Tips to Improve Concentration
Many students have difficulty in concentrating their mind in studies. Being able to concentrate while you are studying is essential to doing well in class and on tests.
Here are 10 suggestions for improving your study concentrations:-
- 1 Make a study schedule that shows what task you need to accomplish and when you plan to accomplish each task. This will provide you with the structure you need for effective studying.
- 2 Try to study at a time of day you work best. Some people work well early in the morning, others late at night. You know what works best for you.
- 3 Make sure you are not tired and/ or hungry when you study. Otherwise, you won’t have the energy you need to concentrate. Also, maintain your physical fitness.
- 4 Don’t try to do two tasks at the same time. You won’t be able to concentrate on either one very well. Concentration means focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else.
- 5 Break large task into a series of smaller tasks that you can complete one at a time .if you try to complete a large task all at once, you may feel overwhelmed and may be unable to maintain your concentration.
- 6 Relax. It’s hard to concentrate when you are tense. It is important to relax when working on a task that requires concentration. Meditation is helpful to many students.
- 7 Clear your mind of worrisome thoughts. Mental poise is important for concentration .you can get distracted by your own thoughts. Monitor your thoughts and prevent yourself from following any that take you off track. Don’t daydream.
- 8 Develop an interest in what you are studying. Try to relate what you are studying to you own life to make it meaningful as possible. This can motivate yourself to concentrate.
- 9 Take breaks whenever you feel fatigued. There is no set formula for when to take breaks. You will know when you need to take a break.
- 10 Study in a quiet place that is free from distractions and interruptions. Try to create a space designated solely for studying.
Studying without concentration is like trying to fill a bucket with water when a bucket has a whole in its bottom. It doesn’t work.
What I prefer during my exam time to concentrate my mind
- 1 I always tried to avoid the late night studies, prefer to study early in the morning.
- 2 Meditation helps us a lot as a said by my chemistry teacher who was the one of the top most faculty of Kota, I put believe in his statement and always do mediation about 10 to 15 min. daily. Believe! me it works.
- 3 I was totally away from all types of social buzz. It cut-off our more than 60% destruction hurdles.
- 4 Try to avoid junk and so oily foods because these kinds of foods create a impact on our concentration.
- 5 Eat almonds to increase memory power, I eat Chyawanprash (also spelled chyavanaprasha, chyavanaprash, chyavanaprasam and chyawanaprash) which helps me to become unaffected from small seasonal diseases especially from common cold.
- 6 When my mind becomes so agitated I prefer to talk with some off my best friends or try to sit in a park.
Religious prospective:-
In the BHAGAVAT GITA lord Krishna talks so much on the concentration of mind. He says that to control the mind is even much tougher than controlling the wind. Lord krishna explains to Arjuna that to fight enemy who is in front of you is quite easy, but what to talk about the fight with invisible enemy. Here the enemy is reffered as uncontrolled mind , the people with uncontrolled mind is just like the kite flying without the thread.
In bhagavat gita sloka 6.5
uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ
nātmānam avasādayet
ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur
ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ
Synonyms:
uddharet — one must deliver; ātmanā — by the mind; ātmānam — the conditioned soul; na — never; ātmānam — the conditioned soul; avasādayet — put into degradation; ātmā — mind; eva — certainly; hi — indeed; ātmanaḥ— of the conditioned soul; bandhuḥ — friend; ātmā — mind; eva — certainly; ripuḥ — enemy; ātmanaḥ — of the conditioned soul.
Translation:
One must deliver himself with the help of his mind, and not degrade himself. The mind is the friend of the conditioned soul, and his enemy as well.
Scientific prospective:-
For much of the 20th century many scientists regarded the idea that the brain might be productive during downtime as ludicrous. German neurologist Hans Berger disagreed. In 1929, after extensive studies using an electroencephalogram—a device he invented to record electrical impulses in the brain by placing a net of electrodes on the scalp—he proposed that the brain is always in “a state of considerable activity,” even when people were sleeping or relaxing. Although his peers acknowledged that some parts of the the brain and spinal cord must work nonstop to regulate the lungs and heart, they assumed that when someone was not focusing on a specific mental task, the brain was largely offline; any activity picked up by an electroencephalogram or other device during rest was mostly random noise. At first, the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the early 1990s only strengthened this view of the brain as an exquisitely frugal organ switching on and off its many parts as needed. By tracing blood flow through the brain, fMRI clearly showed that different neural circuits became especially active during different mental tasks, summoning extra blood full of oxygen and glucose to use as energy.
