Head or brain injuries, such as concussion, as well as certain mental health conditions can also affect concentration. This can lead to stress and irritation, which tends to make focusing on what you need to do even more of a distant dream.

If that sounds familiar, keep reading to learn more about research-backed methods to help improve your concentration.

A study of 4, adults suggests that spending 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week, on brain training activities can improve concentration. Brain training games can also help develop your working and short-term memory , as well as your processing and problem-solving skills.

Brain training can work for kids, too. Invest in a book of word puzzles, complete a jigsaw puzzle together, or play a game of memory.

Even coloring can help improve concentration in children or adults. Older children may enjoy more detailed coloring pages, like those found in adult coloring books. The effects of brain training games may be particularly important for older adults, since memory and concentration often tend to decline with age.

Research from that looked at 2, older adults followed up on participants after 10 years. Older adults who completed 10 to 14 sessions of cognitive training saw improved cognition, memory, and processing skills.

After 10 years, most study participants reported they could complete daily activities at least as well as they could at the beginning of the trial, if not better.

Try these games and puzzles to train your brain. Brain games may not be the only type of game that can help improve concentration. Newer research also suggests playing video games could help boost concentration. A study looking at 29 people found evidence to suggest an hour of gaming could help improve visual selective attention VSA.

VSA refers to your ability to concentrate on a specific task while ignoring distractions. Study authors recommend future research to continue exploring how video games can help increase brain activity and boost concentration.

A review looked at studies examining how video games could affect cognitive function. The results suggest playing video games may lead to various changes in the brain, including increased attention and focus. This review had several limitations, including the fact that the studies focused on widely varying topics, including video game addiction and possible effects of violent video games.

Studies specifically designed to explore benefits of video games could help support these findings. When does video game use become an addiction? Sleep deprivation can easily disrupt concentration, not to mention other cognitive functions, such as memory and attention.

Occasional sleep deprivation may not cause too many problems for you. Being too tired can even slow down your reflexes and affect your ability to drive or do other daily tasks. A demanding schedule, health issues, and other factors sometimes make it difficult to get enough sleep.

What are some healthy sleep habits? Increased concentration is among the many benefits of regular exercise. Exercise benefits everyone.

A study looking at fifth-graders found evidence to suggest daily physical activity could help improve both concentration and attention after just 4 weeks. Other research looking at older adults suggests a year of moderate aerobic physical activity can help stop or even reverse memory loss that occurs with brain atrophy related to age.

Experts recommend aerobic exercise, but doing what you can is better than doing nothing at all. Depending on your personal fitness and weight goals, you may want to exercise more or less. Ask yourself:. If you can, try getting exercise right before you really need to focus or when taking a mental break.

How can exercise benefit your mental health? If you want to boost your concentration naturally, try to get outside every day, even for a short while. You might take a short walk through a park. Sitting in your garden or backyard can also help. Any natural environment has benefits. According to the American Psychological Association APA , spending time in nature can have a positive impact on both physical and mental health.

Research from found evidence to suggest including plants in office spaces helped increase concentration and productivity, as well as workplace satisfaction and air quality.

Try adding a plant or two to your workspace or home for a range of positive benefits. Children benefit from natural environments, too. Research published in followed over 1, children from birth to age 7. The study hoped to determine how lifelong exposure to trees and greenery at home or in the neighborhood might affect attention in children.

The study suggests that natural environments could benefit brain development and may improve attention in children. For children with ADHD, research suggests spending time in nature can:. What are some more natural remedies for ADHD?

Meditation and mindfulness practices can offer multiple benefits. Improved concentration is only one of these. A review of 23 studies found evidence to suggest mindfulness training that emphasizes attention focus could help increase attention and focus.

Mindfulness can also improve memory and other cognitive abilities. Yoga , deep breathing, and many other activities can help you meditate. What are some other benefits of meditation?

How can taking a break from work or homework increase your concentration? This idea might seem counterintuitive, but experts say it really works. But your struggle to focus just makes you feel stressed and anxious about not completing your work in time.

Next time this happens, when you first feel your concentration drop, take a short mental break. Refresh yourself with a cool drink or nutritious snack, take a quick walk, or go outside and get some sun.

Breaks can help boost these functions and more. What are some signs of burnout? Turning on music while working or studying may help increase concentration, but this will depend on the individual. What are some more benefits of music?

The foods you eat can affect cognitive functions like concentration and memory. To boost concentration, avoid processed foods, too much sugar, and very greasy or fatty foods.

You can find more brain foods on this list. Staying hydrated can also have a positive impact on concentration. Even mild dehydration can make it harder to focus or remember information. Eating breakfast can help by boosting your focus first thing in the morning.

