When I used to do a lot of fasting, I learned something very useful about controlling where my focus goes.
During fasting, the hardest part isn’t the physical discomfort.
Especially with short fasts.
It’s managing your own mind. Where your thinking goes.
Thoughts about food show up long before your body actually needs fuel. Way before hunger is real.
And the fastest way through a fast doesn't depend on more willpower. It’s all about attention management.
Get yourself busy with something low-key.
Admin. Cleanup. Simple work that absorbs you just enough.
When your attention is occupied, there’s no space left to obsess about food.
I also noticed something else.
When something in my life fully absorbs my attention, intense work, a personal situation, an emergency, I naturally forget about food entirely.
Not because my body needs less fuel.
Because my spotlight is pointed elsewhere🔦
Your attention works like a spotlight.
It’s a spotlight you can control.
Whatever you shine it on gets more thinking, more energy, more bandwidth.
And if you want something not to dominate your mind (food, worry, anxiety, distraction), the solution isn’t to “stop thinking.”
It’s to start thinking about something else.
TI use this principle when I work with entrepreneurs on work-life integration, burnout prevention, and actually enjoying the life while they’re building, I often give them a simple exercise.
I call it Time Budgeting. And it's all about managing spotlight.
You get 168 hours per week.
Not expandable.
Not extendable.
Not transferable.
Before the week starts, list the areas of your life you want to matter, grow, or maintain - work, health, relationships, learning, recovery, play.
Then yourself ask 1 simple question:
Which of these 168 hours will each area actually get?
Because if something gets none, none will happen.
Just like hunger during fasting fades when it gets no attention.
What you don’t give the spotlight to slowly disappears.
So, over to you, dear reader,
Want to get through a fast?
Get busy.
Want more of something in your life?
Decide when it gets the spotlight of your attention, and schedule it.
