Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

by Winifred Gallagher

“implicit” information, or material that you don’t explicitly attend to, can slip into your brain without quite reaching your conscious awareness yet weakly affect your memory and experience.

To make a long story short: if you want to master and retain certain material, from a bird’s name to your Speak French Like a Native tapes, you’d best really pay attention to it in the first place.

AFTER CONSIDERING THE idea that your life is the sum

of what you focus on,

The things that you focus on,

will win turf in your brain and influence over your experience,

Most important where the quality of your life is concerned, this imaginary ramble shows that by choosing to focus on something specific—birds, and certain ones at that—you had a very particular experience in the park.

In short, to enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention.

Inside Out: Feelings Frame Focus

Just as it orders your experience of the physical world, attention organizes your ideas and emotions, giving you an inner reality that’s comprehensible but also limited.

“You have to prioritize your options in life, because you simply can’t do everything.

You’ll organize your day around that focus and see other things in that context.”

According to psychology’s “negativity bias theory,” we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re simply more powerful than the agreeable sort.

Looking at the dark side of things can also confer a certain objectivity;

the depressed person’s bleak focus on life tends to be more realistic than the sanguine person’s upbeat view.

Notwithstanding the flinty advantages, focusing on negative emotions, particularly when they don’t serve their primary purpose of promoting problem-solving, exacts a high cost: you spend a lot of time feeling crummy even if your life is pretty good.

Carl Jung makes an important point that’s often overlooked: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it—a fact that has important implications for your daily experience.

When you feel frightened, angry, or sad, reality contracts until whatever is upsetting you takes up the whole world—at least the one between your ears.

Just as bad feelings constrict your attention so you can focus on dealing with danger or loss, good feelings widen it, so you can expand into new territory—not just regarding your visual field, but also your mind-set.

“Good feelings widen the lens through which you see the world,” she says. “You think more in terms of relationship and connect more dots.

That sense of oneness helps you feel in harmony, whether with nature, your family, or your neighborhood.”

Where operating in the internal world of thoughts and feelings is concerned, however, staying focused on the optimal target requires more effort,

to protect the quality of your experience, you must shift your focus from dull or dispiriting ideas and feelings that serve no useful, problem-solving purpose, as many if not most don’t, and concentrate as much as possible on the productive, life-enhancing sort.

Thus, the first step toward getting on with your work despite a financial setback or repairing a relationship after a nasty quarrel is to direct—perhaps yank—your attention away from fear or anger toward courage or forgiveness. Thanks to positive emotion’s expansive effect on attention, your immediate reward for that effort is not just a more comfortable, satisfying affective state, but also a bigger, better worldview. Where the long-term benefits are concerned, you’ve come closer to making a habit of the focused life.

W. H. Auden put it, “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”

“How much do you attend to your desire to be a certain way? How much of a disparity between your real and ideal self is there? As a focus, it may or may not be important to you, but it’s an attentional issue.”

At first glance, choosing to assign a few moments each day for stopping to smell a fine vista’s literal or figurative roses may not seem like a big deal. However, it’s just such efforts to pay rapt attention to things that give you pleasure and help you feel and function well that make the difference between the good life and the kind that William James described as feeling like “the dull rattling off of a chain.”

make lemonade” proves, the idea of restoring emotional equilibrium by refocusing on a problem in a different way is not new. What is is the impressive research that increasingly shows that Pollyanna’s insistence on “looking at the bright side,” even in tough situations, is a powerful predictor of a longer, happier, healthier life.

what happens to you, from a blizzard to a pregnancy to a job transfer, is less important to your well-being than how you respond to it.

an emotional “reset button.” If you want to get over a bad feeling, she says, “focusing on something positive seems to be the quickest way to usher out the unwanted emotion.”

people who are depressed and anhedonic—unable to feel pleasure—have particular trouble using this venerable attentional self-help tactic.

they suffer from a dearth of happiness rather than a surfeit of sadness:

It’s a hard thing to accept, but as Fredrickson says, “Very few circumstances are one hundred percent bad.” Even in very difficult situations, she finds, it’s often possible to find something to be grateful for, such as others’ loving support, good medical care, or even your own values, thoughts, and feelings. Focusing on such a benign emotion isn’t just a “nice thing to do,” but a proven way to expand your view of reality and lift your spirits, thus improving your ability to cope.

When your lifespan seems limited, as it does among elders, your attention sensibly shifts to emotional satisfaction in the here-and-now and to worthwhile “sure things” rather than novelty.

“Age does not entail the relentless pursuit of happiness, but rather the satisfaction of emotionally meaningful goals, which involves far more than simply ‘feeling good.’”

WHATEVER YOUR TEMPERAMENT, living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time, which would be both futile and grotesque. Rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.

what you focus on also affects who you are.

what you pay attention to, and how, can actually change your brain and thus your behavior.

what you habitually attend to affects your identity.

the experience of navigating London’s vast tangle of streets actually causes the brains of its taxi drivers to develop an enlarged hippocampus, which is involved in spatial processing and memory.

In short, it seems that simply going about your business, whether it’s driving a taxi or spotting pottery shards, teaches your brain what to attend to and customizes your nervous system to suit your experience and modify who you are.

experience in general and attention in particular affect your brain and behavior. This physiological as well as psychological shift sounds dramatic, he says, but shouldn’t be so surprising, because your nervous system is built to respond to your experience: “That’s what learning is. Anything that changes behavior changes the brain.”

Practices that feature neutral, single-pointed concentration, such as mindfulness meditation, particularly improve your ability to focus as you go about your daily life.

the world you experience is much more subjective than you assume,

attention is indeed a trainable skill.

Popular wisdom has it that the brain is neatly divided into the analytical, verbal left hemisphere and the intuitive, creative right hemisphere, and that some individuals’ behavior is more influenced by one side than the other.

The more difficult your task, for example, the more both hemispheres are likely to get involved.

“people who have greater activation in very specific left prefrontal regions—not the whole hemisphere—report and display more of a certain positive emotion—not simply ‘happiness’—that’s associated with moving toward your goals and taking an active approach to life.”

average subjects who had completed an eight-week meditation course showed significantly increased activity in the left prefrontal