The Superpower You Can Develop To Improve the Quality of Your Life.
Finding your rhythm in a world out of sync, part 3.
How many of us have tried to reduce our stress and improve our lives by becoming better managers of our time? What if we’re building the wrong skill?
“Cathy needs to learn to pay attention.”
These words, or words to this effect, appeared in almost every one of my elementary school report cards. In grade 2, my teacher became so distraught at my seeming willful refusal to pay attention, that she once stood over my desk with a yard stick and threatened to bring it crashing down on my head if I looked anywhere but at the blackboard or my notebook.
Whatever you may think of my grade 2 teacher’s tactics, the assertion, ‘Cathy needs to learn to pay attention’, remains as true today as it was in those elementary school classrooms of my childhood.
If you were to ask me, what is the one skill that has had the greatest positive impact on my life, I would not hesitate. It is the skill of paying attention.
I use the expression “paying attention” deliberately.
I think of attention and time as two basic currencies of life. Even our language reflects that framing. We talk about paying attention and saving or wasting time.
How building the wrong skill is making us miserable.
Managing time has played a central role in strategies to improve work-life balance. Productivity experts have long focused on the skill of harnessing time as a means to improve performance. And there are good reasons for that. Time is easy to measure against output. It is a reasonable stand-in measure for effort. And as every consultant, lawyer or accountant who has ever filled out a time sheet knows – time is money.
These time management systems have taught us how to time box, time stamp, time crunch. How to plan and measure the day in 15-minute increments. How to cram and wedge and squeeze as much as possible into every day.
But have these systems improved the quality of our lives?
With every time saving strategy and device, we have felt increasingly time starved. Despite the promise that modern technology would create more free time, we seem to have less.
In his insightful book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman says, “The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”
The truth is our lives are not usually improved by the amount of time we have; but by what we attend to in the time we are given.
The problem with trying to harness time is that our time on this planet is finite. We do not get more of it, nor do any of us know precisely how much of it we have left. The more we try to squeeze into the time we have, the more we fray and degrade our most precious resource, our attention.
The currency of greater value is not time, but attention.
Technology companies have figured this out. Organizations have built an entire economy around capturing and monetizing our attention. They’ve devised algorithms to feed us a continuous diet of irresistible content. They’ve created alarms and notifications that interrupt and divert our attention continuously throughout the day. These technologies are not tuned to what we want or need to pay attention to but to our default settings – the things the most primitive parts of our brain cannot resist. These companies have built the means to make their platforms irresistible and addictive. Because, they’ve learned that attention is money.
Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine researcher and author of Attention Span, has been studying our use of technology and its impact on our attention for over two decades. She and her colleagues have discovered that in the last 20 years since they began this research, the average amount of time participants spend on any one screen has plummeted from 2 and a half minutes to around 47 seconds.
Further, they learned that our ability to focus can erode if we continually allow it to be fragmented. Mark’s research, as well as research from other scientists revealed, when you engage in routine task switching and multi-tasking, your mind will ingrain that pattern of choppy focus. Your ability to concentrate will erode. Over time, if the outside world doesn’t interrupt you, your mind will interrupt itself.
Your attention is your superpower.
The good news is, that the ability to manage our attention is a skill that we can develop and strengthen. Attention training and practice are the most effective shields against the known and unknown risks of the attention fragmentation created by how we use our devices and how we operate in a culture addicted to speed.
Attention training develops meta-cognition.
Metacognition is thinking about your thinking – the ability to observe, monitor, understand, and regulate your response to your thoughts. And this is as close to a superpower as anything I know.
You can either be a slave to your mind - its defaults, its endless internal chatter and wandering – or you can learn to work with it. When you can work with your own mind, you can create a more meaningful, purposeful, and joyful life. As Winnifred Gallagher wrote in her book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, “…your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”
Attention is a process of selection and filtering. Your mind not only selects what comes into your awareness, but what does not. It both lights up and suppresses aspects of your experience. As a result, if you can exercise a measure of influence over your attention, you hold the master key to improving your experience and reducing your suffering.
One of the problems with an untrained mind is that we are wired to scan for threat, danger and to focus on strong emotions and impulses, particularly negative ones. As a result, an untrained mind is more vulnerable to suffering. It’s kind of like a toddler in that respect, it has the capacity to wander off but not enough sense to stay out of trouble.
When you train your attention you build three critical skills.
Attention training enhances self-awareness. It enables you to observe and work with your thoughts and emotions in a way that builds clarity and greater equilibrium. It gives you space between stimulus and response and therefore, a greater measure of choice over your actions.
It improves present moment awareness. Attention training enables you to sustain awareness of your present moment experience, where your life actually unfolds. This can help reduce anxiety, and stress, which often arise when we are focused on the past or the future. It also supports productivity and performance by enabling you to strengthen your ability to sustain focus over time.
It improves interpersonal relationships and impact. There is no more affirming gift you can give to another human being than your open, undivided, nonjudgmental attention. As you strengthen your ability to direct and sustain attention, it changes the way you interact with others. You develop the ability to listen and connect with others more deeply. It helps build understanding, empathy, and compassion.
So, how do you train your attention?
Like exercise, training attention is a life-long pursuit.
There are many ways to build this superpower, but perhaps the most ancient, widely practiced, and researched method is meditation. Even a few minutes of meditation a day have been shown to produce benefits such as better focus and concentration, improved sleep, and reduced stress.
Meditation and mindfulness training programs are widely and easily available in most communities. There are also some very good meditation apps you can access from your phone. My personal favorite is Waking Up by
.But for those of you who would rather sit in a dentist’s chair than on a meditation cushion, meditation is not the only way to train your attention. For a list of other practical ways you can improve your attention skills, read my post, 10 Ways To Get the Benefits of Meditation Without Meditating.
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I concur on being present and not being a slave to your mind.
Practicing mindfulness and meditation has helped immensely with observing the here and now instead of experiencing the scattered thoughts of past and developing a counterfactual future.
Being present allows us to pay attention to what is important, to navigate the mind, and take the steps necessary to achieve the future that we want to create.
Here's another little hit of dopamine for you! Thank you for sharing these insights. Very useful as I awaken and build a life of passion and purpose out of the ashes and rubble of my earlier life.