Your Focus Zone

Inadvertently, the bound manuscript omitted the section called Resources that will appear in the published book. Here it is. (The new www.YourFocusZone.com, will include the websites listed here as active links, as well as additional, continually updated resources.)

“How Much Information 2003?” was produced by the School of Information Management Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, and is available at www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003.

The Yerkes-Dodson law was first published in R. M. Yerkes, & J.D. Dodson, “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation,” Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, (1909), 459-482.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, PhD has written a series of books on the state of flow; see Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991)

Step-by-step instructions for Jacobson’s progressive muscle relaxation technique are at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_relaxation.

On the inner game, see W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis (New York: Random House, 1997).

For more strategies, see Edward M. Hallowell, MD's CrazyBusy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006).

Malcolm Gladwell explains rapid cognition and thin slicing in Blink (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005).

The Parents Television Council analysis of increased violence on TV is at www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/stateindustryviolence/main.asp.

For a review of neuroplasticity studies, see Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

On Richard Davidson’s research of Tibetan monks’ meditation, see John Geirland’s “Buddha on the Brain,” Wired, 14.02 (2006): www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai.html. The study on western subjects, “Meditation Experience Is Associated With Increased Cortical Thickness,” by Sara Lazar and her associates is at NeuroReport, 16, no. 17, November 28, 2005, www.neuroreport.com.

The brain science of multitasking is explained in Claudia Wallis’s “GenM,” Time, March 27, 2006: 48-55.

On emotional learning, see Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition (New York: Bantam, 2005).

Your adrenaline score is based on the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale (SUDS), introduced by Joseph Wolpe in Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958).

The study of children playing GameBoy while waiting for surgery was conducted by Anuradha Patel at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. See www.umdnj.edu/about/news_events/releases/04/r041210_gameboy.htm.

On procrastination, see Piers Steel, “The Nature of Procrastination,” Psychological Bulletin, 133, no. 1 (2007): 65-94; and Jane Burka, Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004).

On motivation for overcoming fear, see Arianna Huffington's On Becoming Fearless (NY: Little, Brown and Co., 2006).

On cognitive techniques, see David Burns, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated (New York:Avon, 1999).

For Erik Erikson’s developmental stages throughout the lifespan see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Erikson.

A video of the 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address by Steve Jobs is available at www.youtube.com; a transcript can be found at www.stanford.edu. Each site has a search feature: enter “Steve Jobs Commencement.”

Research on recalling the names of supportive friends by James Shah was reported in “Automatic for the People: How Representations of Significant Others Implicitly Affect Goal Pursuit,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, no. 4 (2003): 661-681.

The study linking TV watching in toddlers and attention problems later in school, “Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children” was conducted by Dimitri Christakis and published in Pediatrics, 113, (2004): 708-713. The recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics can be found at: aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/pediatrics;107/2/423.

James Rosser’s study demonstrating the benefits of videogames to train laparoscopic surgeons is described in Michel Marriott’s “We Have to Operate, but Let’s Play First,” New York Times, February 24, 2005.

For more about Benson’s relaxation technique, see Herbert Benson, MD and Miriam Klipper, The Relaxation Response (New York: HarperTorch, 1976).

On people’s attitudes toward risk, including a readable account of Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory, loss aversion, and endowment and sunk cost effects, see Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1998).

On clearing clutter from your office or home, see Julie Morganstern's Organizing from the Inside Out (NY: Owl Books, 2004).

The classic study on personal control by Bruce Reim, David C. Glass, and Jerome E. Singer, “Behavioral Consequences of Exposure to Uncontrollable and Unpredictable Noise,” was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1, 1 (1971): 44-56.

On continuous partial attention, see www.lindastone.net.

On personal productivity, see David Allen's Getting Things Done (New York: Penguin, 2002).

On jet lag, see the MedlinePlus site, maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health: www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002110.htm.

A list of books and articles on learned helplessness is available at www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/lh.htm.

The “Hunter in a Farmer’s World” book is Thom Hartmann’s Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception (New York: Underwood Books, 1997). Yuan-Chun Ding and associates published “Evidence of Positive Selection Acting at the Human Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene Locus” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 99, no.1 (2002): 309-314.

Edward M. Hallowell, MD and John J. Ratey, MD wrote Driven To Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood (New York: Touchstone, 1995).

Mirror neurons and learning through modeling are explained by Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam, 2006).

For parents and teachers of children who struggle in traditional classrooms, see my first book, Dreamers, Discoverers and Dynamos: How to Help the Child Who Is Bright, Bored and Having Problems in School, formerly titled The Edison Trait, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).

On the attention economy, see Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001); and Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Distraction, overload, and procrastination are epidemic today. Whether you're over- or under-stimulated, it's hard to concentrate.

Your focus zone is the range of just-right stimulation between boredom and feeling overwhelmed, where your ability to pay attention is at its best.

Simple psychological strategies can help you stay in your focus zone.

Chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters are responsible for attention. Neurotransmitters in the adrenaline family "activate" you. In other words, you need some adrenaline to keep you alert. But too much adrenaline makes you hyper and causes burnout.

Yes. Everyone has a focus zone. But it's different for different people. It's even different for the same person from activity to activity.

If your activity is physical, you need more adrenaline. If it's mental, you need less.

In sports, for instance, a game such as football requires more strength than skill, so you need lots of adrenaline. Your focus zone is at the high-stim end of the range. But a game such as golf or tennis requires more skill than strength, so you need less adrenaline. Your focus zone is low-stim.

In today's fast-paced, high-tech, quick-click world, everyone is prone to attention swings. Always-on technology kicks you into a high-adrenaline state of over-stimulation. Then ordinary life seems boring by comparison, so you drop into a low-adrenaline state of under-stimulation. You skip right over your focus zone -- the state of just-right stimulation.

In today's workplace, most activities are mental and require less adrenaline, not more. But constant interruptions, distractions, and pressures make you pump more adrenaline, not less.

Old ways of paying attention don't work any more. You need new psychological skills to stay in your focus zone.

1. Keep track of your adrenaline level.
- Use a 1 to 10 scale or simply rate yourself: "too low," "too high," or "in the zone!"

2. Make a list of ways to psych up.
- Play upbeat music, open a window, vary tasks.

3. Make a list of ways to calm down.
- Play relaxing music, breathe deeply, sip herbal tea.

4. Use self-talk to keep yourself on-track.
- "What do I need to do now?" . . ."Stay with it; stay with it; stay with it;" . . . "I've finished things that are harder than this."

5. When you're distracted, remind yourself that there's something you're avoiding, probably because it's too high-stim (evokes anxiety or fear) or too low-stim (boring) or both. Make yourself face it, one step at a time.