Concentration in Older Age Part 1: What to Do When the Force Ain’t With You
This is your brain. This is your brain getting older.
Stuff happens to our brains as we age….
Any questions?
Well, yeah. I have no idea what either of those images means. But they sure do look different. And we do know, from a lot of research, that if you are older, your brain is more likely to face some big challenges:
· It’s more likely to get inflamed
· Some blood vessels are more likely to rupture
· Some of your neural pathways may build up with abnormal proteins
· And there will be shrinkage – you’re going to lose a little brain volume every year.
All these natural things can have a big effect on concentration. According to Dr. Kirk Daffner, director of the Center for Brain/Mind Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston: “Older people tend to have more difficulty filtering out stimuli that are not relevant to the task at hand.”
It’s not purely the impacts of age that effect concentration. The natural effects of aging on the brain can be exacerbated by a number of other factors – depression, sleep disorders, vision loss, hearing loss, certain medications, excessive drinking, information overload, life chaos. If you are struggling with concentration, you might look at trying to control all of those.
And I have, but I still find myself struggling as I launch a new project to dramatically improve my tennis game. I’m not concentrating as well as I need to on the big points.
My question: can I build (or rebuild) mental toughness now that I’m older, or is it too late to get that now?
Here's what I am seeing on the tennis court. As I start to play in national tennis tournaments (against other people my age), the best players seem to be out-focusing me. On court, I find myself thinking about all sorts of irrelevant things: birds flying overhead, work projects, the shot I missed two games ago, whether it is possible that today we have more than 100% humidity, what it would feel like to jump in a pool right now. Meanwhile my opponents appear to be focused simply on how to beat the crap out of me. I feel like Ron Weasley taking on Voldemort; the Ewoks vs. Darth Vader. I have neural sclerosis; they have The Force.
The Force is not yet with me….
World champion shooter and international “focus guru” Christina Bengtsson certainly has that force, the kind one viewer of her TEDx talk described as the ability to “light a candle by staring at it.” And she reminds us of the power of deep concentration: “Focus is the force that brings out the best in all of us and gives the world the things it deserves.”
Here’s how she describes the problem: “Our minds are too full of distracting thoughts… we need to choose the right nondistracting thought at the right moment… not to worry about what we will achieve or might not achieve, but instead to work with what we have in the present.”
OK great. But how do you do that? In my case, what concrete things can I do to compete mentally with the tennis Jedi class? I’m on a quest and I welcome your ideas.
· What are you doing to improve your ability to concentrate in your work or your play?
· What do the golf or poker or chess or bridge or poker or insert-game-here gurus say?
· What’s working for you to keep your mind fully engaged at work during long negotiations, new product development sessions or coding marathons?
· How do you handle it when you need to do serious writing or deep analysis?
Got The Force? Where and how did you find it? And can I get some of it?
-Leslie
Next time: What I’ve tried so far to get my concentration to a higher level.
References:
Concentration in old age: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/tips-to-improve-concentration
Christina Bengtsson on focus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF80HzqvAoA