Golly! It's over two months since I started sharing with you my new learning on the engine room of our experience: attention.
My own attention was pulled away with Christmas ponderings, New Year reflections, and the untimely uploading of my TEDx talk! I was concerned that it's launch - just four days before Christmas - would mean it would struggle to attract people's....attention!
However I was blown away to find that it was viewed over 6000 times in the first 24 hours, and now, just eight weeks later, has been viewed over 147,000 times!
Just before I return to the topic of attention, I'd like to say a HUGE thankyou to everyone who did the 'big 3' for me (watching it all the way to the end; hitting 'like', and making a comment). You are part of why its important messages are reaching so many people. Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!!!
If you haven't yet done the 'big 3' and are happy to, here's the link.
A topic for our time
What moved me to get back onto this topic was a recent interview on The Guardian's Full Story podcast called Where did our attention spans go and can we get them back?
It started with the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary's word for 2024 is brain rot. That is, the slush that our minds become when consuming too much low value, low quality content found on social media and the internet - something we can find ourselves doing when we're not being mindful or deliberate with where we place our attention.
Researcher Gloria Mark begins by sharing the data on the average time spent by office workers concentrating continuously on a computer screen. In 2003 the average amount of time spent focusing was 2:30. In 2012 that had dropped to 1:15 and by 2020 it was 0:45. That is, 45 seconds!
This is a problem for a bunch of reasons, but a big one is that this context switching (euphemism = multitasking) is costly. Researchers have known this for a long time. Not only does it tax our attentional resource pool for the day, but it makes us more error prone and less productive. Shining our flashlight continuously in the same direction for an extended period of time is much more effective than switching it on and off repeatedly while moving its beam.
This constant shifting of attention also means we're practising what Buddhists call monkey mind. That is, wearing in a mental habit of letting our minds shift from here to there, to there, to there, like a monkey swinging from branch to branch - impulsive, habitual, on auto-pilot.
Of course the gushing fire hydrant of information constantly bombarding us and the technology that powers it are issues of our time that make this difficult. They are designed to distract us and they are factors that make the practice of wise attention even more challenging.
But those factors are only a problem because we don't know what's going on in our own minds. We're not paying attention to our attention.
It's important!
Back to the book that inspired this focus: Peak Mind. Its author Dr. Amishi Jha sums up why this focus on attention in important. She says:
Attention determines what you perceive, learn, and remember; how steady or how reactive you feel; which decisions you make and actions you take; how you interact with others; and ultimately, your sense of fulfillment and accomplishment.
Has that got your attention? Think about it - our attention determines what we perceive, learn and remember! This is why I'm talking about it as the engine room of our experience.
Dr. Jha says:
Forget the myth that you only use 10 percent of your brain. One hundred percent of your brain is active right now, with all of its 86 billion neurons—organized into nodes and networks—coordinating, enhancing, and suppressing each other......Everything around us is competing for brain activity at all times. This is where attention becomes the superhero.
So, the first point is, attention is powerful - it's the brain's boss - whatever we pay attention to is the lens through which we view the world. It largely determines our experience of life!!!!
It's fragile
Secondly, it's fragile. It can be drained quickly by certain things. Jha refers to three forms of kryptonite for attention:
stress (including high cognitive demands)
threat (including evaluative pressure, tense social interactions, uncertainty)
poor mood (everything from chronic depression to the afterglow of bad news; can send us into loops of repetitive negative thought like negative eddies).
I found this knowledge so incredibly helpful!
About a year ago I had an experience that ticked two of those criteria at once: it was highly stressful, uncertain, and threatening to some cherished ideas I had about myself - the evaluative pressure mentioned above. It was also prolonged - it went on for over a month.
For months after this experience I thought I'd lost my marbles. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't remember things (especially names of things for some reason - it turns out this is a thing) and I couldn't seem to fully settle the body-mind, to be calm. I felt like I was constantly in a state of alert, scanning for danger.
It was like the floodlight was jammed on, the flashlight was sputtering intermittently, and the juggler didn't know what to do. (See this post if those terms don't mean anything to you.)
Conflict states deplete attention
Dr. Jha says that conflict states are a cause of attention depletion. That is, when there's a gap between what's happening and what we think should be happening. Our minds respond in a variety of ways:
resisting mind (wanting it to stop, feeling sadness, fear, worry, hatred etc.);
doubting mind (distrusting our assessment of things or ourselves);
restless mind (uncertain and dissatisfied about what's happening); and
craving mind (wanting more of what's happening).
These states draw our attention back to processing the situation over and over again which depletes our attentional reserves. Once our reserves are drained, we switch to autopilot where our attention is easily abducted by any shiny thing - the crappy snacks, the temptation to buy stuff you don't need etc.
As I read about the effects of this kryptonite for attention I was flooded with relief. I wasn't suddenly suffering from early onset dementia, my mind had been hit by two big waves of attention kryptonite. The effects were slowly dissipating, but it was taking time.
Knowing this helped remove the extra pocket-dose of kryptonite I was carrying around and drip-feeding myself - the stress of worrying that the days of my mind working sharply were over.
I'm going to leave it there for this week so that you have some hope of remembering and using these bite-sized insights.
My key take-aways from this post:
Recognise the three forms of attention kryptonite and their effects when they are present.
Put off important decision making in the midst of these where possible.
Let those around you know that you're currently afflicted in this way so that they don't mistake depleted attentional capacity for lack of care.
More soon, but in the meantime, I hope this helps with your mindfulness of attention.