The Focus Report: What Practitioners Observe About Adult Focus Rituals

Although the most common explanation for focus loss is phone distraction, practitioners cite a larger mental barrier.

In a May 2026 survey of 106 licensed and allied health practitioners across the United States, 64% cited anxiety and racing thoughts as the biggest challenge for adult clients struggling with focus, while 50% named digital interruptions. Most respondents (100 out of 106) shared specific layered transition rituals their clients use to signal a move into deep work. We coded their responses for the patterns below. This is a small, anonymous, self-reported practitioner survey, not a clinical trial, not nationally representative, and not evidence that Olander products produce therapeutic outcomes.

Who Ran This Study and Why

Olander Earthworks makes the Wonderscape: a round Baltic birch tray containing shallow sand with hand-made concrete sphere designs you roll across the surface. People use a Wonderscape wherever it fits into their lives; on desks, kitchen tables, and in therapy offices.

Therapists, coaches, and occupational therapists describe clients who struggle to start, who circle for forty minutes before beginning a task, who reach for the phone instead of the work. We wanted to understand patterns within the data: what practitioners observe, what they recommend, and what clients report actually helps them enter focus. This report shares what they told us.

Who Responded

We recruited respondents through professional health and wellness networks. The sample includes licensed therapists or counselors (27%), allied health professionals and other working roles (33%), psychologists (8%), occupational therapists (8%), life or productivity coaches (6%), psychiatrists or psychiatric nurse practitioners (6%), educators or learning specialists (5%), workplace wellness or organizational practitioners (5%), and researchers (2%). Experience levels range from early-career to twenty-plus years. The full sample breakdown appears at the end of this report.

Key Findings

• Sixty-four percent of practitioners cite anxiety and racing thoughts as the most common barrier their adult clients face when trying to focus. Fifty percent named digital interruptions, fourteen points behind.
• Most (100 out of 106) practitioners wrote about specific transition rituals their clients report relying on to enter focus states.
• Practitioner-described rituals layer two to four small elements at once. The five element categories: environment reset, body element, breath, single goal, and a low-stakes start. No element appears alone.
• The practitioners describe the conventional path to focus in reverse: the body moves first, and motivation arrives once the work is already moving.
• Many practitioners described tactile or body-based actions as part of the mini rituals they have seen work, especially for clients with ADHD and other neurodivergent profiles.
• Sixty-five percent of practitioners said client interest in flow or deep focus has increased over the past three years.
• Most practitioners use the word “flow” loosely to mean sustained focus and task absorption. Only eleven percent reserve it for the strict Csikszentmihalyi state.

Anxiety Tops Practitioner Ranking of Barriers to Focus 

We asked practitioners which primary barriers their clients report when they try to focus on a task.

The results reveal that anxiety and racing thoughts are the biggest challenges. Next, 50% said digital interruptions interrupt focus goals. Physical discomfort and other issues were ranked as less reported. The full ranking appears in Table 1 below.

This finding reframes the dominant story about focus. The conventional fix for an attention problem is to address the screen: install an app blocker, take a digital break, or put the phone in a drawer. Practitioners see the phone as a real barrier. They see the state the person brings to the phone as the bigger one.

 

Begin Before You’re Ready: How the Path to Focus Inverts

We gave practitioners an open-text box and asked them to describe the most useful transition ritual or focus-entry technique they had seen a client use. One hundred of 106 wrote answers. Forty independently described the same process across clients.

When we think about motivation, we generally believe that motivation sets the stage for focus. Yet the survey results show us that practitioners observe a different path to focus that begins with starting before you are motivated or before you feel ready. 

Three practitioners put it this way:

“Most people think flow comes from motivation or inspiration, when it usually comes from removing distractions and starting before you feel fully ready.”

“People wait to feel ready, but the brain often needs sustained attention first before immersion kicks in. The real skill is lowering the friction to begin.”

“It’s the kind of thing you have to make happen without trying to make it happen.”

At its core, the goal is to lower the cost of starting and combine it with a discipline to begin before your mood says you are ready. A mini ritual is a working form of that idea as expressed by practitioner observations. It gives a person a way to begin when motivation is absent.

Inside the Mini Ritual

Five elements recur in the free-text responses, combining into the mini rituals practitioners have seen work. 

Breath is the most common anchor

Practitioners described breathing more often than any other technique. Box breathing. Three deep breaths. Rhythmic breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing. Breath paired with grounding. Practitioners rarely described breath alone. They almost always paired it with one other thing: a goal statement, a sensory anchor, a movement, a change in the room.

