Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple by Simmons Russell

Author:Simmons, Russell [Simmons, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

FINDING YOUR FOCUS

As you’ve already seen, there are a lot of reasons to meditate. But whenever I’m trying to give someone who’s on the fence about meditation a very practical reason to do it, I usually tell them this: “Meditation is going to let you accomplish twice as much while only putting in half the effort.”

Think about that.

Imagine if day in and day out you were able to be twice as productive as your coworkers. If every day you read twice as many reports as the guy in the cubicle next to you, taught twice as much material as the other teachers, or washed twice as many dishes as the other guys in your kitchen. How long would it be before you got promoted in that office, in that school, or in that restaurant? Not long at all. I can tell you that if someone in my office suddenly started doing twice as much work in half the normal time, I would notice that transformation.

And reward it too.

So if being more focused and productive is something that sounds attractive to you, then consider the studies that have proved people who meditate are able to hold their attention on tasks much longer than those who don’t.

For instance, recently the University of California–Santa Barbara conducted a study on how meditation affects test-taking ability, which requires tremendous focus. In the study, a group of college students were asked to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examination). Then the students were split into two groups; one group took an intensive meditation class, the other an intensive class on nutrition.

After two weeks of class, each group was asked to take the GRE again. The group that studied nutrition didn’t show any improvement, but the group that had meditated saw their average GRE verbal score go from 460 to 520. The meditation group also showed improvement on tests they were given on memory and focus.

If you’ve ever studied for the GRE or the SAT, then you know jumping up sixty points is a big deal. The kind of improvement that people often spend thousands of dollars on tutoring or classes to hopefully achieve.

Similarly, researchers from George Mason University and the University of Illinois recently conducted a study to find out if meditation could help college students increase their focus and retain more information from their lectures. The researchers found that students who meditated before their lecture scored better on a quiz that followed the lecture than those who didn’t. “Data from this study suggest that meditation may help students who might have trouble paying attention or focusing,” said one of the researchers, Professor Robert Youmans of George Mason.

Another study, entitled “Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention,” was also recently published in Psychological Science and described similar findings. In this study, researchers tested two groups—one that had been taught meditation, one that hadn’t—on their ability to focus on a task that required them to distinguish small differences between things they saw. Not surprisingly, the group that meditated scored much better on the tests.

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