WILearned
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Question about Exercise & Focus
🕑 Added 2017-05-31 04:27:34 +0000 UTC Hey all,I rarely have the time to answer questions that come in through my contact form on my website, but the dragonballs aligned or something and I got back to this one so I thought I'd share:
[Question]
I have been watching your videos lately and I have come across a particular video about how Exercise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsVzKCk066g) improves the ability to focus and learn. I have been adverse to exercising till sometime ago but when I started to get problems with focus and concentration I started practicing meditation and started to explore more. I am skeptical about 1 thing though. Why some people need to exercise and why are some people doing good without exercising? I have seen people with super focusing abilities and they are super smart but they don't move a bit. So if they can outperform everyone in terms of focusing, concentrating and working hard, what makes them so different from normal people that they don't need exercise and are able to deliver day in day out? I have personally seen 2 examples who are super performers in their fields and they don't ever exercise in any form!
Can you help me with this?
[Response]
I'm sure there are many factors that contribute to why this seems to be the case; for now I'll offer two:
Level of Interest: Stephen Hawking is the example I've seen brought up very often in the comments section on this video. i.e. "Oh yea, exercise is linked to brain function? That explains Stephen Hawking." Exercise can enhance brain function, but isn't a requirement for it. Stephen Hawking is an expert on theoretical physics, something very abstract where the relation to the physical world is hard to grasp.
For someone who can't move, not even use their own mouth to communicate with others, his experience of life relies a lot on his capacity for imagination. It makes sense that he would be interested in a topic where the reward comes from exerting a huge amount of mental effort versus something like sports for example.
Then, people could say "well jocks are dumb. Shouldn't their exercise have made them smarter?" - If they're getting a lot of fulfilment from being good at sports, then it's reasonable for them to place a lot of focus (mental and physical) into sports, and not academia.
Some books I'll read all in one sitting because it's a very interesting topic for me, some books I have to take 20 pages at a time because it's not all that interesting.
-Also, back to my point of "Exercise can enhance brain function, but isn't a requirement for it," you can still cultivate mental faculties conducive to good focus without exercising much.
For example, if you look at novelty at a click websites reddit, imgur, tinder, facebook, twitter (scroll, swipe or click for new information) then you begin to train your mind to seek novelty. That is, your mind becomes accustomed to the loop of [quick, small reward] for [quick, small behavior.] Simply put, your mind becomes accustomed to and favors distractibility. The behavior conducive to good focus is: [more effort, more time invested] leads to [less frequent but bigger reward.]
I have talked about this in depth here. Personally I have noticed a direct correlation to the amount of time looking at reddit or imgur and how long I can focus. Yesterday I didn't sleep very well, which lowered my resilience and I ended up looking at reddit and imgur a good bit. I already feel that affecting my focus today: I keep wanting to tab over and open up facebook; want to check my phone for new messages, want to browse through the comments section of my videos and, of course, want to open up reddit and imgur. I have to exercise more willpower than normal to hold myself back from doing these things, and that's because I exposed myself to these kind of behaviors yesterday. Just a personal anecdote, but I hope that helps.
