What if every day you had an attention budget? Would you spend it carelessly or use it with purpose?
When people first start practicing mindfulness, they often realize how distractible, random, scattered, and even chaotic attention can be. Our minds tend to be filled with whatever is most captivating. Or if it’s left to wander, habit takes over, and we follow well-worn grooves.
You’d never treat your money the same way, leaving it lying around carelessly or letting other people take it and use it as they wish. And yet, that is exactly what we often do with our attention: let other people decide where our attention will be focused. And this costs us.
If your attention is constantly drawn to every notification on your phone, for example, you’ll likely end up distracted and exhausted. Notifications, by their nature, are designed around powerfully capturing your attention. If it’s social media, you may get sucked into a vortex and absorb whatever your media streams feed you, which will be driven by algorithms designed to first capture and then keep your attention.
Maybe this seems like a radical idea, but you can choose where to place your attention. You can choose to focus on pleasant or unpleasant experiences. You can attend to your internal experience or the outside world. You can even choose which sense—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, bodily sensations—to use.
Amishi Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, has spent her career studying attention. Her classification of attention as three different types is one useful way of understanding how important this capacity is to our functioning.
1. Alerting attention: our alarm system
Our mind and body possess an elaborate, hard-wired alarm system that continually monitors for things that need our attention. Mostly things that require a quick, often automatic judgment: pain, threats, unexpected change. This alarm system is probably not trainable.
2. Orienting attention: our flashlight
Once alerting attention has drawn our focus, orienting attention operates a bit like a flashlight, moving a beam of light onto whatever we’re attending to so we can see it in greater detail. When the alarm system goes off, the flashlight reorients toward a pang of physical pain, the car that cut us off on the highway, or someone calling our name.
But we can also choose to turn the flashlight toward something that we like or want: a message from a friend on our phone, for example (which might take our attention away from reading the words on this page). Finally, we can orient attention outward to something important that is being said or inward to how we feel as we hear it.
3. Executive attention: juggling
Executive attention is how we work with information, take time to think before acting, resist temptations, plan, reason, choose the information we need, and mentally solve problems. There is so much information to juggle, and this is why Amishi Jha uses the analogy of juggling—we’re keeping all these balls in the air, making decisions all the time based on which balls are up and which are dropping down.
Psychology has yielded some important insights about executive attention. We can only juggle so many balls at a time. Executive attention takes up cognitive resources, which are limited.
Specifically, attention relies on working memory, which has only so much capacity. There is only so much information we can process at any one time. Our ability to juggle is much worse if we’re stressed, our alarm system is activated, we’re tired, or intrusive thoughts are pulling on our attention.
A whole range of factors affects our ability to juggle, including how many things are competing for our attention at any one time and our personal history. Executive attention is something we can become much more familiar with, and I’d argue we can shape it to a significant degree through mindfulness training, although the research on this is still ongoing.
Attention Essential Reads
So, attention can be an alarm system, a protector, a flashlight, and an anchor, grounding us in the here and now. It can also be a way of opening new doorways, helping us see things afresh.
Mindfulness and attention skills
Here is Sophia, a woman describing a riverside walk she has taken many times but is now taking with her partner.
I was walking along the Thames with my partner, who is an art collector; we’d just been to an art exhibition. At one point, he stopped, and we looked at the river—I guess in the same way we’d looked at some of the paintings.
It was late winter or early spring, and it had rained a lot, so the river was running full and fast. There were so many colors and shades in the river—browns, greens, even yellows. The water’s surface was moving, and in many ways, with small and large eddies, and toward the bank, there were back eddies. The winter sun, low in the sky, was casting shadows on the water that you had to do a second take to see.
In short, there was so much to see, which, until he stopped, I had barely noticed. Right there, next to the towpath, it was like looking at an impressionist painting, but it had come to fully animated life; it was beautiful, interesting, textured, and it changed moment by moment.
I slipped my hand into his, and we walked hand in hand, with a real sense of intimacy not only with the world around us but with each other, too. He approached the whole walk with a curiosity that was catching. I had done that walk many times, but he brought an energy and vividness to moments that I would have let slide by unnoticed.
In that riverside walk, Sophia’s partner demonstrated how pausing and focusing transforms something everyday into a memorable experience. Mindfulness involves allowing attention to reveal the richness of each moment. If your attention were an asset like money, you’d take care of it, keep it safe, and use it well. What would it be like if you treated your attention like your money? Perhaps your life would be enriched—yes, enriched.
If some of this seems a long way from where you are, don’t worry. Chapter 2 of my new book, Mindfulness for Life, offers a whole range of ways to train attention, both through mindfulness practices and in everyday life. You can use these skills to gather your “scattered mind,” stabilize, and choose how to use your attention. Attention is a foundational skill for life, one that can transform your experience every day and is essential to planning your future—the next minute, hour, month, year, or stage of life. This skill-building needs to be at your own pace, one step at a time, learning mindfulness for life, for life.
By learning attention skills, we can see things afresh and empower ourselves to live more meaningfully—able to plan and connect deeply with others and the wider world.
Start small. Next time your attention is hijacked, maybe turn off your phone, pause, tune in to what’s happening, and then, with kindness and discernment, invest your attention wisely. You might find yourself richer for it.
This post was excerpted from my book, Mindfulness for Life (Guilford Press, 2024).
