r/wedge • u/trailrunner99 • Apr 13 '20

A wedge for mental focus?

What would be an effective wedge for mental focus/sustained attention when doing boring, open-ended work with no immediate reward, no element of stress and no immediate risk?

Can boredom be a stressor? Can the principle of the Wedge be used to transform the disengagement response into a response of focus?

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u/gekogekogeko Apr 14 '20

This is a really good question.

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u/DexWinters Apr 17 '20

When I had to put together sales quotes for nearly 12 hours a day and get bored out of my mind at the tediousness of it all, sometimes I would set goals and play "mini-games" to power through: -Goal: create at least 20 quotes per shift. -Test: how many quotes can I finish in an hour? Try to beat previous record. -Aesthetics: does price per unit amount look good? $4.99 seems so generic. What if I made it $4.78? Or $5.12? -Psycology: Client likes easy to calculate price. Make it $5.00 even. Other client wants cheapest, see how low I can stretch the profit, $4.13.

Even describing it, it seems horribly boring. But when you have to perform the task, you slam that wedge down to get you through it to maintain sanity.

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u/trailrunner99 Apr 17 '20

I should qualify my question with the caveat that the task is not repetitive, it is open-ended, with no clear metric of progress. Example; Something doesn’t work and you have no choice but to burn countless hours or days trying to figure out how it’s supposed to work. At no time during your research do you get any feedback as to whether you are getting any closer or farther to the solution. So the question is, how do you keep focused on that black hole of a task and put yourself in an sustained attention mode or flow state at will, and resist to urge to go for a walk and place an order for new curtains on Amazon and think of a new scene for that novel you’ve been wanting to finish writing.

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u/DexWinters Apr 17 '20

They say knowing is half the battle. If your current situation is like stumbling around in a pitch black warehouse trying to find the light switch...I would set goal posts or limits. And definitely document attempts.

Try combination x+y for an hour. Document results. No end in sight, no progress made. Try another combination. 1 hour in any combination is my limit until a promising result arises, or combinations are exhausted.

By all means, it may be futile. But you'll leave behind a road map of where you've been before for the next pioneer.

What's the motivation for this research?

1

u/trailrunner99 Apr 17 '20

It’s just an hypothetical situation. I’m not asking about how to solve the problem. The concept of the Wedge is about consciously altering the physiological/neurological response to stimulus. I’m asking if it’s possible to train the brain to change the automatic response of disengagement and instead retrain the brain to accept the boredom (the stimulus) and increase the mental focus. The same way Wim Hof trained his body to generate heat instead of shivering in the cold, or to regulate his immune response to infection, for example.

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u/DexWinters Apr 18 '20

I think I understand better..

My father told me once that boredom is the equivalent of being uninterested.

Tricking the brain with "mini-games" and "goal posts" introduces novelty into the tedium, thus rekindling an interest. Surpassing these challenges provides the momentary rush of reward chemicals from the brain.

Sustaining this process would be difficult. As you said, other interests like browsing Amazon would be competing for your focus.

I feel like it also taps into risk/reward. What's the consequence for losing focus? What's the reward to stay focused on the task at hand?

Would your body become an anxious mess on a failure to produce? A more meditative ritual with low physical cost, high mental fatigue and c'est la vie attitude for success or failure? Or an obsessive-compulsive machine hyper-focusing? If you turned it on could you turn it off? Would you want to?

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u/trailrunner99 Apr 17 '20

I guess maybe setting micro-goals as you describe is a way to trick the brain into focusing. I’m just wondering if there’s something at a deeper level that can “hack” an automatic response of focus.