Stressed out and distracted?  You may be onto something!

Did you know that stress and distractions are the key to developing your ability to focus and perform mentally? This may seem strange at first, but it is literally the truth. It has everything to do with how your brain develops its reflexes.

Performance in any challenging or creative environment depends on your ability to concentrate awareness on the relevant focal “cues” for the task at hand. Those cues can range from a soccer ball, opposing players, emotions of a client, or even the rhythm of a song.

You would be correct in assuming that being distracted will destroy your ability to perform at your best. You already know from experience that when stress or distractions cause you to think about or focus on anything other than the relevant focal cues mentioned above your results begin to suffer. So why then would we say that distractions are the key to performance?

It turns out that the distractions themselves encode clues that help you conquer them. It also turns out that your brain is really good at rendering irrelevant “noise” like stress, interruptions, and distractions invisible, as long as you can identify them when they occur. Once you recognize at the neurological level (think reflexes) that any given bit of information is a distraction, you can train your brain to ignore it.

Another ironic twist of mental performance is that stress is a particularly valuable type of distraction. We have all heard our own voice warn, threaten, or berate us in the middle on an important performance.  It is probably also pretty clear that, all good intentions aside, it wasn’t all that helpful.  

Many of us recognize what accumulated stress can do to our focus, our emotions, and ultimately our performance and so we have learned to avoid it or cope with it.

Coping with stress means essentially leaving it idling in the background until it needs management at some later time.  Harvesting stress, on the other hand, means taking time to discovering what causes it and why you are susceptible to it.  

If you can methodically identify the things that cause you to feel stressed and lose your focus, you can learn from every challenge. We call this process “riding the stress cycle”.

With well developed mental skills and reflexes you will get in the habit of seeking out stress and distractions knowing that you can resolve and grow from them confidently.   

Herolab offers programs that take a simplified approach to developing focal control reflexes and stress recovery habits. We also use these concepts as the foundation for building strong relationships through clear communication in our “synchronization” module.

Our method of mental skill development takes advantage of your brain’s natural tendency to adapt, maintain calm emotions, and take a practical point of view while you work to improve your focus and performance.  

Once you have developed the neurological pathways that control focus under pressure automatically you are working towards accessing “the zone” of peak mental performance, and routinely!

Are you ready to rewire your focus control circuits and decipher your stressors?   

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