By the mid 1990s, however, Marcus Raichle of Washington University in Saint Louis and his colleagues had demonstrated that the human brain is in fact a glutton, constantly demanding 20 percent of all the energy the body produces and requiring only 5 to 10 percent more energy than usual when someone solves calculus problems or reads a book. Raichle also noticed that a particular set of scattered brain regions consistently became less active when someone concentrated on a mental challenge, but began to fire in synchrony when someone was simply lying supine in an fMRI scanner, letting their thoughts wander. Likewise, Bharat Biswal, now at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, documented the same kind of coordinated communication between disparate brain regions in people who were resting. Many researchers were dubious, but further studies by other scientists confirmed that the findings were not a fluke. Eventually this mysterious and complex circuit that stirred to life when people were daydreaming became known as the default mode network (DMN). In the last five years researchers discovered that the DMN is but one of at leastfive different resting-state networks—circuits for vision, hearing, movement, attention and memory. But the DMN remains the best studied and perhaps the most important among them.
In a recent thought-provoking review of research on the default mode network, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California and her co-authors argue that when we are resting the brain is anything but idle and that, far from being purposeless or unproductive, downtime is in fact essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics—processes that depend on the DMN. Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future. We craft fictional dialogue to practice standing up to someone who intimidates us or to reap the satisfaction of an imaginary harangue against someone who wronged us. We shuffle through all those neglected mental post-it notes listing half-finished projects and we mull over the aspects of our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions. We sink into scenes from childhood and catapult ourselves into different hypothetical futures. And we subject ourselves to a kind of moral performance review, questioning how we have treated others lately. These moments of introspection are also one way we form a sense of self, which is essentially a story we continually tell ourselves. When it has a moment to itself, the mind dips its quill into our memories, sensory experiences, disappointments and desires so that it may continue writing this ongoing first-person narrative of life.
Related research suggests that the default mode network is more active than is typical in especially creative people, and some studies have demonstrated that the mind obliquely solves tough problems while daydreaming—an experience many people have had while taking a shower. Epiphanies may seem to come out of nowhere, but they are often the product of unconscious mental activity during downtime. In a 2006 study, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues asked 80 University of Amsterdam students to pick the best car from a set of four that—unbeknownst to the students—the researchers had previously ranked based on size, mileage, maneuverability and other features. Half the participants got four minutes to deliberate after reviewing the specs; the researchers prevented the other 40 from pondering their choices by distracting them with anagrams. Yet the latter group made far better decisions. Solutions emerge from the subconscious in this way only when the distracting task is relatively simple, such as solving an anagram or engaging in a routine activity that does not necessitate much deliberate concentration, like brushing one’s teeth or washing dishes. With the right kind of distraction the default mode network may be able to integrate more information from a wide range of brain regions in more complex ways than when the brain is consciously working through a problem.
During downtime, the brain also concerns itself with more mundane but equally important duties. For decades scientists have suspected that when an animal or person is not actively learning something new, the brain consolidates recently accumulated data, memorizing the most salient information, and essentially rehearses recently learned skills, etching them into its tissue. Most of us have observed how, after a good night’s sleep, the vocab words we struggled to remember the previous day suddenly leap into our minds or that technically challenging piano song is much easier to play. Dozens of studies have confirmed that memory depends on sleep.
More recently, scientists have documented what may well be physical evidence of such memory consolidation in animals that are awake but resting. When exploring a new environment—say, a maze—a rat’s brain crackles with a particular pattern of electrical activity. A little while later, when that rat is sitting around, its brain sometimes re-creates a nearly identical pattern of electrical impulses zipping between the same set of neurons. The more those neurons communicate with one another, the stronger their connections become; meanwhile neglected and irrelevant neural pathways wither. Many studies indicate that in such moments—known as sharp-wave ripples—the rat is forming a memory.