Engage the body

Many practitioners share a small, repeated physical action as the main way clients enter focus states. Examples include drumming fingers against an arm, tracing the grooves of a basketball while staring at the square on the backboard, splashing cold water on the face, using noise-canceling headphones, holding a stress ball, and wiggling toes against the floor. Although the actions are small, they engage the body. Practitioners describe these as a sensory bridge. 

Reset the environment

A second pattern centers on making a change in the physical space. This can be clearing a desk, closing browser tabs, putting a phone in another room or in a drawer, or starting a tried-and-true playlist. Practitioners describe this action as a signal that removes choices to narrow focus. 

One named goal

Consistently, the survey results cite a single concrete goal, named and documented in a meaningful way. Clients may write their intended outcome by hand or say their goal out loud. Some set a timer or commit to a small beginning action. This goal sets a frame that is achievable. One coach described a startup founder who would write “the single outcome I wanted from the session and the very next action to take.”

Rely on a low-stakes start

Because starting can feel like a massive barrier, practitioners recommend finding ways to create a low-stakes start. They shared examples like permission to do imperfect work for a short, fixed period. This is similar to the concept of beginning with a bad first draft as the goal outcome. 

We classify the main responses into the following table of focus entry state elements. 

 

Practitioner-Reported Misconceptions About Focus

We asked practitioners what most people get wrong about how to enter a flow state. The responses cluster around four misconceptions.

Misconception 1: Flow can be forced

The single most common misconception: that you can will flow into being. Practitioners describe clients who try harder, push through, and white-knuckle their way toward focus, then produce the opposite of the state they were chasing. One wrote: “Most people wrongly believe that flow is forced through sheer willpower, when it actually requires deliberate removal of cognitive friction and a precise alignment between the difficulty of the task and the individual’s current level of skill.”

Misconception 2: Motivation comes before focus

Closely related, and named almost as often: the belief that you must feel motivated, inspired, or ready before you begin. Practitioners describe the inverse relationship with focus and flow. Motivation most often happens during the early stages of the task instead of preceding the task. 

Misconception 3: Conditions must be perfect

In the data set, a group of clients was documented as believing that focus requires a silent environment, a clear schedule, an organized desk, and the right day. Practitioners describe clients whose conditions always fell short of perfect, and who learned to enter focus anyway, by reducing the conditions they required.

Misconception 4: One method works for everyone

The results agree that there is not a single method for everyone. Practitioners describe matching the technique to the person and adjusting it over time. As one wrote, “There is no one right way to enter a flow state. Everyone is different and needs to feel comfortable trying different techniques until they find what works for them.”

How Practitioners Describe Flow

Over time, flow has changed in meaning. The word flow was first defined in a practitioner context with the definition provided by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s and 1980s: a specific state that emerges when challenge meets skill, attention narrows, and time feels different. Practitioners have come to use the word more flexibly, closer to how people actually use it. Now, when people talk about flow, they often relate it to deep focus, sustained attention, task absorption, or the feeling of being in it.

Table 3 shows how practitioners in this survey understand the term.

 

When practitioners in this survey talked flow states, most meant sustained, focused attention. 

Rising Interest in Flow and Deep Focus

Sixty-five percent of the 106 practitioners reported that client interest in flow or deep focus has increased over the past three years. Forty-nine percent said somewhat. Sixteen percent said significantly. Twenty-nine percent saw it hold steady. 

Wonderscapes fit naturally into the broader category of low-stakes tactile rituals: a few concrete forms, shallow sand, and a screen-free pause before the next task.

Perfectly imperfect, by design.

How This Survey Was Conducted

This survey was conducted in May 2026 with 106 practitioners across the United States. We recruited respondents through professional health and wellness networks. They include licensed therapists and counselors, psychologists, occupational therapists, coaches, psychiatrists, educators, and workplace wellness practitioners, with experience ranging from early-career to twenty-plus years. The full breakdown appears in the table below. Open-text responses were coded for themes. The barrier question asked practitioners to select the most common barrier they encounter; the ranking reflects practitioners' judgment about prevalence across client populations.

Sample composition

 

The 35 “other” respondents included physical therapists, registered nurses, behavior analysts and behavior technicians, massage therapists, speech and language pathologists, a substance abuse counselor, a certified athletic trainer, a crisis-line advocate, a case manager, and a clinical psychology doctoral student. 

Suggested Citation

Olander Earthworks. (2026). The Focus Report: What Practitioners Observe About Adult Focus Rituals. Published May 2026. olanderearthworks.com.