Hacker News Reader

Comment by davyjones | Hacker News Reader

If you are particularly fidgety and have trouble concentrating, here is a thought experiment that might help:

Sit in a room with minutes to spare and task yourself this: to get to the market and back from your house. Maybe you shop for some fruits or something.

Step into your mental realm imagining every step you have to do in this task. Changing your clothes, tying your shoe lace, locking your door...everything. Not in frames but in a continuous motion as in a movie. It could be boring and I have felt the strong need to snap out of it. It still is difficult to power through, imagining every step and "looking" at the trees and shrubs along the way, picking up and inspecting an apple and putting it in the basket, paying for the goods, etc.

The whole thing is much more difficult than it sounds if you are the kind of person who gets restless easily. With practice, it gets better. Hopefully this helps you get in the productive zone. Good luck!

View on HN

That's a great tip. I occasionally sit through a somewhat exotic variant: I imagine I can take to flight like a bird (slow flight only, not like Superman) and mentally take off from the balcony and imagine what the town would look like from above. The end of the exercise would be taking a full trip and 'returning' home.

It's a bit more engaging to figure out the aerial view of a place you normally navigate only by road. It's very hard to sustain this practice for even a minute or two initially.

See my other response above (wrote that before I read this, though well after you'd made the comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286046

I wonder how many people use flight for this kind of thing.

I can tell you I came by it because I'd commonly see kites (as in birds of prey) drifting by, for hours on end, and I wondered what things would look like from their POV. Then when I actually tried to think like that (or imagine, I should say) in a sustained manner, it was unexpectedly hard; so I kept it around as an informal practice.

edit: it's interesting that we both mention "not like Superman". For me it's about going as slow as possible.

The technique that you outline is one that I discovered myself as an easy way to fall asleep. I think of it as "starting a dream".

hah, I thought I was the only one that did this! Though my usual go to dream-starter is either flight, or snowboarding.

With flight, I just imagine that I'm flying relatively low above the tree line (Iron Man style with my hands at my side, rather than Superman style with arms outstretched ... not sure why, but this matters to my brain :P ). Also, I start somewhere that I'm really familiar with such as my house or office and then I make sure to not follow the roads ... the thought of flying across blocks and lakes really makes me happy.

With snowboarding, I just imagine myself at the peak of a gigantic mountain. The terrain oscillates somewhere between greens and blues and is a chill winding experience.

I imagine going to the concert hall and listening to classical music. I find myself wanting to direct, but then the music is slower, more mechanical. When I let go and just listen, the melody gets faster and more complex, more enjoyable. Usually that lasts a few seconds and then I slip under.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com