What To Do If You Can't Get Your Attention Off Performance

September 3, 2025

If the only thing that you can focus on is pain or the only thing that you can focus on is performance, it may simply mean that you need more going on in your life to be able to put your attention or to be able to put your focus on. And I understand this very well because this was me a while ago. I was an athlete. The only thing that I cared about was my performance. The only thing that I cared about was my training. And that was the only thing that mattered for me.

When I was in that position, everything became magnified. So if something was bad, it became magnified as worse than it was. And if it was good, it became magnified as better than it was. And there were these huge ups and downs with it because I did not have anything else going on, so I had this hyper-focus on this one thing.

And what that actually does... in the sense of pain, and also your performance, is going to create those things as sticking more than they otherwise would, right? If you have five different things going on, like you have your sport that you care about. You have school that you care about, or whether it's school or some type of job or some type of work that you care about, or you have relationships that you care about.

When you have all these other things that you care about, it helps to keep it in perspective and it will actually help you to heal and rehab faster when you have those other things going on because you're not putting a bunch of attention on one thing that doesn't need that much attention. You're not making it bigger than it is.

Because when you make it bigger than it is, your body will literally lay down more receptors to get pain or to get whatever it is that you're looking for, your body will literally lay more of those down. But if you have this wide array of things that you're going towards, then you're not going to put as much attention on them and so not as many of those are going to get laid down.