Oatmeal, plain yogurt with fruit, or whole-grain toast with eggs are all good breakfast choices. Which foods can help if you have depression?

If you feel your concentration starting to drop, consider a cup of coffee or green tea. A study found evidence to suggest phytochemicals naturally found in matcha, a type of green tea, not only improve cognitive function but can help promote relaxation.

So matcha may be a good option if coffee makes you feel jittery or on edge. How does caffeine affect your body? Some supplements may help promote concentration and improve brain function.

However, there is not enough research to confirm that these supplements are effective or safe for everyone. Also, the Food and Drug Administration FDA does not regulate supplements. This means you cannot be sure of the precise ingredients or how supplements will interact with other drugs.

Always check with a doctor before trying any supplements, especially if you have any health conditions or allergies. Which supplements can help you focus better? Concentration workouts often help children who have trouble focusing. This mental workout involves fully devoting attention to an activity for a set period of time.

After completing one of the activities, ask your child to write a short summary or sketch how they felt during the experience. Young children can simply use words to describe their feelings. Talking about where they lost concentration and how they managed to refocus can help them develop these skills for use in daily tasks.

Multitasking has become part of daily life. It seems a good way to get a lot done, but some scientists have questioned this. Studies have suggested that we are not as good at multitasking as we like to think we are. For one thing, the brain is not designed to cope with doing two or more things at once.

What we are actually doing is switching from one task to another. Excessive drinking. Having too much alcohol impairs thinking and causes interrupted sleep, which affects concentration. Information overload. We are bombarded with information from TVs, computers, and messages such as texts or emails.

When there's too much material, it burdens our filtering system and it's easy to get distracted. Want a way to boost your attention and focus? Neuropsychologist Kim Willment of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital suggests a single-task exercise like reading.

When it goes off, ask yourself if your mind has wandered. If so, just refocus on what you're reading," she says. She recommends sitting still for a few minutes each day, closing your eyes, and focusing on your breathing as well as the sounds and sensations around you.

Cognitive training. Computerized cognitive training games aim to improve your response times and attention. Evidence that this works has been mixed. So if you reach a certain level of sustained attention, pushing it to the next level can help improve it, and this may translate to everyday life.

A healthier lifestyle. Many aspects of a healthy lifestyle can help attention, starting with sleep and exercise. There is a direct link between exercise and cognitive ability, especially attention. When you exercise, you increase the availability of brain chemicals that promote new brain connections, reduce stress, and improve sleep.

And when we sleep, we reduce stress hormones that can be harmful to the brain, and we clear out proteins that injure it. Aim for seven to eight hours of sleep each night, and minutes per week of aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking. Other healthy steps to improve focus: eat a Mediterranean-style diet, which has been shown to support brain health; treat underlying conditions; and change medications that may be affecting your ability to focus.

Getting older is out of your control, but healthier living is something you determine, and it may improve concentration. As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content.

Please note the date of last review or update on all articles. No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.

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And when we sleep, we reduce stress hormones that can be harmful to the brain, and we clear out proteins that injure it. Aim for seven to eight hours of sleep each night, and minutes per week of aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking. Other healthy steps to improve focus: eat a Mediterranean-style diet, which has been shown to support brain health; treat underlying conditions; and change medications that may be affecting your ability to focus.

Getting older is out of your control, but healthier living is something you determine, and it may improve concentration. As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content.

Please note the date of last review or update on all articles. No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.

Thanks for visiting. Don't miss your FREE gift. The Best Diets for Cognitive Fitness , is yours absolutely FREE when you sign up to receive Health Alerts from Harvard Medical School.

Sign up to get tips for living a healthy lifestyle, with ways to fight inflammation and improve cognitive health , plus the latest advances in preventative medicine, diet and exercise , pain relief, blood pressure and cholesterol management, and more.

Get helpful tips and guidance for everything from fighting inflammation to finding the best diets for weight loss from exercises to build a stronger core to advice on treating cataracts. PLUS, the latest news on medical advances and breakthroughs from Harvard Medical School experts.

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To improve focus and productivity, build healthy habits like getting enough sleep and exercise. Multitasking and social media can cause distractions during work, so it's best to limit them.

Breaks are important to stay focused — try a time-blocking technique like the pomodoro method. Read preview. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go.

download the app. Email address. Sign up. You can opt-out at any time. Katie Walsh. Katie Walsh is a Health Editorial Fellow for the Health Reference desk at Insider. Katie is a recent graduate of Davidson College where she majored in English and spent most of her time editing her college newspaper and baking for a local cafe.

Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer. Lydia was a senior editor for the healthcare team at Insider. She joined Insider in after graduating from Northwestern University.

