Here is how to reset your brain to focus. Sometimes we need a hard reset to re calibrate our mind to re-focus on our goals.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business owner, a student, or a professional in your field, our common objective here is to elevate our output, reset our mental state, and introduce healthier daily habits that translate into success in both our personal and professional growth.
Back in 2018, I remember around this time I just had a couple business startups fail, and, in that moment, I felt defeated, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do as far as my next business and means to make money.
I was just mentally drained from those failed startups, and I remember thinking that something needs to change, and moving forward I had to become hyper focused and remove anything that is stealing time away from that.
And five years later, a lot has changed! I’ll talk more about that later in the article.
Now to be fair, within a year of starting to incorporate some of the ways to reset the brain, which we’ll talk about shortly, I exceeded my goals not only for my business but that translated to doing better financially as well.
So implementing some of what we talk about in this blog article can help in as little as 7 days.
We’ll cover actionable steps you can take immediately to refocus, enhance your productivity, and address certain lifestyle habits that might be hindering you from your true potential and reaching success.
We will talk about tools and apps I use to help with this and some lifestyle changes that were needed to produce results.
How to reset your brain to focus?
This first necessary evil to get in control is to re-focus and reset by limiting distractions. This is a huge problem right now, more than ever. With all the notifications, emails, and the dopamine hits from social media, this is the first step I focused on to reset my brain for success.
I’ll show you a few ways to apply this right now.
For those of you that have an iPhone I quickly show you, and I believe android has a similar feature.
We’re going to do 2 things.
Screen Time
First let’s turn on screen time. Turning this feature on lets you know how much time you are spending on social media, YouTube, different time-wasting apps and websites. This way, you will know exactly how much time you are spending on these apps, which should help you to make smarter decisions on where to spend your time to optimize your output.
Just to put this into perspective. If you were to reduce the time you spend on your phone by 1 hour a day, you would have gained 365 hours a year that you could use towards more productive tasks.
That equates to 9 / 40-hour work weeks, which is over 2 months of work. Here’s how you turn on screen time.
First go to settings > Then select screen time, turn on screen time > And you will start tracking your time.
Gray Scale
Second, let’s turn on a feature called gray scale.
Turing on the grayscale setting would cause your phone to stop displaying color. This has been found to reduce screen time and some of the negative effects associated with spending too much time on your device.
We know smartphones are designed to retain our attention; it is literally a battle of who can keep your attention the longest. These app developers study human behavior and create apps using colors that will result in longer retention and higher click through rates.
And those colors, especially the red notification badge, can lead to anxiety.
Here’s how to turn on grayscale on your iPhone: Again, android should have this feature as well.
First go to settings > Click Accessibility > Click display & Text size > Select color filters > Turn on color filters and select grayscale.
Limiting Computer Distractions
On the topic of limiting distractions, I spend a lot of time on my laptop and desktop. So in order to limit distractions and optimize productivity, I installed a couple Chrome plugins which has helped me, that I wanted to share with you all.
- Stay focused Chrome plugin: StayFocused is a Chrome extension that monitors how much time you’ve spent on specific sites and gives you the option to block the popular ones. So this is like the desktop version of screentime.
- I also use slack and clickup: Clickup is a project management app and has a chrome plugin as well. I take notes on here, write my daily weighted tasks, I’m quickly able to add a screen shots and emails and create a task in click up all only using their chrome extension. I then use slack in conjunction to communicate with my team. These 2 things together has increased my workflow a lot.
Social Media is Evil... Depends.
Here’s why I had to leave IG for 5 years to remove and monitor some of these distractions. I remember it was getting to a point where likes mattered to me, and it felt like a drug, where I kept going back to see how the post was performing.
This was destructive to not only for my time but for my mind. It almost had control over how I felt after a post.
This is because our brain sends dopamine when we expect or receive a reward. It tells the brain that whatever it just experienced is worth getting more of. Similar to the “high” feeling you get from other “Substances.”
And Studies have shown that getting a “like” on social media, also produces dopamine. It gives us a high, and we keep going back to social media looking for it.
We are in an age where we receive instant gratification, and our brain generates cortisol when we’re stressed out about something and dopamine when we experience pleasure.
OK we went over some of the ways to limit distractions, which should result in more time to spend on productive tasks, help you focus more, and regulate some of those dopamine hits.
Now there were lifestyle changes I needed to do to reset my brain moving forward as well.
And so this aspect of reforming my thoughts and behaviors takes a bit longer. On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic.
Reboot Your Brain
As we all know our brain is a super complex organ. It can change thanks to something called neuroplasticity. This means our brain creates new paths when we experience things. The plasticity part actually means we can change and mold those neural paths.
And we can do this by doing something over and over, or repeat behaviors day in and day out, which strengthen and create these new paths.
This just means we can “reboot” our brains and create new behaviors, habits, and ways of thinking.
There are some habits I’ve implemented in my daily life that has helped me with mental clarity, resetting dopamine levels, and over better quality of life.
Exercise
Prioritizing your health is an obvious thing to do. I do this 4 to 5 days a week and Ive been doing this for well over 5 years, I’m closer to 15 years now.
I won’t go too deep into this because this is something that we all know we need to do, it’s just some of us choose to do it and some don’t.
Without trying to nerd out on this too much, here’s why I would start incorporating exercise at least 3 times a week.
Regular exercise and working out can enhance cognitive functions like thinking, learning, problem-solving and it has the ability to boost memory and lower anxiety and depression.
Besides that, you’ll look better and feel better.
Sleep
Over the last 5 years I started to watch how much sleep I was getting. Before this I would tell myself that I only needed 4-5 hours of sleep and I’m fine.
I think I was binge watching Gary vee around this time and I figured I would never sleep again, to maximize my output of work and If I did sleep like a normal 8 hours then I ended up feeling mad at myself for wasting time.
Well I increased my sleep to about 7-8 hours a night on average, and it has helped getting more done, reducing any metal fog, increased my testosterone which helped in the gym and many other benefits that I didn’t expect.
Getting the proper amount of sleep helps your brain work well. During sleep, your brain repairs itself, gives your brain energy, and balances hormones.
I thought getting more sleep would slow me down, but I noticed when I increased the amount of sleep I was getting and reduced distractions. I was able to get more done, with more focus and make better decisions.
Work smarter AND harder!
Reduce Alcohol Consumption
Something that has been proven to affect the quality of sleep we get is alcohol. This wasn’t one that I had to focus on too much but for some this may be a huge thief in your ability to get mental clarity.
First, reducing alcohol helps with everything we already talked about and is beneficial for rebooting your brain for many reasons:
You can watch Andrew Hubermans podcast on this subject, as he goes into great detail on the negative effects.
But overall alcohol can hurt normal sleep patterns, leading to poor sleep quality. Excessive alcohol consumption can impair cognitive function, affecting memory, attention, and problem-solving abilities. Which is everything we have been trying to work on.
Excessive alcohol can damage neurons and neural pathways in the brain and it can have an impact on your mood, emotional well-being and can hinder concentration.
So for this the next way of resetting the brain is to reduce alcohol consumption and any substances.
Resetting my brain back in 2018, resulted in me making half a million dollars my first year in business, which I talk about on numerous videos on this channel. I have since continued to use most of these habits to stay on track and reach quarterly and yearly milestones.
Its easy to get sucked back into your old ways, so having a way to monitor and track them will help you become more self-aware.
