Essentials: Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration

What I want you to imagine is an arrow.

And an arrow, of course, has an arrowhead, and it has the shaft of that arrow.

The neurochemical system that really represents the shaft of that arrow, right, the straight line, is epinephrine, also called adrenaline.

Turns out that epinephrine/adrenaline are released within your brain from a little location, a little cluster of neurons called locus coeruleus, but you do not need to remember that name, and from your body from the adrenal glands.

And the release of epinephrine from those two locations overall increases energy.

It increases alertness.

It does not alone increase focus, okay? So things, whether or not they're behavioral or psychological or supplements or drugs that increase epinephrine allow focus to occur.

They are necessary for focus, but they are not sufficient for focus.

That is, they are required, but they are not enough to create focus.

So we're going to need epinephrine in the equation.

Now, the arrowhead on this metaphorical arrowhead that represents focus and concentration is going to be represented or related to the mechanisms of acetylcholine.

And the best way to think about it is it's like a spotlight.

It highlights specific neurons, nerve cells, that should be active or more active, I should say, than the other neurons in the environment.

If you have an arrow with a very big arrowhead that's really broad, really blunt, imagine a mile-wide arrowhead, that's not very focused on any one location.

It's not really pointing to any one location, is it? But with a narrow, really tightly focused arrowhead, well, that's focused on one location.

So we have alertness, epinephrine, and then we have the actual direction in which our concentration and focus is placed, and that's, at least in this mental model I'm creating, acetylcholine.

And then in order to have ongoing focus, we need another neurochemical.

And it turns out that that third neurochemical is dopamine, a molecule often associated with pleasure and reward, but it's really the molecule of motivation.

These three neurochemicals together, acetylcholine, epinephrine, and dopamine, really allow you to get focused, to focus very precisely, and in fact, increasingly precisely over time, to really narrow and narrow and narrow your focus progressively within a single bout of focus, and to continue to do that and to be able to do that repeatedly whenever you want.

Let's jump into the tools for concentration and focus.