Are you distracted all the time?  Do you have trouble focusing on what you’re doing? Well, it’s your own fault, but there is something you can do about it.

First of all, let’s get what distractions are out of the way.  Distractions are when something comes to your attention that draws your focus away from whatever it was that you were doing.   This breaks your concentration, and can throw off your rhythm, making it harder to get back to what you were doing before you were distracted.

That being said, there are, at any given time, hundreds or thousands of things going on around you that could get your attention.  The vast majority of these things pass by beneath our conscious awareness, but some pop up into that realm.  This is because your subconscious determines that whatever it is needs your attention urgently enough to take your conscious attention away from what it is you are doing.

Your subconscious takes its cues as to what is important enough to distract you with from your conscious mind.  If you give a lot of importance to what you are doing, if you love it and are passionate about it, then it takes quite an occurrence to distract you.  If, on the other hand, you are doing something that you feel you HAVE to do, not something that you want to do, your subconscious listens to this guidance as well, and the threshold for something to come to your attention will be much lower.  The barrier to something coming to your conscious attention is lowest when you’re doing something you don’t want to do AND have something important to think about, and especially if that thing that is important to think about is one you don’t want to think about.

So your subconscious mind does what your conscious mind tells it to do, even if you barely realize you’re doing it.  If you tell it that you don’t want to be where you are, doing what you’re doing, then it will try to present you with other things going on around you.  If you tell it that you are totally engrossed in what you are doing, it will filter out all but the most important events.   If you try to avoid thinking about something that you know you need to think about, it will pass you just about everything, not doing much filtering at all.

There’s the problem and its cause, so now what can you do about it?  Well, the first thing you can do is make sure you take quiet time.  This gives you the opportunity to stop avoiding all those thoughts that you’re trying not to think about, thus lessening your seeking for distractions.  The second thing you can do is learn to prioritize, and work on things in priority order… this will cause you to be working on something important to you up until you get all of that accomplished, at which point distractions are not so bad, anyway, as they may provide you with an opportunity that you otherwise would have missed.  The final thing you can do is work on increasing your awareness, as the more aware you are, the more your conscious mind is in direct control, rather than sitting back waiting for the subconscious to filter everything for it.

So now you are aware of what you are doing, and know how to change it, so what are you waiting for?  Don’t let anything distract you on your path to growth and awareness!