Entrepreneur

This essay is excerpted from Jim Kwik’s new book, Limitless Expanded Edition.

Most of us are working on multiple devices at the same time, often with multiple applications running on each of those devices. We have meetings to attend, e-mails and texts to answer, social media statuses to update, and multiple projects in play. Yet, precisely because of this, it’s more important than ever to find ways to bring calm to your mind.

You might not even realize it, but all the input you’re getting on any given day is causing you a considerable amount of stress. If you’re like many people, you might even think of this as a positive thing, because it means that you’re busy, and by being busy, you’re making a meaningful contribution to the world. While this might be true, it is in spite of this anxiety rather than because of it.

“Anxious thoughts can overwhelm you, making it difficult to make decisions and take action to deal with whatever issue bothers you” writes psychologist Melanie Greenberg, Ph.D., author of The Stress-Proof Brain. “Anxiety can also lead to overthinking, which makes you more anxious, which leads to more overthinking, and so on. How can you get out of this vicious cycle? Repressing anxious thoughts won’t work; they will just pop up again, sometimes with more intensity.”

Juliet Funt is the CEO of the consulting firm WhiteSpace at Work. She describes whitespace as “the thinking time, the strategic pause that’s in between the busyness.” When she was on my podcast, Juliet called whitespace “the oxygen that allows everything else to catch fire.”

What both Greenberg and Funt are identifying is the need for all of us to have more time when our minds aren’t cluttered. It’s obvious how doing this will positively affect our mental health. But what’s less obvious is how it will also dramatically improve our focus and our productivity.

Some interesting studies in neuroscience underscore this, showing us how distraction is actually changing our brains. One, from University College London, compared the brains of heavy media multitaskers with those of light media multitaskers and found that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is involved in focus, was smaller among the former group. Conversely, a study at the Max Planck Institute found that, among people going through training exercises to increase attention, their ACCs grew thicker.

And distractions can be a serious time sink. A study from University of California, Irvine, shows how distractions can really disrupt your day. “You have to completely shift your thinking, it takes you a while to get into it and it takes you a while to get back and remember where you were,” said Gloria Mark, lead author of the study. “We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news—it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.” That’s more than 20 minutes every time you’re distracted—and how often are you distracted every day?

Tools like meditation, yoga, and certain martial arts can be tremendously valuable in helping you calm your busy mind. But if you’re in the middle of the day and can’t afford to get away for more than a few minutes, there are still some things you can do. Three important ones are:

1. Breathe

Taking deep cleansing breaths is valuable whenever you need to re-center yourself. Holistic health expert Andrew Weil, M.D., developed a breathing tool that he calls the 4–7–8 Method. It works like this:

• Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.
• Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of 4.
• Hold your breath for a count of 7.
• Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of 8.

This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.

2. Do Something That’s Causing You Stress

Things weighing on our minds are going to continue weighing on our minds until we deal with them. If you’re having trouble focusing or if your mind is operating on a dozen planes at the same time, it’s very possible the reason this is happening is because there’s something that you need to do that you’ve been avoiding doing. If that’s the case, do a little 4–7–8 breathing, deal with the stressful task, and then you can get back to everything else you want to do with increased focus.

3. Schedule Time for Distractions

It might be a challenge for you to turn off your phone and your e-mail when you need to focus, but if you can convince yourself to do these things, great. They’re relatively easy to do. What’s likely to be considerably harder is to avoid letting worries and obligations get in the way of whatever you’re trying to accomplish in that moment.

There’s a reason you’re seeing these things as worries or obligations, and that makes them much harder to push out of your mind. Addressing one of your concerns head-on, as we just discussed, is one way to deal with this, but there are going to be situations where that’s simply not possible. Instead, what if you set aside a specific time in your schedule to move these worries and obligations to the forefront of your mind? Simply saying, “I’ll worry about that later” isn’t likely to keep that worry from creeping back 20 minutes from now. But saying, “I’ll worry about that at 4:15” very well might.

Excerpted from LIMITLESS EXPANDED EDITION by Jim Kwik published by Hay House, Inc. Copyright © 2023.

Jim Kwik (his real name) is a widely recognized world expert in memory improvement, brain optimization, and accelerated learning. After a childhood brain injury left him with learning challenges, Kwik created strategies to dramatically enhance his mental performance. He has since dedicated his life to helping others unleash their brains’ true potential. For more than 30 years, he has served as the brain coach to a who’s who of Hollywood elite, professional athletes, political leaders, and business magnates, with corporate clients that include Google, Virgin, Nike, Zappos, SpaceX, GE, 20th Century Fox, Cleveland Clinic, WordPress, and such institutions as the United Nations, U.S. Air Force, Caltech, Harvard University, and Singularity University.

Through keynote speeches, he reaches in-person live audiences totaling over 200,000 every year; his online videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views. Kwik is regularly featured in media, including Forbes, HuffPost, Fast Company, Inc., Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight, CNBC, and the cover of Entrepreneur magazine. He is the host of the acclaimed Kwik Brain podcast. KwikLearning.com’s online courses are used by students in 195 countries.

Kwik, an advocate for brain health and global education, is also a philanthropist funding projects ranging from Alzheimer’s research to the creation of schools from Guatemala to Kenya, providing health care, clean water, and learning for children in need. His mission: No brain left behind.

He knows that, as an entrepreneur, you’re trying to shove as much information into your brain as you can, and to do it as fast as possible. He knows that is frustrating, especially in our current moment of great change, because you can never move as fast as the things that come at you: Emails pile up, reports go unread, people are waiting for you, your industry is evolving, your world is shifting, and all the while you’re bombarded with noise and distractions and Slack pings and it’s why you’re waking up early and grabbing your phone and responding to everyone right away, as if that’ll actually stem the tide, which it will not.

A dominant question is the thing we keep asking ourselves, over and over throughout our day. It’s what drives our decisions in the moment and focuses our obsessions when we’re alone. It feels permanent — but Jim Kwik says it is not. Kwik was recently going through this exercise with a friend of his, and they realized her dominant question was: “How do I get people to like me?” This explained a lot about her. “You can imagine her personality, ” Kwik says. “She’s self-deprecating, her personality changes depending on who she’s with, and people take advantage of her.”

This is a habit we’re programmed to have. “We all have a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and that helps determine what you focus on,” Kwik says. “People don’t realize this, but our brain primarily is a deletion device. We’re trying to keep information out. If you paid attention to the billion stimuli around you, you would go stark raving mad. The only things that come through that filter are the things that are important to us, that are charged by the questions we ask. Because ask and you shall receive.”

Focus begins in the morning, Kwik says. And most entrepreneurs destroy it by reaching for their phones.

“When you wake up, you’re in this relaxed state of awareness — it’s the most relaxed you’ll feel the entire day,” he says. “When you pick up your device, you’re rewiring your brain for two things — for distraction, and then something even worse, reaction.”