Camera lenses have focus for a reason. Imagine a world where everything captured by a camera lens was blurry? Without focus, we have no clarity. Clarity is what helps us maintain our objectives in our recovery, like getting a job, having healthy relationships, and maintaining our sobriety. Focus helps us keep our eyes on the prize, keeping us present for everything we do in our lives. Here are eight ways to boost your focus and enhance your recovery.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the practice of being present through simple exercises and habits like noticing, paying attention, and awareness. Inherently, the act of focusing on mindfulness, as well as through mindfulness, increases focus. Mindfulness based practices are proven to improve brain function.
Meditation
Meditation is intrinsically mindfulness based because most meditation asks you to focus on your breath, mindfully bringing your attention to the breath and simply noticing what thoughts arise. You become aware of your thoughts instead of being consumed by them. Like mindfulness, meditation is proven to increase focus. Performers, athletes, and many other professionals use meditation as a tool to center their minds and enhance their focus. Meditation is also proven to promote the growth of grey matter in the brain, reduce inflammation, and more.
Exercise
What exercise has in common with mindfulness and meditation is focus, specifically a focus on the breath, being present, and paying attention. If you hop on the treadmill and don’t focus on your task, you risk tripping and falling. If you go to deadlift 100 pounds and you don’t focus on your form, you risk pulling your back, tearing a muscle, and sustaining a serious injury. Exercise is focus and meditation in motion. When you exercise, you are completely focused on what you are doing, which builds the habit of focus into other areas of your life.
Yoga
Yoga combines exercise with mindfulness and meditation through a series of asanas, poses, and vinyasa, a series of poses put together in a flow. Each yoga pose asks you to focus on reaching and stretching, mindfully paying attention to the body, noticing any resistance, and bringing your awareness to different areas of the body. Focusing on one pose or movement at a time, as well as the breath in between, helps you to enhance focus holistically.
Sustainable recovery requires total transformation of a man, inside and out. At Tree House Recovery in Orange County, California, we help men completely transform their lives by creating sustainable change. For information on how our men’s treatment programs provide the path to freedom from addiction, call us today: (855) 202-2138
