment and sunk cost effects, see Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1998). Chapter 10: Outsmarting Interruption and Overload The classic study on personal control by Bruce Reim, David C. Glass, and Jerome E. Singer, "Behavioral Consequences of Exposure to Uncontrollable and Unpredictable Noise," was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1, 1 (1971): 44-56. Learn more about continuous partial attention. Regarding digital age cognitive overload: on Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety 2 (NY: Que, 2000); on Information Fatigue Syndrome, David Lewis, PhD for Reuters; on Analysis Paralysis, David Shenk's Data Smog (Harper San Francisco, 1998) on Info-mania, Glenn Wilson, PhD for Hewlett Packard; on Attention Deficit Trait, Edward Hallowell's "Overloaded Circuits" in Harvard Business Review, January, 2005. Chapter 11: Defeating Distraction in the 21st Century On jet lag, see the MedlinePlus site, maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Chapter 12: What If You (or Your Children) Have Attention Deficit Disorder? Read about learned helplessness. The "Hunter in a Farmer's World" book is Thom Hartmann's Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception (New York: Underwood Books, 1997). Yuan-Chun Ding and associates published "Evidence of Positive Selection Acting at the Human Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene Locus" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 99, no.1 (2002): 309-314. Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey wrote Driven To Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood (New York: Touchstone, 1995). Chapter 13: Teaching Kids To Pay Attention Mirror neurons and learning through modeling are explained by Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam, 2006). For parents and teachers of children who struggle in traditional classrooms, see my first book, Dreamers, Discoverers & Dynamos: How to Help the Child Who Is Bright, Bored and Having Problems in School, formerly titled The Edison Trait, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999). Chapter 14: The Power of Attention On the attention economy, see Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001); and Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006). Back to top |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Additional Links Hunter in a Farmers World. The ADD and AD/HD homepage for NY Times bestselling author, Thom Hartmann, creator of the hunter in a farmers world metaphor. Movies in My Mind. Entertaining audio for kids to build listening skills, developed by psychologist and attention expert, Mark Cooper, PhD. My Kids Clubhouse. A San Diego center for kids and parents. Thrillers. Site of Gayle Lynds, NY Times bestselling author, who taps Dr. Palladino’s expertise when she wants a psychologist’s point of view for her novels. Back to top |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
| © Your Focus Zone 2007. All rights reserved. | Home | Books | Speaking | Press | Resources | Contact Us | Privacy Statement | ||