At Insider, she covered everything from healthcare mega-mergers, to drug-pricing debates , to pharmacy disruptors , to private healthcare startups that rack up high valuations including Theranos of course , and the new ways people are going to the doctor.

That included the changing footprint of the hospital and how they fared in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Incorporate different types of activities to increase the effectiveness. Most health care teams don't recommend the paid brain-training programs available. These programs often overpromise results or focus on memorization skills that aren't useful in everyday life.

Your brain can get just as good of a workout through reading or challenging yourself with puzzles. Finally, don't watch too much TV, as that is a passive activity and does little to stimulate your brain. Social interaction helps ward off depression and stress , which can contribute to memory loss.

Look for opportunities to connect with loved ones, friends and others , especially if you live alone. Research links solitary confinement to brain atrophy, so remaining socially active may have the opposite effect and strengthen the health of your brain.

The health of your arteries and veins is important to your heart health but it is also critical for brain health. Get your blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol checked regularly and take steps to keep your numbers within a normal range.

Increase your physical activity, eat a Mediterranean diet and decrease your sodium consumption to lower blood pressure and cholesterol values.

Finally, tobacco and alcohol use are impactful on brain health as well, so only drink alcohol in moderation and don't smoke. Moderate drinking is defined as up to one drink per day for women and up to two drinks per day for men.

Kelsey Kidd is a nurse practitioner in Neurology in Mankato , Minnesota. Skip to main content. Posted By. Kelsey Kidd, APRN, C.

It's tough to stay mentally focused when you are ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, or tuned out of the present moment for some other reason.

You have probably heard people talk about the importance of " being present. This notion of being present is also essential for recapturing your mental focus.

Staying engaged in the here and now keeps your attention sharp and your mental resources honed in on the details that really matter at a specific point in time. It may take some time but work on learning to truly live in the moment. You cannot change the past and the future has not happened yet, but what you do today can help you avoid repeating past mistakes and pave a path for a more successful future.

Mindfulness is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. Despite the fact that people have practiced forms of mindfulness meditation for thousands of years, its many health benefits are only recently starting to be understood. In one study, researchers had human resources professionals engage in simulations of the sort of complex multitasking they engaged in each day at work.

These tasks had to be completed in 20 minutes and included answering phones, scheduling meetings, and writing memos with sources of information pouring in from multiple sources including by phone calls, emails, and text messages.

Some of the participants received 8 weeks of training in the use of mindfulness meditation , and the results found that only those who had received this training showed improvement in concentration and focus. Members of the meditation group were able to stay on task longer, switched between tasks less frequently, and performed the work more efficiently than the other groups of participants.

Practicing mindfulness can involve learning how to meditate, but it can also be as simple as trying a quick and easy deep breathing exercise. Start by taking several deep breaths while really focusing on each and every breath.

When you feel your mind naturally begin to wander, gently and uncritically guide your focus back to your deep breathing. While this might seem like a deceptively simple task, you may find that it is actually much more difficult than it appears.

Fortunately, this breathing activity is something you can do anywhere and anytime. Eventually, you will probably find that it becomes easier to disengage from intrusive thoughts and return your focus to where it belongs. Have you ever tried to stay mentally focused on the same thing for a long period of time?

After a while, your focus starts to break down and it becomes more and more difficult to devote your mental resources to the task. Not only that, but your performance ultimately suffers as a result. Traditional explanations in psychology have suggested that this is due to attentional resources being depleted, but some researchers believe that it has more to do with the brain's tendency to ignore sources of constant stimulation.

Researchers have found that even taking very brief breaks by shifting your attention elsewhere can dramatically improve mental focus. So the next time you are working on a prolonged task, such as preparing your taxes or studying for an exam, be sure to give yourself an occasional mental break.

Shift your attention to something unrelated to the task at hand, even if it is only for a few moments. These short moments of respite might mean that you are able to keep your mental focus sharp and your performance high when you really need it.

Building your mental focus is not something that will happen overnight. Even professional athletes require plenty of time and practice in order to strengthen their concentration skills.

One of the first steps is to recognize the impact that being distracted is having on your life. If you are struggling to accomplish your goals and find yourself getting sidetracked by unimportant details, it is time to start placing a higher value on your time. By building your mental focus, you will find that you are able to accomplish more and concentrate on the things in life that truly bring you success, joy, and satisfaction.

Mental focus refers to your ability to concentrate on relevant information in your environment. This ability allows you to attend to things that require attention, complete tasks that you need to accomplish, and acquire new information. In order to focus, the brain needs to filter out irrelevant information to concentrate on what really matters.

