Your Monday Focus Check for April 13, 2026

Your Eyes are Running the Show

A quick note before we get into this…

You’re getting something new from Jon and Will at Focus Now Training/Men Talking Mindfulness this week, and every week moving forward.

We’ve been sending Your Thursday Three Things for a while now, and that’s not going anywhere. You’ll still get the podcast recap and the usual stuff every Thursday.

But we wanted to give you something to start your week with too. Something short and useful. One idea, one tool, one thing you can actually try on a Monday morning before the week runs away from you.

So we’re adding Monday Focus Check to the mix.

Think of Thursday as the recap. Monday as the warmup.

We hope it’s useful. Let us know what you think… we actually want to hear it.

Now, here’s this week’s edition.

We spend a lot of time blaming our brains for our inability to focus.

We tell ourselves we lack discipline. We tell ourselves we need more coffee, more sleep, more motivation. We download apps. We try timers. We move the phone to the other room and then walk over there to check it anyway.

And most of that misses the point entirely. Because your eyes have more control over your focus than you probably realize.

Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist at Stanford, has been hammering this point for years. Cognitive focus tends to follow overt visual focus… what you’re literally looking at. In plain English, where you look determines where your brain goes. This is why people put blinders on horses, or wear a hat to obstruct their vision while working.

Think about that for a second. We’ve known this principle for centuries with animals. We just forgot to apply it to ourselves.

The 60-Second Reset

Here’s Huberman’s simplest protocol. Costs you nothing but a minute of your time.

Pick a specific spot related to your workspace. A point on a piece of paper. A corner of your monitor. A spot on the wall. Now stare at it. Set a timer. Start with 30 seconds of focused attention, then work your way up to 60 or even 90 seconds over time.

That’s it.

When you narrow your visual attention onto a single point, neurochemicals get released in your brain that increase alertness and arousal. This controlled focus opens the door to cognitive focus, making the work ahead feel less heavy and require less mental effort.

I’ve been using this before deep work sessions. Before calls where I need to be locked in. Before writing when the words aren’t coming. The research backs it up, but honestly… you’ll feel it working before you read a single study.

One note from Huberman that made me laugh: “Don’t make the fixation point your phone; duh.”

The 13-Minute Daily Practice

If you want to build this capacity over the long haul, there’s a meditation protocol that’s been shown to actually rewire the focus circuits in your brain. Not just make you feel calmer in the moment. Actual structural change.

Research shows that a brief 8-13 minutes per day meditation can improve cognitive focus. Huberman recommends 13 minutes, eyes closed, directing your mind’s eye to a location just behind your forehead.

The key isn’t staying perfectly focused the whole time. The repeated return to a state of focus from a state of non-focus… that’s the actual work. Every time your attention drifts and you bring it back, you’re doing a rep. You’re building the muscle.

You’ll still get the benefits even if you’re a meditation novice or you lose concentration a few times. That’s normal. That’s the point.

One thing worth knowing: if this kind of meditation is done too late in the day, it can mess with your sleep because it actually requires a high attentional load. So this is a morning or early afternoon practice. Not something to do before bed.

The So What

Most productivity advice treats focus like a character issue. Like if you just wanted it badly enough, you’d have it.

That’s not how your nervous system works.

Focus has a neurochemistry. Epinephrine and dopamine work together with acetylcholine to help you get focused, direct that focus, and stay focused over time. And the fastest lever you have to pull on that chemistry is your visual system.

More than 40 percent of your brain is involved in vision in some way or another. You can train your cognitive focus through practices of visual focus and attention.

You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t need to download anything. You just need to understand that your eyes are the steering wheel, and start using them that way.

One Thing To Try This Week

Before your most important work block each day, spend 60 seconds staring at a fixed point. Not your phone. Not your email. Just a spot.

Then get after it.

(By the way... Will and I have been building something that goes deeper on this stuff. Focus, attention, the gap between stimulus and response. More on that soon!)

What did you notice when you tried it? We actually want to know.

Jon and Will, Focus Now Training

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