How do I stay focused when I pray?

Number two, you need to have focus when you pray. It does not matter how long you are praying for. What matters is that you are focusing on the words of prayer. The Orthodox Church primarily falls into two recipes for this. Number one, the prayer book by Jordanville Press that has morning and evening prayers in it. That is the go-to prayer book, with all the prayers laid out for you.

Number two is the prayer rope, praying the Jesus prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Either one is going to be very beneficial. There will be times when you become overly familiar with some of the prayers and may need to pray an akathist for a short period. Those are nuances you talk over with your spiritual father. But whatever you are praying, when it is time to pray, you have to be focused, dialed in, putting in all of your best mental energy.

This is why the saints so often committed to praying in the middle of the night. Many of the saints kept an all-night vigil. It was not that they stayed awake all night. Typically they slept three or four hours, then woke up, and they drank coffee. They did whatever they needed to get themselves into the right mindset where they felt energized. We read about this in the life of St Joseph the Hesychast: the whole brotherhood would wake up in the middle of the night at 1:00 a.m., drink coffee, get energized, and then hit their prayers.

It is so key to understand that there is a physical component to prayer. And why did they pray as the first thing they did in the day? Because that is when our mind is the most focused and acute, when it does not feel exhausted from a whole day of activities. What you are doing has to be the only thing you are doing. Praying while walking, praying while driving, praying while cooking, those are all good activities, but you need to pray when you are praying.

That is the key. Whatever it takes to get you into that state where you are ready and mentally focused and able to give your best mental energy to God, that is the most fruitful experience of prayer I have ever had in my life: when everybody was asleep, I woke up before them, got into my little prayer corner, and did my prayers with no distraction, no thought for the day.

One tip I give everybody: you are going to have thoughts, things you need to do that day, bills that need to get paid, something random your brain brings up. It is helpful to have a little notepad and a pen, and you just write those things down. You have the thought in the middle of your prayers, I was supposed to call somebody back yesterday and I forgot. Write it down, call so-and-so, put it down, and your brain will feel like a burden lifted off of it.

It says, okay, now we do not have to worry about that, we already wrote it down. Otherwise it will start nagging you, and you will start thinking about it. You do not want that. You want the best, most focused time of prayer.