When you’re trying to reach a place of hyperfocus, you need to remove every possible obstacle from your path.
#Walk into the waves of life full#
Eliminate all distractionsĪccording to the latest workplace research, whenever you get distracted it takes an average of 25 minutes to regain your full focus on the task in hand, thanks to “attention residue” left on the distraction. “I point it toward my chair so it can fire inspiration into me,” Pressfield explains.Ĭreating a ritual of your own will help cue your brain that it’s time to go deep. He then sits down, recites the “Invocation of the Muse” from Homer’s “Odyssey,” and positions a tiny cannon on his desk in a very specific way. In his classic book on creativity, “ The War of Art,” author Stephen Pressfield describes his pre-writing routine, which includes handling any calls or pending tasks before starting work. If you do exactly the same thing every time before entering an alpha state, your brain will recognize it and begin acting on the established cue, helping you to reach a state of flow more quickly. That could be a phrase or mantra you repeat, a particular piece of music you listen to, or even a certain number of deep breaths. If you create a mental cue for yourself when you sit down to enter a flow state, your brain will remember and respond.
Just like Pavlov’s dog, the human brain can be conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain triggers – including the production of alpha waves. 7 ways tap in your alpha-waves frequency 1. On a practical level, there are easy, day-to-day tactics you can use to tap into alpha waves at work, triggering a flow state to sweep your in-tray aside with ease.
That’s the beauty of the immersive alpha state: it reduces stress levels and increases productivity levels, making it a brilliant business tool for both you and your entire team. A 2015 study found direct evidence that meditation and mindfulness could help unlock this beneficial state of mind. To successfully harness them, you’ll usually need to slow things down, deepen your breaths, lower your heart rate, and calm the electrical activity in your mind. The good news is that you can indeed increase your alpha brain waves, if you put your mind to it.Īlpha waves oscillate between the theta and beta waves.
#Walk into the waves of life how to#
In Productivity You can learn how to increase your alpha waves Think of this state as a kind of work hypnosis, where you’re fully engaged with your subject matter, yet completely happy and relaxed as you calmly and deftly decimate deadlines. Then there’s the “alert” beta waves, when you’re engaged in problem solving or decision making, and the even faster gamma waves, when you’re full of adrenaline and energy, feverishly multitasking to complete impossible to-do lists.īut when it comes to work performance, the most valuable brainwaves of them all, the gold standard, are your alpha waves. Thanks to the 86 billion nerve cells in your brain, there’s always some type of electrical activity going on inside there – and at different times of the day, different waves dominate. When you wake up in the morning, for example, your brain passes from the slow delta waves of slumber into the low frequency theta waves that act as a portal between the dream and waking worlds. When your brain is operating at the alpha frequency, you’re able to absorb new information with ease and you’re significantly more creative.
What are alpha waves?Īlpha waves are at the center of your brainwave spectrum, between 8-12 Hz.
And the key to diving into that deeper state is to harness your brain’s alpha waves. That better way, of course, is to get into flow states more often so you can achieve deep work. In his bestselling book “ Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in A Distracted World,” author and professor Cal Newport explains that “most people have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there is a better way.” But that’s not necessarily a “you problem.” It’s an everybody problem. The problem is, you may find it hard to achieve that state during a normal workday. They’re those moments when you lose track of time (in a good way) and you enter a calm, creative state of concentration that results in fast learning and powerful performance.
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