Most of us don’t require F1-level focus to get through our days. But we all struggle with distraction — and the techniques that drivers use to optimize their performance can help anyone to be more intentional and effective in all sorts of situations. We asked McLaren Formula 1 team driver Oscar Piastri (that’s him, in the video above), along with a sports psychologist and an attention expert, for tricks to stay on track.
Visualize important challenges in advance.
F1 racers use simulators and mental rehearsal ahead of an event so that when they are driving, they can focus on driving, rather than wondering what’s around the next turn. “We’re going on the simple premise that a lot of planning and practice and rehearsal makes things more automated,” said Robbie Anderson, a sports psychologist at Hintsa Performance in Finland who works with multiple F1 drivers. Racers visualize options, and then visualize doing the most favorable option several times, until it feels automatic.
Piastri — who is currently No. 4 in driver standings for the 2024 season with two wins, and who is racing in the Las Vegas Grand Prix this weekend — said he spends about a day training in a simulator before each event, “getting a fundamental idea of what to do and where.”
The most effective kind of visualization recreates the situation as realistically as possible, Dr. Anderson said. “You’re trying to pick out key sensory information — the feel of the steering wheel, the closeness of your car.”
You can do the same thing when you’re preparing for a presentation or a job interview by creating a mental image of what you will see looking out from a stage, or of the person who’ll be interviewing you. The idea is “to put yourself in the first-person perspective of a given moment,” Dr. Anderson said.
Talk yourself through it.
Dr. Anderson coaches drivers to use self-talk to help them on the course. This can be instructional (“See the target smooth through the exit”) or motivational (“Game on!”). It can be a personal mantra or a reminder, at a certain corner, to “take a breath.”
“If you don’t have these helpful language cues primed, the brain will run with the default self-talk, which isn’t always that helpful,” Dr. Anderson said. Negative instructions (“Don’t put it into the wall” or “Don’t overrun the corner”) are especially self-defeating, since the very thing you want to avoid is already in your head. “If you say, ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant,’ there it is,” he said.
Pre-race rehearsals can also function as a type of mindfulness training, which has been linked to moderate improvements in attention, executive control and cognitive flexibility. Just as people who meditate learn to refocus attention on their breath, F1 drivers rehearse staying focused on all aspects of their ride, “and as soon as their attention deviates, they’re pulling it back in,” said Daniel Smilek, a professor of psychology who runs the Vision and Attention Lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Prepare for the unexpected.
Racing is “filled with things you can’t control,” Piastri said. “Whether it’s the performance of your car, a pit stop, the weather, what other people do on the track — having acceptance that you can’t control that stuff is quite important.”
Drivers need to anticipate when their brain is likely to “kick out” — go into a reactive, emotional state — and find ways to counter that, Dr. Anderson said. Getting cut off, for example, can make a driver angry. “In those moments of high adrenaline, you’re more at risk of making an error,” he said; to quickly get back on autopilot, drivers might tell themselves, “That happened — just race.” This same advice can work in your own life, when you’re playing an amateur sport or just driving in traffic.
Shift focus without breaking it.
On the 40th or 50th lap of the same track, zoning out is a risk. “It’s easy to start thinking about completely random things,” Piastri said.
Neurologically, our brains seem to crave distraction, Dr. Smilek said. “The system may be set up to prevent us from focusing on a task for a long time, as a functional mechanism to keep us from getting in a rut,” he explained. Momentarily diverting attention from the main task to “check in” on a related sub-task can help to break up the monotony and allow us to maintain focus longer, he added.
F1 drivers aren’t just statically watching the track in front of them, but dynamically shifting attention to their cars’ performance, changing track conditions and radio communications. In the same way, during a long meeting, you can take your focus off the person talking to sharpen your notes or gauge other attendees’ reactions.
“The key is to find the variability within the task that you’re doing, and then focus on the different aspects of that,” Dr. Smilek said.
Find your motivation and flow.
Drivers like Piastri often describe entering a flow state during a race, where they can sustain attention for a very long time and it feels effortless. “One of the primary factors that seems to drive these states is intrinsic motivation,” Dr. Smilek said. “If you’re intrinsically motivated to do a task, you’re much more likely to be able to sustain attention on it, and it feels effortless for a longer period of time.”
If you really need to focus, it might help to ask yourself, “What’s in it for me?” When organizing the garage, for example, think about all the ways you’re going to use the reclaimed space. Flow states are also rewarding in themselves, Dr. Smilek said. They feel satisfying, “so they kind of perpetuate the cycle.”
Flow occurs when you are working to the limits of your skills, but not pushing so hard that you fail a lot. For Piastri, it comes more easily on “street circuit” courses like the one in Singapore than it does on less complicated, high-speed tracks like the one in Monza, Italy. “You don’t have that much time to get distracted by other things,” he said.
Remember to recharge.
Dr. Anderson’s work with drivers involves four phases: pre-race, race day, review and recharge. He follows a similar four-part plan when he coaches business executives. “Everyone just wants to do one, two and three,” he said. The crucial recharge phase is often overlooked.
Research shows that intentional breaks improve attention and learning. One simple reason is that they help to reduce stress. “Stress negatively affects the brain — primarily the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in attentional control,” Dr. Smilek said.
While being fast and “doing things right technically” are essential to win, Piastri said, the mental game gives you the edge. “When there’s a lot at stake, if you’re having a bad run of things, being mentally resilient makes a big difference to the result.”
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