Do you want to be more attentive throughout the day (or during a work session)? Here’s how to improve your focus with exercise.
Is tiredness or grogginess affecting your concentration? Like, you can’t seem to focus even if you force yourself to?
If so, here’s something that you can try: exercising.
In the morning before you head to school or before you sit down to study, get your body moving.
It doesn’t have to be a long and strenuous activity. A light 10-20 minute workout will do the trick.
For example, you can take a short stroll, you can do a short yoga sequence, or you can do a quick resistance workout.
Just make sure it includes movements that require some concentration.
The goal here isn’t to improve your athleticism.
Rather, it’s to get your blood flowing so that your brain will wake up (so don’t worry –you won’t be doing any heavy squats or long-distance running).
What Philosophers Thought About Exercise and Focus
Exercise to increase brain power was something that ancient philosophers often did and discussed.
They believed that a healthy body equals a healthy mind. And when one degraded, the other does too; the two work together hand-in-hand.
Here’s Socrates talking about it:
“Why even in the process of thinking and not using our body, it is a matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression and discontent often attack the mind so violently as to drive out whatever knowledge it contains.”
How Exercise Improves Focus
However, if ancient philosophy isn’t enough to convince you to be more active, here’s the science behind how exercise improves your focus.
According to a 2016 report from The Guardian, aerobic exercise can improve your attention span.
Additionally, it will help you ward off distractions and keep you focused on the task at hand.
“The best scientific evidence comes from testing school children, but the same most likely applies to us all. Interspersing lessons with 20-minute bouts of aerobics-style exercise improved the attention spans of Dutch school pupils. Meanwhile, a large randomised controlled trial in the US looked at the effects of daily after-school sports classes over a school year. The children, of course, got fitter. Less predictably, their executive control improved. They became more adept at ignoring distractions, multitasking, and holding and manipulating information in their minds.”
Like reading first thing in the morning, exercise stimulates your brain, as the study suggests. It may not be the same type of stimulation, but both activities force you to concentrate.
And when you have to focus and be mindful, your brain gets stronger, making being productive easier.
How Exercise Improves Memory
Also, exercising before working has an additional benefit that will help boost your productivity.
The report also says that exercise will improve your memory (and we can all benefit from the advantages of having a better memory).
“The part of the brain that responds strongly to aerobic exercise is the hippocampus. Well-controlled experiments in children, adults and the elderly show that this brain structure grows as people get fitter. Since the hippocampus is at the core of the brain’s learning and memory systems, this finding partly explains the memory-boosting effects of improved cardiovascular fitness.”
Finals Thoughts
There are too many benefits from exercising and if you don’t do it, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice.
So, be more active (especially before you sit down and do mental work).