Focusing and Quieting the Mind - Practical Mental Techniques to Manage Intrusive Thoughts, Improve Focus, and Help Falling Asleep

The human mind is remarkably good at solving problems—but not always good at turning itself off or staying on task. The two situations below are among the many moments when our thoughts work against us rather than for us:

You’re tucked under the covers, hoping for sleep to come, but a persistent worry or lingering thought refuses to let your mind rest.

Similarly, you’re trying to work on a mental task, but a slew of distractions or interruptions have kept you from refocusing after you’ve dealt with them.

This presentation introduces tangible mental exercises and effective techniques for focusing on areas of the brain to help suppress random thoughts, distractions, or worries -- in support of relaxation and concentration. It draws from universal mindfulness, meditation, mental body scanning and visualization practices, but adds some practical and illustrative assistance that you might not find elsewhere. 

Initial Loop Exercise

To start building a practical skill set for calming the mind and attaining control of your thoughts, try the following simple visualization technique. This initial exercise will aid in establishing the mind-calming and concentration skills discussed further below.

Begin by closing your eyes and imagining a small, softly glowing orb moving in a slow, smooth circular loop around your head. Let it travel from left to right as it passes in front of your face in a clockwise direction, completing an easy, unhurried loop.

Allow the orb to continue circling for a few moments, moving at whatever pace feels comfortable. There’s no need to control it precisely—just let your attention rest on its gentle motion.

When you’re ready, imagine the orb gradually reversing direction, now moving in the opposite, counterclockwise path. Notice whether one direction feels more effortless than the other. If so, allow the orb to continue in the direction where its movement is most natural.

As your attention traces the orb’s path, you may notice your breathing beginning to slow, or a softening around your forehead, temples, or eyes. Let this happen naturally, without trying to make anything change. Simply stay with the rhythm of the movement.

You may also notice subtle shifts in awareness or gentle sensations as the orb moves around your head—or you may simply feel more settled. Either experience is perfectly fine.

If the visualization feels comfortable and absorbing, you’re ready to move on to the more focused mind-calming techniques.

Using Focused Awareness to Ease into Sleep

Now that you’re comfortable guiding the orb, let it gradually become less defined. Rather than a specific shape, think of it as a soft area of focus—a place where your attention can gently settle.

When you’re lying in bed and ready for sleep, allow this area of focus to rest toward the back of your head, roughly at eye level. You don’t need to locate it precisely. Simply hold a quiet sense of attention in that region, as if your awareness were lightly resting there.

At first, troubling thoughts or worries may still arise. When they do, acknowledge them briefly and then return your attention to the area of focus. There’s no need to push thoughts away. You may even notice them fading or bouncing off the center of focus on their own -- as if they pass nearby without fully engaging you.

Play with this technique for a while. You can stop and restart anytime to get used to the pattern of how your mind and thoughts react to it. It may take some time for things to quiet down, and you feel a sense of control, calm and relaxation.

As your mind finally becomes calm, let it focus on your mind’s eye where you might imagine or “see” faint images, shifting patterns, or gentle movements appearing. Let these arise naturally, without trying to shape or hold onto them. If they dissolve or disappear, that’s perfectly normal, simply continue resting your attention where it is and let the images reform

With practice, this gentle form of focus can guide the mind into the in-between state where wakefulness softens and sleep begins. This transitional phase—often called the cusp of sleep or hypnagogia—is a natural doorway into restfulness and allows your mind to carry you into sleep.

Using Focused Awareness to Maintain Concentration

For wakeful use, the same area of focus technique can be applied in slightly different ways — ones that support alertness, clarity, and sustained attention rather than sleep. This technique supports concentration for such activities and situations as:

• Desktop Activities: e.g., writing, programming, and other job or creative tasks
• Visual Arts Activities: e.g., painting, drawing, graphics design, and sculpting
• Learning and Training: e.g., studying, musical instrument practice and song learning, and other training exercises
• Sports: e.g., at bat, gymnastics, and archery
• Personal and Public Verbal Engagement: e.g., giving a speech, interviewing, and one-on-one concentrated verbal discourses or even arguments
• Mindfulness: e.g., meditation and relaxation
• Household Activities: e.g., cooking, sewing, and creative remodeling or repairs
• Other Activities Requiring Attention and Concentration: e.g., emergencies, accidents, and driving a car in intense traffic situations  

Begin applying this technique by allowing the orb to soften into an amorphous area of concentration. This time, focus your attention at the front or center of your head, behind the eyes, or the crown of the head, where awareness often occurs naturally when you’re engaged in concentrated thinking or problem-solving. As before, there’s no need to pinpoint an exact location, but rather, explore different focus areas where you begin to experience regained concentration and awareness.

As you return to your task, distractions or leftover thoughts from earlier or immediate interruptions may still surface. When they do, acknowledge them briefly and then guide your attention back to the area of focus. You may notice that intrusive thoughts lose momentum more quickly, as if they no longer have a place to take hold.

While maintaining this gentle focus, allow your attention to widen just enough to include the task in front of you. Rather than forcing concentration, let the task unfold and you’ll find yourself drawn to engage in it. Many people find that mental effort decreases while clarity and engagement increase.

With practice, this technique can help you transition smoothly into focused activities without the strain of trying to “push” distractions away. 

Neuroscience and Physiology Aspects

These area of focus techniques for supporting sleep and concentration engage, stimulate, and/or soothe different areas of the brain, as follows:

• Prefrontal Cortex (Focus and Control): As mentioned, focus on this area, located behind your forehead to promote clarity and decision-making, stabilize attention and reduce reactivity.
• Amygdala (Emotional Regulation): If you're feeling overwhelmed, imagine this almond-shaped area cooling down or gently soothing itself, lowering emotional urgency, and quieting mental chatter.
• Hypothalamus: (Sleep Support): Focus on this area to support sleep transition and manage sensory disengagement.
• Hippocampus: Visualize this part, critical for memory, as a peaceful memory library or a serene, flowing stream for relaxation.
• Occipital Lobe: As this lobe plays a crucial role with other areas of the brain in supporting language, reading, storing memories, and recognizing optical image; focusing on the Occipital Lobe will assist in quieting the mind for rest or sleep. 

When you gently guide attention—whether by following a moving image, resting awareness in a specific internal area, or returning focus after distractions —you are not “controlling” individual brain structures. Instead, you are shifting how the networks and regions of the brain communicate with one another, which involve well-studied systems tied to attention, emotion, and arousal. 

Practice and Experimentation

Ideally, the techniques described here will be effective in calming and focusing the mind. However, we are all different in many ways and some of our common or unique life problems, issues and experience can be overwhelming for some more than others. Anxieties and life experiences related to personal issues -- such as financial, health, job, family and interpersonal problems (just to name a few) -- may consume our thoughts. Even minor distractions or pressures can have a significant impact on our immediate goals and responsibilities. These mind-quieting and mind-focusing techniques are targeted.

As such, these techniques may be easier and more immediately effective for some, than for others. Try to actively apply these techniques under various conditions throughout the day, and experiment with different areas of focus and see which ones are most effective for those diverse, transitory or persistent distractions when rest or focused concentration are desired and necessary.

Over time, you’ll find that your mind will automatically apply and adapt these techniques and those areas of focus that work for you for a variety of day-to-day situations. 

Further Exploration

In support of your interest in exploring techniques for quieting and focusing the mind, here’s a sample of some websites that provide further information and other approaches on visualization techniques for relaxation and mindfulness:

1. Healthline: Offers a variety of visualization meditation exercises, including body scanning, guided imagery, and goal visualization:
   https://www.healthline.com/health/visualization-meditation.
2. Mindfulness Exercises: Provides free guided visualizations for relaxation, stress relief, and mindfulness practice:
   https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-guided-visualizations/.
3. Calm Blog: Explains the benefits of visualization meditation and provides eight exercises to help reduce stress and boost well-being:
   https://blog.calm.com/blog/visualization-meditation

The Mystery of Love's Labors Won - Part 2

 

Coming Soon!

The Mystery of Love’s Labor’s Won - Part 1

 What is “Love’s Labor’s Won”?

From Titus Andronicus to Henry VIII, with Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet tossed in between, we have been passed down an eclectic list of Shakespeare’s history, comedy, and tragedy plays; along with his sonnets. However, among all that we know and accept about Shakespeare’s canon of works, we are vexed and intrigued with the mystery of a possible Elizabethan publication known as Love’s Labor’s Won.

Love’s Labor’s Won is the name of a play attributed to Shakespeare, of which there are no known extant copies; either in manuscript, or as a printed/published volume. Nor are there any records that a play under that name was ever performed publicly, or before the royal courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James.

And yet, we have two unrelated, but noteworthy, evidential references that a play known by the title of Love’s Labor’s Won existed in some manifestation.

What is particularly intriguing that such a play might exist is that its title is teasingly similar to Shakespeare’s well-known play Love’s Labor’s Lost; which begs the questions:

• Was Love’s Labor’s Won a sequel to Love’s Labor’s Lost?, 
• Was it another name of one of Shakespeare’s known plays?,
• Or, was Love’s Labor’s Won an entirely different play of its own?

Evidence of “Love’s Labor’s Won”

Our knowledge of Love’s Labor’s Won comes from two sources originating in Shakespeare’s life time, but not recognized as having any significance until much later.

The first source is one that explicitly attributes Love’s Labor’s Won to Shakespeare in a contemporary book called “Palladis Tamia”, by Francis Meres, published in 1598.

The second source attributes the play to Shakespeare by association, where a play by that name appears in an Elizabethan 1603 hand-written stationer’s (bookseller’s) account book along with a reference to Love’s Labor’s Lost.

The following discussion explores these two references in more detail.

A Contemporary Reference, Francis Meres – “Palladis Tamia”

Francis Meres (1565–1647) was a schoolmaster, clergyman, and scholar, born in the year following Shakespeare’s birth. By the time Meres reached 33 years of age, he had, to an extent, acquired an appreciation and understanding of the classical poets and playwrights of Greek, Latin and Italian antiquity (e.g., Ovid, Plautus and Seneca), and more importantly, an apparent nationalistic pride in his English contemporaries who had “rivaled” these ancients.

In 1598, Meres published “Palladis Tamia”, a multi-part volume that covered contemporary books, philosophy, music, painting, poetry, plays, and literature of the latter half of the Elizabethan era. It is the second part of Mere’s work, “Wits Treasury, A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets, with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets”, that provides us this first spark in our Love’s Labor’s Won mystery:

 “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreams, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.”

 

Figure 1: Meres' Palladis Tamia Reference to Love's Labor's Won

Prior to Meres’ accolades to Shakespeare for his plays on page 282 of Meres’ work, Meres begs us, on page 281, to witness that the “sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in the mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”. Specifically, Meres cites the previously published Shakespeare narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593), and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), which were known well enough by 1598, along with some equally noteworthy but unpublished “sugared Sonnets” that circulated “among his private friends”.

It was customary for poets, as well as nobility, to pass around unpublished works amongst groups of friends and acquaintances to be read individually or performed as “A-List” parlor-room, game-time entertainment, where these works obtained word-of-mouth notoriety outside of these circles. Some of these works were exceptional enough to escape the parlors and be published; e.g., the “sugared Sonnets” were first published for our amusement as the “Shakespeare Sonnets” in 1609.

Palladis Tamia is intriguing and important from a historical perspective in many ways beyond the “Love Labor’s Won” reference. It is the earliest contemporary published reference to Shakespeare, and one that associates him with the following 12 plays, consisting of 6 Comedies (of which “Love’s Labor’s Won” is one), and 6 Tragedies (of which some are now classified as History plays):

Comedies:

• The Two Gentleman of Verona (“his Gentlemen of Verona)
• A Comedy of Errors (“his Errors”)
• Love’s Labor’s Lost (“his Love labors lost”
•  Love’s Labor’s Won (“his Love labours wonne”)
•  A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“his Midsummers night dreams”)
•  The Merchant of Venice (“his Merchant of Venice”)

Tragedies:

• Richard II (“his Richard the 2”) - History
• Richard III (“Richard the 3”) - History
• Henry IV (“Henry the 4”) - History
• King John (“King John”) - History
• Titus Andronicus (“Titus Andronicus”) - Tragedy
•  Romeo and Juliet (“and his Romeo and Juliet”) – Tragedy

We will readdress this list of plays further on.

An Elizabethan Bookseller’s Account Book

Now we introduce the intrigue of two interesting characters whose encounter on Christmas Eve, 1953 at the British Museum leads us to the second attribution of Love’s Labor’s Won to Shakespeare.

Solomon Pottesman
Solomon Pottesman was an early-to-mid 20^th Century London book collector and dealer, who (by contemporary accounts) was an endearing, but sometimes annoying eccentric. On a daily basis, he would scour London area antique book dealerships, auction houses, and the reading room at the British Museum doing hard-shoe document-collection mining, and occasionally making a rare find to add to his extensive book collection.

Pottesman was an “incunabulist”; i.e., someone who has an interest in books, single sheets, or images printed before the year 1501 in Europe. His passion for and knowledge of incunabula gained him the nickname “Inky” (he had the other nickname “Potty”, as well). Although, Pottesman‘s curiosity was in incunabula, he also scoured the London book-collector’s venues for later printed material, but with no appreciation of anything printed after 1700.

Sometime near the end of 1953, Pottesman acquired a 1637 bound copy of Thomas Gataker’s Certain Sermons, First Preached, and After Published at Severall Times. On examination of the inside back cover of this purchase, he found that the folded, back-cover hinge-spine leaf -- that was pasted and sewn by the bookbinder to secure the back cover to the printed volume -- had become detached, along with the hinge-spine “under-leaf” that provided additional strength and support to the back-cover hinge spine. This was a common bookbinding practice during the period of the printing of Certain Sermons.

Figure 2: Bookbinding – Back-Cover Hinge-Support Leaves

Pottesman wasn’t necessarily surprised to see this supporting under-leaf, nor was he surprised to see that the under-leaf had handwriting on it. For along with this bookbinding practice, bookbinders would employ leaves of used paper from such scrap piles that they kept on hand for binding-support and other purposes. These binding-support leaves are not normally visible after binding is complete.

It just so happens in this case that any glue binding the back leaves had deteriorated to the extent that the leaves became partially separated from the back cover. Pottesman was intrigued, because the under -leaf exhibited writing on both sides of the half that was visible, and there were words that were partially covered by the still-attached hinge leaf to indicate that the concealed side of the under-leaf had handwriting on both sides, as well. So, Pottesman, with apparent ease, was able to separate the leaves, although they were still attached to the volume through the stitching that bound them to the back cover hinge.

Figure 3: The Back Hinge “Under-Leaf” Verso View

Reference to Love’s Labor’s Won from 1603 Stationer’s Registry

Even though the leaves were still attached, Pottesman was able to see that on the backside (“Verso”) of the now fully exposed back-cover manuscript under-leaf there appeared a long, hand-written list of published items consisting of histories, sermons, lectures, treatises, expositions, and plays, which appeared to be a bookseller’s inventory or order sheet. Pottesman was quite excited when he recognized that one of the plays listed on the sheet was Love’s Labor’s Won!

His excitement led him out to the British Museum, where he had a chance encounter with T. W. Baldwin.

T. W. Baldwin  
In 1953, T. W. Baldwin, a Professor from the University of Illinois specializing in Medieval and Elizabethan Drama, was on a Fulbright Research Scholarship in London “spending [his] days in the happy hunting grounds of the British Museum”.  On New Year’s Eve Thursday of that year, Baldwin describes (in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Won: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller) his encounter with Solomon Pottesman as follows: 

“At the end of the working day of the last day of 1953, as I was about to leave the Cloak Room of the British Museum, I met an obviously excited bookdealer, S. Pottesman, Esq., of whom I had been aware for many years in his referred capacity of reader-student. We sat down on one of the backless benches of little ease to examine his find, a strip of manuscript, showing at the back hinge of a folio volume of sermons. In his magpie hobby-habit of collecting any bit of early print or manuscript, he had come upon this strip, and had noticed that it evidently contained a list of plays in 1603, some of which were Shakespeare’s. And there in unmistakable clarity was “loves labor won””.

Upon his fortunate encounter with Solomon Pottesman on that New Year’s Eve day, Baldwin arranged for the University of Illinois to purchase the Gataker volume and the still attached manuscript leaves from Pottesman. After having the under leaves detached from the volume and a few years thoroughly analyzing these finds, Baldwin relates it all to us in his 1957 collaborative publication of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Won: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller. This book is the source for how we know of and what we know of this second historical reference to Love’s Labor’s Won.

The plays that are referenced in the Gataker volume back-hinge under leaf include the following:

• The Merchant of Venice (“merchant of venice”) - Shakespeare
• The Taming of the Shrew (“taming of a shrew”) - Shakespeare
• (“knak to know a knave”) – William Kemp
• (“knak to know an honest man”) -
• Love’s Labor’s Lost (“love labor lost”) - Shakespeare
• Love’s Labor’s Won (“love labor won”) – Shakespeare?

On the same page is the following account notation for bookbinding services paid on August 19, 1603, which gives us a time reference for when the under-leaf text was written; circa 1603, and provides a stationer's context that a physical volume of Love's Labor's Won may have existed at that time:  

To valentine at bremor

was m^r doringtons cooke

19 of august 1603 for

binding a servis booke 16—8^d

            

Conclusion - Part 1

Given this historical evidence provided by two separate sources as background, the following possibilities of what Love's Labor's Won may have been, or actually be, are addressed in Part 2 of this discussion:

• Was Love’s Labor’s Won a sequel to Love’s Labor’s Lost?, 
• Was it another name of one of Shakespeare’s known plays?,
• Or, was Love’s Labor’s Won an entirely different play of its own?