Build Mental Models to Enhance Your Focus | Charles Duhigg | Big Think

Nowadays it’s incredibly hard to stay focused. There’s so many distractions around us at any given moment. Your pocket vibrates at any given moment because you’re getting ten new emails, and on social media, there’s all these new notifications. The phone is ringing, and your kids need help, and your colleagues are coming up because you are working in an open office plan. They’re asking you to chime in on some memo. Maintaining focus nowadays is harder than ever before. But it’s way more critical too.

One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they create ways to enhance their focus. They manage their mind in such a way that they’re able to focus on what’s important and ignore distractions much better. The way that they do this is by what’s known as building mental models. Essentially, telling themselves stories about what they expect to see, engaging in this kind of inner dialogue about what they think should be happening. This allows their brain almost subconsciously to figure out what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

One of my favorite examples of this is a big study that was done of nurses in NICUs. Some researchers from a group named Client Associates went into some hospitals because they wanted to figure out why some nurses were so good at paying attention to the right things, whereas others got distracted by all the noise and bustle around them. What they found is that the best nurses in NICUs, which is the neonatal intensive care unit, who were handling these babies, the nurses who almost had a sixth sense or an ESP about figuring out which babies were sick and were getting sicker were the ones who were constantly telling themselves stories about what they expected to see as they were walking around the hospital.

So one of my favorite interviews from this study was with a nurse named Darlene. Darlene said that what she would do is that she was always keeping a picture in her brain of what she thought the perfect baby should look like. She would walk through the unit and notice when babies didn’t match that picture in her brain. They would mismatch that picture in kind of odd ways. For example, she might be walking past a crib and expect a baby to be crying because babies cry all the time. If a baby was being uniquely silent, she would go over and try to figure out what was going on. Why is this baby being so quiet?

To all the other nurses, a quiet baby seems like a good thing. It seems like that baby is happy and doesn’t need any attention. But to Darlene, because she has this picture in her head of what the perfect baby should look like, when she sees a quiet baby, she thinks, “That doesn’t match the picture in my head. I need to go pay attention.” So she’d walk over and see all these things that are small issues on their own. Maybe the baby’s blood was taken from its heel, and instead of a dot of blood on the Band-Aid, there’s a little bit of a bigger splotch. Maybe the baby’s temperature is a little bit elevated. But nothing that is out of place. Nothing that’s worrisome.

For Darlene and nurses like her, who keep this picture in their head, this mental model of what should be occurring, all of those things don’t jive with the story inside their head. As a result, their attention is grabbed by it, and they start saying to themselves, “Why? Why is this baby bleeding a little bit more than I expected? Why is its temperature off just a few degrees?” In this case, they discovered that the baby was incredibly sick. There was not a lot of evidence that it was sick.

In fact, if they had waited half an hour or 45 minutes more, the baby probably would have passed away. But because Darlene noticed all these things, because the baby that she was seeing in real life didn’t match the picture in her head, she acted immediately. They started the child on antibiotics. The sepsis, the infection in its system, was stamped out. The only reason that Darlene was able to notice these warning signs, the only reason she started to have this ESP or sixth sense for something going wrong was because she had a strong mental model. She had a picture in her head that she was comparing reality to.

Now, not all of us work in NICUs, right? We don’t work in hospitals. We’re not dealing with life and death issues. But think for a minute about what it’s like when you walk into a meeting and your boss asks you an unexpected question. Or you’re sitting there juggling the kids and dinner, and suddenly your phone vibrates with an email that causes this spike of panic. Our instinct in a moment like that is to react immediately, to type something that we end up regretting later on. Or to answer our boss and blurt something out.

We think to ourselves afterward, “God, I could have put that so much more eloquently.” Why are some people so much better at maintaining their focus and not reacting and not getting distracted by all these things? It’s because, ahead of time, they’ve envisioned what they expect to see. They’ve envisioned what they expect to occur.

So on the subway, when they’re riding to work, they think about what this day is going to be like. They know they’re going to this meeting. They think, “What do I expect to occur at that meeting?” When they walk in, and their boss asks them some unexpected question, their brain almost subconsciously says, “I didn’t expect that question to occur. This isn’t matching the picture in my brain of what I anticipated. So I need to put that question off. I need to say, can we take that offline? I’ll answer that later.”

Or, they have a picture in their brain of what it’s going to be like to deal with the kids and to make dinner. There’s some type of expectation. As a result, when their pocket buzzes and an email comes in, they can say, “I can’t handle this right now. I need to give myself five minutes, and I’ll deal with this later.”

I use this all the time. It used to be that when I would ride the subway into work, I would spend that time reading the paper or trying to get caught up on memos or something else. What I do now is I put everything away, and I spend that 30 minutes just trying to envision what this day is going to be like. Because I know that the more I have thought through what’s about to occur, the more I have a strong vision in my mind of what I should expect and anticipate, the more my subconscious is going to be able to decide this is what you should focus on; this is what you can safely dwell on.

I’m trying to train my brain by just spending a couple of minutes thinking through what’s about to occur to make better decisions about where my focus should actually go.