Practice
Old Concentration Exercises That Still Work
A little over a hundred years ago, a shelf of small, earnest books promised to teach ordinary people how to control their minds. They carried titles about will, memory, personal magnetism and concentration, and they were sold through mail order catalogs and the back pages of magazines. Much of what they claimed has aged badly. Some of it has not. Buried among the promises of success and influence are plain attention exercises that look surprisingly close to what a modern meditation teacher or a sports coach might give you. This article looks at where those exercises came from, what a few of them actually ask you to do, and what we can and cannot say about whether they work.
The Mind-Training Boom of the Early 1900s
The books came out of the New Thought movement and the wider self-improvement culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New Thought taught that the mind shapes health and circumstance, and many of its writers believed that a trained mind was a more powerful one. If thought mattered that much, it made sense to practice holding a thought steady.
One of the most prolific writers in this world was William Walker Atkinson, a Chicago author who published a large number of books under his own name and under several pen names. A book called The Power of Concentration, published in 1916 under the name Theron Q. Dumont, is one of the best known of these manuals. Dumont is widely believed to be one of Atkinson's pseudonyms, though the book itself presents Dumont as a separate teacher. Either way, the book is a good example of the genre: short chapters, a confident tone, and a mix of moral advice, claims about mental power, and practical drills.
It helps to separate those three strands. The moral advice is a matter of taste. The claims about mental power, such as the idea that concentrated thought can influence other people or attract opportunities, are beliefs that have never been demonstrated. The practical drills are a different matter. They are simple, cheap, and testable in your own life, and they line up reasonably well with what later researchers learned about attention.
What the Exercises Actually Ask You to Do
Most of the drills in this tradition share a structure. You pick something small and boring, you give it your full attention for a short time, and you notice each time your attention slips. The boredom is the point. The exercises train the act of returning, not the pleasure of the object. Here are several of the classic types, described in plain terms. Exercises of these kinds appear in Dumont's book and in other manuals of the period, sometimes with small variations.
- Sitting still. Sit in a comfortable chair and see how still you can keep your body for a few minutes. No fidgeting, no adjusting, no scratching. You will discover how many small movements you make without deciding to.
- Watching the fingers. Hold your hand in front of you with the fingers spread and keep your eyes on them, slowly and deliberately closing and opening them while giving the movement your complete attention.
- Holding a glass of water. Fill a glass with water, hold it out at arm's length, and keep it so steady that the surface barely moves. Your hand becomes a gauge of your attention.
- Following a clock. Watch the second hand of a clock or watch go around and think of nothing else. When another thought arrives, note it and go back to the hand.
- Holding an image. Look at a simple object, close your eyes, and try to keep a clear picture of it in mind. Open your eyes, look again, and repeat.
The manuals usually suggest starting with a few minutes and increasing slowly. They also tend to recommend doing the drills at the same time each day. That advice holds up well, because short, regular practice is easier to keep than long, occasional sessions.
Why These Drills Make Sense
Notice what all of these exercises have in common. They give the mind a single, clear task and an immediate signal of failure. If you lose focus while holding the glass, the water ripples. If you drift while watching the clock, you suddenly realize the hand has moved on without you. That fast feedback is the same principle behind much modern skill training: you cannot improve what you cannot notice.
They also build a habit that matters more than raw focus, which is the habit of catching yourself. Almost everyone's attention wanders. The useful skill is noticing sooner that it has wandered and bringing it back without fuss. The old writers often framed this in the language of will power, as though the goal were to force the mind into obedience. A gentler framing works just as well and is probably more accurate: you are learning to notice, then to return, again and again.
What Research Says, and What It Does Not
None of these specific exercises, as far as we know, has been tested in a controlled study under its original name. So it would be wrong to say that "science proves" Dumont's drills work. What we can say is that the broader practices they resemble have been studied a good deal.
Psychologists have shown that mind wandering is extremely common. A widely cited 2010 study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, which sampled people's thoughts through a phone app during their daily lives, found that people's minds were wandering a large share of the time, close to half of the moments sampled, and that people tended to report being less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not. That study does not tell us how to fix the problem, but it does suggest the old writers were right that untrained attention drifts constantly.
Research on meditation, especially focused attention practices where you rest attention on one object such as the breath and return when you drift, is the closest modern relative of these drills. That research is large and uneven. Some studies report small improvements in attention and in emotional well being, while reviews often point out problems such as small samples, short follow up, and difficulty designing a believable placebo. A fair summary is that brief, regular attention practice appears to help some people in modest ways, and that bold claims go well beyond the evidence.
The claims in the old books about concentration giving you influence over others, or drawing money and opportunity toward you, are a separate matter. Those are beliefs from the New Thought tradition, not findings, and there is no good evidence for them.
How to Try Them Without the Baggage
You do not need to accept the philosophy of the old manuals to borrow their drills. A sensible approach looks like this:
- Pick one exercise, not five. The clock or the glass of water are good choices because the feedback is so clear.
- Start with three to five minutes a day. Short sessions you actually do beat long sessions you skip.
- Count the returns, not the failures. Each time you notice a stray thought and come back, that is one repetition of the skill you want.
- Keep a short note of how it went. After a few weeks, look back and see whether anything has changed in your everyday focus.
- Stop or adjust if it makes you tense. These drills should be calm, not a contest with yourself.
People with attention difficulties, anxiety, or other health concerns should treat these as a supplement to proper care, not a replacement for it.
A Practical Takeaway
The early twentieth century mind-training books mixed real insight with claims that do not hold up. Their simple concentration drills are the part worth keeping. They are free, they take minutes, and they train a useful habit: noticing when your attention has slipped and bringing it back. Try one exercise for a few minutes a day for a month, judge it by how your ordinary focus feels, and leave the grand promises on the shelf where they belong.