In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.

But Nathan—after studying all this—had found that to be productive, you can’t aim simply to narrow your spotlight as much as possible. He said: “I try to go for a walk every day and just let my mind kind of sort things out…. I don’t think our full conscious control of our thoughts is necessarily our most productive way of thinking. I think loose

is actually a different form of attention—and a necessary one. Nathan told me that when we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes “a certain amount of bandwidth,” and when we turn off the spotlight, “we still have the same bandwidth—it’s just we can allocate more of those resources” toward other ways of

In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing—we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later.

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.

Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them.

He said: “The brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain things, the stronger the connection’s getting, and the better things work.” If you are struggling to focus, he said, just try monotasking for ten minutes, and then allow yourself to be distracted for a minute, then monotask for another ten minutes, and so on. “As you do it, it becomes

So if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer. He said: “If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted

“we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.” If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus.