![]() ![]() Keep in mind that differentiating between awareness and attention has to be done gently. Applying this to your everyday life requires practice, so give yourself some time. Hopefully this exercise will help you to experience the difference between being aware of something and directing your attention towards it. Just let it hover in awareness without trying to push it out…Īnd gently let go of directing attention towards it… Just do your best to let it be there without directing your attention towards it… In the moments when it comes back into awareness, it might not be possible to tell the difference between awareness and attention, and that’s okay don’t worry too much about exactly where that line is. Eventually it will leave your awareness again… Again, just let it hover in awareness without directing your attention towards it. If you stop directing your attention towards the thing you’re trying not to pay attention to, that thing will eventually wander out of your awareness…Īnd every so often it’ll come back into your awareness, or perhaps your attention will shift back to it for a moment, and that’s fine. That’ll happen eventually, but you’re not forcing it… If it lands on something else, that’s fine. This is a passive process, not an active one you are letting go of actively directing your attention. You don’t need to grab onto something else just let go of that…Īllow your attention to wander. Directing attention is like mentally holding onto something. I’m not asking you to actively direct your attention elsewhere, just to let go of directing your attention towards that. You’re going to let it be there, and gently let go of directing your attention towards it… It won’t leave your awareness it’ll sort of hover there. Now what I want you to do is to stop directing your attention towards whatever that is… Let’s start by paying attention to whatever it is you don’t want to be paying attention to. With all that said, here is how to stop paying attention: I believe a combination of theoretical and experiential learning is particularly helpful with this topic, so I encourage you to read the theoretical article in conjunction with doing the exercise below. A theoretical discussion of that difference can be found here the following exercise is meant to provide an experience of the difference. The key to solving this problem is differentiating between something being in awareness and directing attention towards it. Sometimes people feel like they can’t stop paying attention to something this is especially a problem for people with sensorimotor OCD. Auschwitz-survivor Viktor Frankl wrote “Everything can be taken from man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstance, to choose one’s own way.As discussed here, directing attention is a controllable mental process, and as discussed here, directing attention is part of our definition of rumination. When you pay attention, you are devoting your thoughts, energy, and time to what is happening in the present. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.”Įvery single day, your life is driven by what you’ve paid attention to and what you haven’t. In contrast, the things that you don’t attend to in a sense don’t exist, at least for you.Īll day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. When you focus on a stop sign or a sonnet, a waft of perfume or a stock-market tip, your brain registers that ‘target,’ which enables it to affect your behavior. “That your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore is not an imaginative notion, but a physiological fact. In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher writes: Yet, I think that if we just let the year go, if we don’t reflect on all that happened, we may miss all that 2020 taught us-if we paid attention. It may have been filled with just too much uncertainty or loss. For many, 2020 may have been the kind of year that we simply want to forget. A time to look back and consider all that happened over the past 12 months how events surprised, and transformed, how they wounded and how they strengthened. For many, New Year’s is a time of reflection.
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