Focus - Part 2 This week’s session will address: “What are safe ways to improve attention and focus without interfering with sleep or jump-starting anxiety?”
Hello, good morning. What is up beautiful cadre fam? It's another day. It's another opportunity for you to come in and do what I call rewire the fire, which is just essentially thinking about every single way that you want to tap into your highest potential, everything that you need in order to move you forward. If this is your first time here, I'm Dr. Shereece Johnson, a licensed clinical mental health therapist, mindfulness practitioner and author who is passionate about helping you experience peace and harmony as long as you are willing to do the work.
It's so good to see those of you that are coming in and joining live. I'm always a proponent that joining live is the absolute best. Good morning, queen. Always good to see everyone. I always want you to come in and say good morning and let me know how your week is been. That's important to me. How is your focus going? We've been talking about focus and most important question of the day, what's in your cup? I'm only drinking water because I have a coffee date at 10 this morning. The world was not ready for multiple doses of me and coffee.
I see we've got some cinnamon tea and various things going on, but again, chime in. Let me know what's in your cup and how are you doing with actually working on your focus because that's essential and then let's get into it. Today is a teaching day. Every day that we come together is a teaching day, but specifically, I am of course excited about what I'm bringing to you today. The question of the day, if you looked under the calendar, I'm trying to do a better job of letting you know here's where the focus of things are going to be.
You know that once we get started, where things go are going to have a mind of their own, but that is my goal. Focus of the day. What are safe ways to improve your attention and focus without interfering with sleep and jump starting anxiety? Some of you may wonder, well, Dr. Shari, Dr. Ase for those of you that know me that way, why did you choose the word safe? Part of that is in the world of quick fixes, we have become extremely accustomed to trying to find very quick boost of energy. Am I sideways to you all?
How about this? Is that better? Better? Let me actually move this because I don't like this angle. Hold on. I wanted to do it sideways because I thought it would look better, but there we go. Well, thanks for the person who told me. Nobody told me. I simply thought if you flip the camera, that it would flip itself. So take two . All that being said, you may wonder why did I say safe ways of being able to join and find your focus? Audrey, you're like, I was going to let you know you've been sideways.
What a great, you're not a great friend, not at all. You totally left me hanging. Here's what I'm going to do. This will aggravate you for two seconds. I'm going to get off of this and restart. One, so we can all focus better, but two, so I can just get them to delete the other one because it will drive me bananas for that to post. I'm going to hang up, don't move, and we're going to come back. Audrey, your fired is a friend. Fire. Hello. Here we are. We're going to try this again. Technical difficulties, but it's all good.
It's what we do. We learn how to navigate through them, and I won't give you credit for this. I'm impressed. Yes, Kathleen, that you stayed focused. Y'all were just like, okay, I'm not going to tell her that she's literally talking out the side of her day, but we 're going to go ahead and stay with it. So I will have to say, I'm really doing some ways, totally and completely appreciate the fact that you were like, I don't know what's happening, but I'm going to go with this, but at the same time, you can't have me out here in these streets looking crazy.
It's so funny. I'm so glad you're here and you stuck around for that switch. We still have plenty of time because this is the most important place for you to be, for us to be together. Now, see, I really did need coffee this morning. Maybe that's why it happened the way it did, but no, it is definitely a learning process in that regard. So we're going to talk today about natural ways or safe ways for you to increase your focus without causing anxiety or really causing any type of medical harm. We live in a season that there is a constant desire for quick fixes of tell me how to do this.
Tell me how to make it better. What can I do to feel better with the least amount of work? And while you may be able to get away with that for a very limited amount of time, it doesn't actually help you learn what are the things that you need to do on a regular basis, what's the most optimal way that you can create a sense of harmony in your life so that you feel like you're peacefully going through your day and you're able to do the things that you need to do without it being a constant push. So let me say this right off the bat.
Of course, I am not giving you necessarily advice. These are things that are based on research and recommendations. You always want to seek the guidance and counsel of your medical providers, because I'm going to get into a few things that kind of lend into that space. Not in a harmful ways, but I always want to give that as a caveat because no amount of information that you receive is ever going to be solely a one size fits all process. You always want to look at how do you take what I'm saying and what you're hearing in other places and put it together in ways that you know are going to be beneficial for your individual needs.
But that being said, the first thing I want to identify for you are the five most common factors of poor focus and concentration. Number one is distractions. We talked a little bit about that if you watched part one on focus. Distractions is the number one most common way that we impair and impact our ability to focus. You can have physical distractions, you can have mental distractions, you can have emotional distractions. It can be a number of distractions. You can have all three, but a distracted brain, because there's too many things going on at one time, is the number one.
Number two, insufficient sleep. I cannot tell you enough how crucial sleep is for you. Sleep is even more crucial and can be more challenging as you age and mature because you may have been coming out of a season where you've had years of chronic sleep issues. I may say this once a week for the rest of our lives together. If you're the individual who is said to yourself that you can do without a lot of sleep, that is not true. You are surviving on a lack of sleep, but you are not surviving to the degree that you can.
I'm curious. Take a minute. Pop in the chat for me. How many hours of sleep are you averaging right now? So I want you to think about that over the last week and tell the truth, because we can either treat your truth or we can treat your lie and so your progress is going to be parallel to which one of those you decide to acknowledge. Take a moment. Pop in the chat about how many hours of sleep, and this is no shame. It's just given me a good gauge and giving you a little level of accountability of how much sleep you're averaging over the last week.
So distraction, insufficient sleep. We're talking the five most common factors of poor focus and concentration. Three is insufficient physical activity. So on the days that you may feel like it's really difficult and you don't have the desire to move your body, it's so important to recognize that choosing not to move your body on a consistent basis isn't just impacting your adipose fat or how you look in the mirror. It's also going to impact your sleep quality and your focus. We need that movement and if you have a neurodivergent or what I like to call a neural spicy brain, you especially need that movement in order to kickstart those neurons and get you moving into the right part of your brain that is already a struggle for us to access and to continue to work through.
Number four is poor eating habits. We're going to get into that sum today. Your eating habits are highly conducive to your ability to focus. Think about it. When you eat things that are very processed and rich and laden on a consistent basis, I'm a friend believer that all foods fit in moderation. The message is not for you to reduce things down and not eat a variety of foods. That would be an issue, which we'll talk about here in just a moment. Bye!
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