In the Spotlight

We often think about attention as a kind of light beaming out from our minds. An analogy might be a torch beam that moves around in a dark room, highlighting whatever you point it at, but as with all analogies it has limitations! The most important difference is that the torch makes no response to what it shows, be it a chair or a tiger or a corpse. What our minds add to the process is perception, toned by emotion, and it is emotion that draws us to look longer or to look away. Attention might be given in an objective torch-like way, but that would be rare – our response to just about everything has an emotional tone of some sort.

The more important aspect of the process from our perspective is whether or not our attention becomes caught by what we perceive. A practical example illustrates this: you might be sitting quietly reading a book. Where is your attention? Perhaps you’re having to read it for an exam, but you’re not really that interested. The emotional tone will be tedium, and your attention will be easily drawn away to anything you can see or hear – in other words, it isn’t concentrated on the book, but diluted across anything around you or running in your mind. At the other extreme, you might be so emotionally engrossed in the story that you’re not aware of anything else, and your mind fills with the sadness or tension that the story is about. If someone calls your name you might hardly be aware of it, and will only reluctantly switch the beam of attention away from the book.

There will nonetheless always be some awareness of someone calling to you. In the Challenge of Change training we use a continuum of sleep, and only in the lowest level of deep sleep are you oblivious to stimuli – even in dreaming sleep people will make some response. To take another example, driving a car. Even when you’re really listening to music or the radio, if a car does something unexpected up ahead you’re likely to react. You could think about it as a portion of the torch beam constantly monitoring the world for change, and when that happens in the CoC model, you wake up, your attention shifts to what’s changed and you respond accordingly.

Or rather, you might respond accordingly. One of the major causes of accidents is drivers not responding appropriately or quickly enough, and one reason for that is their attention having been caught. That’s why countries ban the use of mobile phones while driving. Carrying out a conversation absorbs your attention – in other words, it is captured, and you’re no longer driving, just chatting. The problem is you could become just as absorbed in thoughts, especially ruminative ones about emotional upsets; governments can’t legislate against rumination!

We can think about attention as moving on a continuum, from being open to the world to being closed to it. You can see this for yourself: choose a word on the page you’re reading, and focus on just that word – concentrate your attention on one word. Then be aware of the writing on the rest of the page. Then be aware of the room around you. At each stage, detail is diminished but the scope of your awareness grows – it would be like a torch where the beam can be focused into a thin pencil or opened out into a wide beam.

The switch from open to closed can happen very quickly. A good example is the survivor of a ferry disaster, who described being aware of the whole rapidly-changing situation but also noting where the exits were. He also described how some of the other passengers were either rushing about in a panic or were frozen by fear. His attention remained controlled, and he showed what we would describe as presence of mind – his attention was in the present, here and now, moving rapidly into the past or future but retaining the present as the frame of reference.

What these examples include is the context. Some situations may change very rapidly, but since our reactions are governed primarily by electrical nerve signals we’re able to respond quickly enough to most things. Think back to the last time you were startled by something. How long did it take for your body to react? The link from perception to physical fight-or-flight requires a nerve signal to the adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline, but it happens so fast it seems instantaneous.

The complication is the emotional component. In the ferry disaster, the survivor reported feeling no fear at the time, whereas the attention of the panic-stricken or frozen passengers had been caught by emotion. This is not to say that emotion is wrong, and even in a detached response there will still be emotion. It comes back to the old adage of the tail and the dog – all too often we lose the detached perspective and the tail of emotion ends up wagging the dog of the mind, rather than the dog wagging the tail.

Giving names to the points on the continuum, your attention might start off switching between being wide open to briefly focussing on one feature or another. It might then home in on just one thing, and with increasing focus it becomes concentrated. Attention is still controlled and given intentionally, but the trap is allowing your attention to be snatched away and captured. It might be captured by an idle thought about your next holiday, a state we call waking sleep, but if negative emotion is added it becomes rumination. This is what stress is: ruminating about emotional upsets.

Emergencies are not everyday occurrences. Using an everyday example, your boss might give you a restructuring project to work on. You evaluate it by drawing on your experience and thinking about the outcomes, wide awake and keeping the present as the frame of reference – this is what we call reflection, and in mindfulness terms your mind is full of controlled attention. As you work on it, the project seems very much like the last restructure, same old same old, and your attention drifts off into what you’re going to be doing at the weekend. Attention has been snatched away into waking sleep, mind is filled with dreams, and work stops. Then your boss calls in to say things have changed, the restructure plan is needed for a meeting that afternoon. Panic! Mind fills with fear of not delivering, anger that you’re expected to do everything yesterday, etc. Attention has been completely hijacked by negative emotion and you feel stressed out.

The solution: wake up, take back control of your attention, put the issues into perspective, let go of the negative emotion. Does ruminating ever help? Take these four steps and do the job without the drama.