Different types of attention can affect your ability to focus. Selective attention , for example, acts like a spotlight to highlight specific stimuli in your environment. Sustained attention, on the other hand, allows you to stay mentally focused on something for an extended period of time.

Levy D, Wobbrock J, Kaszniak A, Ostergren M. The effects of mindfulness meditation training on multitasking in a high-stress information environment.

Proceedings - Graphics Interface. Brief and rare mental breaks keep you focused: Deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements. doi: By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book.

Use limited data to select advertising. Create profiles for personalised advertising. Use profiles to select personalised advertising. Studies suggest that caffeine may, in moderate doses , help to boost focus — particularly in those of us who are fatigued. But don't get overzealous with the coffee , or you might get the caffeine jitters , which typically reduce your ability to concentrate.

You can also try a cup of tea , which won't give you the quick buzz like coffee but can provide you energy for a longer period thanks to the L-theanine chemicals in it that our bodies metabolize throughout the day.

You might have heard that watching cat videos on YouTube can improve productivity. Well, that's true sort of. Whether it's watching cat videos, taking a walk , or a brief nap , it is critical to take the occasional break from work.

In one study , 84 subjects were asked to perform a simple computer task for one hour. Those who were allowed two brief breaks during that hour performed consistently for the entire time whereas those who weren't offered a break performed worse over time.

Another widely-noted study analyzed the decision making process of 1, judges and found that more "favorable rulings" were made by judges during the beginning of the day and after they took periodic food breaks. Essentially, this study explored how "decision fatigue" i. how fast and accurately we make decisions was alleviated by semi-frequent breaks.

The right background music is ultimately what works for you. Some experts argue that no music is best for productivity because it minimizes the opportunity for distractions.

Whereas other studies have found that listening to background music without words offers better performance compared to white noise or silence.

And still another study found that the time spent on a certain task was longest when listening to no music. All that is to say, the type of music you listen to and the type of work you're doing at the time matters.

So be conscious of your productivity and choose what music is right for you. Your brain is a mental muscle, and some studies have found that people who are easily distracted will benefit from "brain training" exercises, like those promoted by Lumosity or Cogmed.

But which exercises work — and for how well or long their effects last — is unclear. Therefore, the purported benefits of brain training need further examination, Susanne Jaeggi — who studies the brain and memory at the University of California — told New Scientist.

The pomodoro method is a time-blocking technique that can help compartmentalize your tasks into manageable minute intervals.

To use the pomodoro method work for 25 minutes, taking five minute breaks in between 25 minute intervals. After four of these intervals, you can take a longer minute break. This method of time blocking gives you the needed break in between work sessions to help you maintain focus longer and more sustainably.

Ambient noise, like cars honking or kids screaming, can stimulate the release of the stress hormone cortisol, Mark A. Andrews, former director of the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, told Scientific American.

Too much cortisol can impair function and hinder focus. And, unfortunately, the more we're exposed to ambient noise, the worse our bodies respond, according to Andrews. Many of us spend most of our waking hours staring at a digital screen, which can strain our eyes and actually make it more difficult to focus on, and therefore process, what we're looking at.

To refocus the eyes, just stare at a distant object for a few minutes. One doctor suggested the " rule" to a journalist at LifeHacker.

It goes like this: Every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to stare at an object at least 20 feet away. The idea behind the rule is that the eye is a muscle and like all muscles it benefits from exercise. Just like how sitting in one spot for a long time can make your muscles feel achy and stiff, staring at one object does essentially the same to your eyes.

If you don't periodically refocus, your vision can become a little blurry or fuzzy after work. Blue light glasses, which filter out the blue light that screens emit , have become popular to help screen-exhaustion. However, they won't help with eye strain, but could potentially help your quality of sleep.

One of the main symptoms of chronic sleep loss is poor concentration. Getting a solid seven to eight hours ahead of a busy work day could be the difference between being frazzled and being laser-focused. If you can disconnect from the internet, there are fewer things to distract you from the work at hand.

Get helpful tips and guidance for everything from fighting inflammation to finding the best diets for weight loss from exercises to build a stronger core to advice on treating cataracts.

PLUS, the latest news on medical advances and breakthroughs from Harvard Medical School experts. Sign up now and get a FREE copy of the Best Diets for Cognitive Fitness. Stay on top of latest health news from Harvard Medical School. Recent Blog Articles. Flowers, chocolates, organ donation — are you in?

What is a tongue-tie? What parents need to know. Which migraine medications are most helpful? How well do you score on brain health?

Shining light on night blindness. Can watching sports be bad for your health? Beyond the usual suspects for healthy resolutions. November 20, Mindfulness, cognitive training, and a healthy lifestyle may help sharpen your focus. What's fogging up focus? The following factors can also affect your concentration.

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