Here’s an interesting question from a student:
“When developing your concentration how much time did you spend daily working on it?”
Concentration training requires the most effort in the very beginning.
This is where your mind is the most restless and untamed.
You don’t have any control over your mental state and attention span.
It seems impossible to get it under control.
So the initial sessions often are the most frustrating. If you ever tried to meditate or to do any concentration exercises, you know what I mean.
That’s why it’s not a good idea to start with a long training sessions straight from the start.
20 minutes a day of mental exercising is a good ballpark estimate. Can be less or more depending on your own particular conditions.
It’s enough to do a good practice, yet, not that long so that you get tired and frustrated.
After you get a minimum amount of control, it gets easier. Or at least, not as frustrating. You get used to the fluctuations, and to the mind running away, and you start to get a few good sessions.
Then you can increase the time if it’s comfortable for you.
What you DON’T want to happen is to spend 20 minutes (or more) bored or frustrated. This way you are training the exact opposite that you want to be training.
You’ll need to improve your mental state control more than the attention.
With time, even though you pretty much never have absolute control over your mind, you can get quite good with your directed attention. Particularly by releasing the frustration and restlessness that can come along with it, you can have very pleasurable sessions.
Then after some time, you may enter a maintenance phase.
You get used to a certain mental state and mind control and don’t want to lose it, but you also don’t want to go to extra lengths to improve it.
At this time, you’ll find a comfortable training session and routine for you. Usually 30minutes is a good estimate for maintenance of attention.
Granted that the most important aspect of concentration training is the awareness and control of your attention during your day.
If you simply do a 20 minute exercise everyday but completely ignore your mental processes, mental states and attention during your day, it won’t be very useful for you.
The goal is for you to improve the awareness over yourself and your own attention during the day so that you can focus your mind into what you want to think, reflect and do.
That’s the true goal of this training: to be able to achieve what you want to achieve and get a laser like attention in what you want to do.
Start to train your attention with the course:
>>> Concentration and Mind Control