There is a basic meditation technique where you just lightly focus your attention on your breath. When you notice you’re not thinking of your breath, which will happen 10s to 100s of times a minute, typically, you bring your focus back to your breath.
It’s incorporated into a general school called “mindfulness” which you read more about. A book I’d recommend for beginners is “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
The theory is that training your mind to focus on something mundane like your breath for 10 minutes, you will generally train the capacity of your mind to direct focus.
This greater focusing ability will come in handy when you want to focus on other specific things without being distracted as easily, like listening to someone in a conversation or going through the debugging process for a bug.
I like Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and the Shambhala approach. Some of his best books IMO: Turning the Mind Into an Ally and Running with the Mind of Meditation.
I like his approach since it has a more modern appeal and his writing is very approachable for those new to meditation (at least to me).
The standard breath-watching practice you're most likely to encounter primarily targets samatha, which basically means concentration or freedom from distraction.
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Meditation is frequently mentioned in this context, is there a specific meditation design for for attention span ?
There is a basic meditation technique where you just lightly focus your attention on your breath. When you notice you’re not thinking of your breath, which will happen 10s to 100s of times a minute, typically, you bring your focus back to your breath.
It’s incorporated into a general school called “mindfulness” which you read more about. A book I’d recommend for beginners is “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
The theory is that training your mind to focus on something mundane like your breath for 10 minutes, you will generally train the capacity of your mind to direct focus.
This greater focusing ability will come in handy when you want to focus on other specific things without being distracted as easily, like listening to someone in a conversation or going through the debugging process for a bug.
I like Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and the Shambhala approach. Some of his best books IMO: Turning the Mind Into an Ally and Running with the Mind of Meditation.
I like his approach since it has a more modern appeal and his writing is very approachable for those new to meditation (at least to me).
The standard breath-watching practice you're most likely to encounter primarily targets samatha, which basically means concentration or freedom from distraction.