How To Pay Attention
+ Upcoming Intro to Mindfulness Course Online
LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE
(If you are reading this in your email you may need to click through to the Substack website in order to listen to the audio)
Cast your mind back to your school days.
How often were you told "Pay attention”?
How many times did you hear something along the lines of “Come on now, focus”?
Were you ever taught how to pay attention though? How to focus?
How much class time was spent on learning this skill that seems so essential to learning?
Things might be different now (I realised recently I left secondary school almost 17 years ago) but if you’re like me then you were never taught this skill in school. We were expected to just automatically be good at it. Paying attention is something we can inherently do but it is also a skill - one that we can practice to become better at.
We all have the ability to pay attention, some more so than others. It is a natural human skill. Think about the last time you got totally absorbed in a good movie, series or book. You were probably paying close attention without even having to try too much.
The issue isn’t that we need to learn how to pay attention from scratch, it’s more that as we get older we have more and more distractions and we need to develop the skill of choosing wisely where to place our attention, learn how to hold it there and how to get it back to where we intended it to be when it wanders off. In a world where we have constant distractions available to us its becoming more and more important to intentionally develop this skill.
Accepting Distraction and Mind-Wandering
One of the first things we need to accept is that our minds love to be busy. Our brains can be thought of as problem solving machines that jump into imagined futures to prepare us for potential danger (“What if …”) and go back to the past to help us learn from our experiences (ever find yourself mentally replaying an argument you had with someone and coming up with the perfect witty comeback…6 months later?).
This is absolutely fine. Having the ability to imagine the future and take precautions or to replay past experiences and learn from them is vital.
The Benefits of Developing Our Ability To Pay Attention
"My life is full of terrible misfortunes, most of which have never happened" Michel de Montaigne
What’s the point? If it’s natural and even helpful for our minds to wander then why do we need to train our attention?
The issue arises when we spend too much time in the future or the past and lose the ability to focus on what is directly in front of us. Not only does this excessive mind-wandering make us less effective in school or work for example, it also leads us to missing out on life in the present moment and not being able to focus on what is important right now.
When the mind is left to its own devices it will often dream up potential future threats or ruminate on difficult experiences from the past rather than imagine something pleasant. Again, this is actually helpful at times but we can’t change our past and so many of our worries for the future are completely unfounded or are out of our control. Also, it is difficult for our minds to tell the difference between a real threat/danger in the present and a memory or hypothetical one. Our nervous system will often sound the alarm in a similar way for both real and imagined situations leading us to experience a stress response even when no threat is present.
How Do We Train Our Attention?
In many mindfulness programmes the body scan meditation is introduced early on. One of the reasons for this is because it is a great way to develop skill of attention - intentionally placing what we might refer to as “the spotlight of attention” on one area, practicing holding our attention on one thing at a time, and moving that spotlight around intentionally.
I’ve included a body scan meditation below for you to try out if you like so you get a better idea of what I mean. It’s helpful to have concepts in mindfulness explained to us but the real learning comes from doing the practices.
All the guidance is in the recording below but just a quick word before beginning. Meditation is a way to develop the skill of attention and learn how to focus. But it is not just about focus. The nature of the awareness we bring to our experience is also crucial. We encourage a kind, curious, non-judgemental form of awareness. To come back to the “spotlight of attention” metaphor, we are not shining a harsh, unforgiving light on ourselves, more like a warm, gentle lamplight.
(If you are reading this in your email you may need to click through to the Substack website in order to listen to the audio)
If you’re coming to this on a day when there’s a lot of pain or discomfort in the body or there are some particularly strong, difficult thoughts or emotions about then maybe it’s worth just listening to the practice for now to get an idea of what it is about and coming back to actually follow along at a time when there is a bit less going on for you.
3-Week Introducing Mindfulness Course
Starting Monday 8th of April I’ll be teaching a three-week Introduction to Mindfulness course online. This programme was designed by the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation as a way to help beginners get started in mindfulness and as a way for people who may have some meditation experience with apps etc to deepen their practice.
The three sessions will take place on Monday nights between 7.30-8.30pm and the course will be fully online. Between sessions there will be some home practice to do each day and I’ll be providing all the materials for this including recordings of guided meditations.
Dates: 8th, 15th, 22nd April
Price: €60 (Concessions available, please feel free to ask about these)
If you’d like to know more you can email me at goldenalfie@gmail.com or click here to book a free 1:1 consultation.