Attention Is Your Most Valuable Resource
Attention is a limited resource. Unfortunately, many of us choose to use up this resource in unhelpful ways. But learning to tailor your attention to your best advantage will open up a life of peace, progress and more opportunities.
Controlling Your Attention
Whatever we assign our attention to becomes our reality. This is an obvious but powerful statement. Two people can simultaneously experience the same event yet have their attention focussed on entirely different matters. In this way, what we call ‘experiences’ become malleable objects shaped by our conscious responses and attitudes. In the words of Marcus Aurelius:
“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them.”
One of the greatest goals of Stoicism is to realise that whatever may happen in the outside world is independent of our behaviour. We have the choice over how to handle a situation, whether good or terrible and a choice of how we treat a person.
A Brighter Day
This is where attention comes in; we also have the choice of what we assign our attention to.
Put yourself in the following scenario: you’re on your way home from work when you encounter a horrendous traffic jam. The weather is very hot.
Now, you could choose to emphasise thoughts of not getting anywhere, curse drivers around you and frown at the temperature. But consider now you shift your attention to the scenic view of the city, the delicious meal you’re going to cook tonight and looking forward to changing into some shorts to enjoy bathing in the sun.
When thinking about little, pleasant aspects of our lives, we can become distracted from the current circumstance we are in. This is most helpful in unpleasant situations. By guiding our attention elsewhere, we can forget the frustrating aspects of what we’re currently dealing with, thereby becoming less affected by it.
If you can imagine drunk people laughing away stuck in an intense thunderstorm, the concept is not too dissimilar.
Thinking about successful and comforting ideas and ignoring the unnecessary, annoying details is one of the best ways to gain control over your mind. In the words of Epictetus:
“You become what you give your attention to.”
Tailor your attention towards pleasant aspects of your daily experiences and you’ll discover the hidden beauty in your life.
Attention and Ignorance
“Attention is narrowed perception.”
Those are the words of philosopher Alan Watts. Watts uses the analogy of a dark room to explain the streamlined viewpoint of attention — conscious attention, he explains, is like shining a thin beam with a flashlight in a dark room.
Our experiences are defined by selective attention. Some details must be ignored. Just as a harpist will only pluck certain strings, we can not experience the full picture all at once.
What’s important to understand here is when we draw attention to something, we simultaneously ignore other details. A person with an upcoming exam will likely notice less on a walk than a person having just finished an exam.
Blinded Attention
We seldom realise that our brains have a limited capacity; we can only process so much information.
The Invisible Gorilla experiment perfectly demonstrates this. The study involved participants watching a video of basketball players passing each other two balls wearing black and white shirts. Participants were then asked to count how many times the white team only passed the ball.
The estimates were irrelevant — little were they aware that 50% of people failed to see a person clothed in a gorilla suit walk directly across the screen halfway through the video and stamp its chest.
When our mind is occupied by little stresses and worries, we can be blinded by what’s right in front of us. What we feed our attention on grows, and in a similar way:
Sometimes the best way to make a difficult decision is to go on a long walk.
Attention in Reverse
Not all problems can be instantly solved by our conscious attention — sometimes it’s best to leave them for the subconscious mind to work on in the background.
Several studies demonstrate this principle. When faced with a difficult task, putting your mind on standby mode for a while and reviewing the situation with a fresh mind may be the best route to take.
The important role of the subconscious mind here may explain the philosophical idea of ‘letting go.’ Solutions rarely arise whilst we’re grasping for them; their appearance often takes us by surprise.
This reversed logic is an interesting example of when less attention is better. Learn to optimise your attention to your mind’s needs and you’ll discover new ideas that were once inaccessible.
False Attention
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explores the volatile nature of our attention, judgements and beliefs.
When we are presented with information, unless it is obviously false, our fast brains have no way of processing whether or not we are dealing with the truth. It is only our slow brains, what Kahneman refers to as System 2 thinking, which has room for doubt and critical analysis.
This may have been harmless in pre-Internet times. But enter today’s data-rich, digital world and there is plenty of room for danger. Misinformation isn’t the only culprit here; the titles of many news articles and YouTube videos hold a misleading appearance inviting us to make false assumptions.
The format of this media is perhaps the biggest concern — as we scroll down a news or video feed, we are exposed to a series of statements that attempt to summarise the content of the media. The issue is we’re rarely given the full picture — the snippet of information the title involves can easily bring us to wrong conclusions.
A Lack of Judgement
Consider you scroll past a video titled: ‘Why we don’t need 8 hours of sleep.’ Without any further inspection, you may be tempted to care less about the amount of sleep you get tonight or throughout the week. Despite the heaps of evidence supporting sufficient sleep, this miniature belief based on very limited evidence (a video title) can tinker with your mind, stemming false credibility.
This is just one example amongst millions on the web. If things persist the way they are, our beliefs may be defined more by clickbait than approved research.
Despite seeming inescapable, solutions do exist: try scheduling a news digest session or disabling the abundance of news headlines on your device’s homepage.
Look after your attention and keep your mind clean from the murkier waters of the web.
Pay Attention
Over the coming days, notice what you’re paying attention to and what you are not paying attention to. Adjusting these two factors will create an immense impact on your life and redefine your daily experiences.
