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:

In the Challenge of Change Resilience Training we dispense with the conventional idea of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ stress. The distinction makes no sense – if they’re both called stress, how do you know the difference? We resolve the issue by distinguishing instead between pressure and stress, which is not mere wordplay: pressure can be defined precisely, as a demand to perform.

The primary biochemical mechanism that facilitates fight-or-flight involves activation of the h-p-a axis — the link between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, and the two adrenal glands above our kidneys. However, we’re not necessarily running or fighting for our lives — the fight-or-flight is simply a consequence of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, and it will happen even when we’ve been in waking sleep and someone calls our name. In this case the physiological effect will be very small and hardly