May I have your ATTENTION, please?

A Piece of our Attention

In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded with information throughout our waking hours, by our television sets, computers or the ubiquitous mobile phone. The internet made information transmission easy, rapid and with the ability to penetrate the remotest corner of the world. I am sure many of you will agree with me that although we have to navigate sheer volume of data every day, only a handful of them are actually essential, most are unnecessary and some are purely fraudulent. However whatever may be their purpose, one thing is common - they are all craving for our attention.

In our personal lives, we have our families, children, parents, friends, work, health, community, environment and many different domains and each seeks a share of our attention. If we focus just on a particular area for long and neglect others, the consequences are inevitable. Our health may suffer, our relationships may lack warmth and affection, we may become distant and disconnected from the people we love and who love us back, our work may appear unfulfilling and so on.

Connected or disconnected?

Even inside the psychological space of our minds, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories and other private experiences are constantly in want of our attention, especially the ones which we call as negative thoughts and emotions, because they are the ones causing us a lot of discomfort but instinctively instead of turning towards our pain, we often run away from it, which doesn’t reduce it but paradoxically takes up our energy, our attention in fighting with the unpleasant thoughts and emotions and memories.

Attentional Capacity

Now the fact about human attention is it is not unlimited. We have a limited attention capacity and once we reach that capacity due to any reason, our minds become exhausted and our ability to focus diminish, making us more error-prone. Our attention also varies with our health conditions, illness, our mood state, emotional state, fatigue, dehydration, body temperature, external ambience, sleep quality, and not to mention many psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety disorders, ADHD and so on.

Imagine our attention like a flashlight which we can point in different directions. We can also narrow or broaden the beam depending on our needs. We can choose to focus on one object or appreciate the entire room. However, in many cases, if this beam gets fixated on a particular incident or situation or thought or emotion and this is where our problem is likely to begin. For example, in clinical depression, our attention is focused only on the unpleasant aspects of our lives, on our negative thoughts and emotions. In anxiety disorders, our attention is focused on our fears- fears of future, fear of a particular situation or incident, etc. In addiction cases, our attention is focused on the particular substance of use.

However it also does not work well if we try to pay attention to multiple commitments at once. It is like swinging the flashlight rapidly on many objects at once. The beam will shift rapidly and we won’t be able to notice anything properly. We may become frustrated, which in turn consumes more attention, setting up a vicious cycle inside our minds. Now to escape from this cycle, we may be attracted towards things that seem stimulating (means arousing interest or attention) like watching movies, scrolling through social media, drugs or alcohol, partying, going on vacations etc. For a while, we may feel good because of the novelty of the experience, but soon enough as our attention keep dwindling, we may lose interest in those experiences too. So we may go into a downward spiral till we hit a rock bottom in terms of our health or finances or relationships or we may continue living a life pushed around by unwanted information and mindless consumption, without finding any purpose or meaning to live.

Being Flexible

This is where mindfulness skills are very essential in managing our attention and directing it to things or activities that truly matter to us. They are also helpful in identifying our values, what we really care about than getting distracted by what others find interesting. Most importantly, they help us in developing a very strong psychological tool called Psychological Flexibility, which is our ability to think and feel with openness, our ability to direct our attention to the present moment, here and now, non-judgmentally, and focus on things that truly matter to us. The world may be full of information but we can make the choice where to pay our attention.

- Dr. Suhasini