Narrow Attention: The Hidden Cause of Stress and Suffering

These internal processes that disturb the peace of the vast majority of people have common hidden roots, and they result from a dysfunction in one of the most important functions of the mind, which is attention.

What Is Attention?

According to the American psychologist and philosopher William James, attention is: “The absolute control of one goal or idea among many goals or ideas on your mind. That is, being distracted from several things to focus on one thing precisely.”

The way attention works is reminiscent of a flashlight. Imagine that you are in a dark room with a flashlight. Determine the place to which you direct the light inside the room, and you will see that your attention will go every moment to the spotlit by the lamp beam specifically, while everything else is dark.

So, attention is the ray of light under the control of your consciousness, with which you observe yourself and the world around you. The absence of this ability will make life almost impossible. Thus, the way you use your attention determines how you see yourself, others, and your surroundings.

In this article, you will get to know:

• The radical cause of negative thoughts and recurring fears.
• The reason why it is difficult to get rid of disturbing feelings.
• How to use attention to bring calm and harmony into your life.

Attention Characteristics

Attention is seen as a continuous process. One of its forms can be described as being narrow and focused on one point on the one hand, but broad on the other hand. Also, when your field of attention is narrow, your focus is on a limited part of your experience. The source of your attention obsess all or parts of your consciousness disproportionately.

However, when your attention span is wide, your awareness is evenly distributed over each part of the experience.

Let's take some simple practical examples:

Now you're reading black words on a white screen with your attention focused on what's written, yet you can expand your focus and pay attention to the screen you're reading from and your surroundings at the same time.

If you want another example, pay attention to the moon in a landscape photo. Now direct your focus to the earth, then extend your attention to the moon, the earth, and the surrounding space, and notice the difference in perception.

There are huge implications for everything you feel or you think of, and do related to this simple cognitive exercise. In fact, the way you use your attention can make the difference between happiness or displeasure, between suffering, or safety and wellness, between mental harmony or chaos, and that's what we'll learn its reason in the next lines.

Narrow Attention: The Hidden Cause of Stress and Suffering

Ideally, you should use attention in a conscious way and narrow or broaden it according to the activities you do. There are cases in which one type of attention is more effective than others in carrying out certain tasks.

Unfortunately, for evolutionary and cultural reasons, people tend to overuse narrow attention, and it is a technique associated with emergencies and danger. If there is supposed danger, attention is actually reduced and focused on the potential threat.

Imagine that you are walking down a dark street, and suddenly you hear a noise. Your attention will automatically focus on the source of the noise, and your body will enter a tense state, preparing for fight or flight.

However, your attention will gradually return to a more benign and relaxed state after making sure that there is no danger. This mechanism is very effective if activated when there is a real danger.

Unfortunately, due to the negativity bias, the mind instinctively tends to focus on the worst, to sense danger everywhere, and this state of alert is activated when the dangers are not real most of the time.

When do problems arise?

You spend most of your life in narrowed attention mode. So, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and other physiological values are overworked, and this state of attention, which is supposed to last only for short periods, becomes chronic.

Maintaining a state of narrowed attention requires expending a lot of energy. This is because it becomes a chronic condition, and this often leads to the accumulation of psychological stress. Also, a prolonged state of stress may have many negative consequences for your health.

Numerous studies have shown that stress causes long-term changes in the physical structure of the brain, which exposes people to serious problems.

What does it mean to be trapped in a narrowed attention mode?

It’s easy to find out if you have a narrow attentional use dysfunction. The mind in this case is often preoccupied with worries, problems, and feelings of anxiety.

Do you know when you are completely absorbed in your negative thoughts? When do you keep thinking about the same things? When attention is frozen in this position, it is common to feel tense, anxious, and nervous. But emotionally, you may have feelings of resistance and evasion.

Why is it so hard to get rid of these dysfunctional mental patterns?

As mentioned earlier, if you suffer from this attention disorder, you may find yourself stuck in negative thoughts, fears, and moods. So, to counteract this annoying mental activity, you need to distract yourself by thinking about something else, or maybe replace a negative thought with a positive one at best.

Unfortunately, this approach is ineffective for the simple reason that it operates within the same mental configuration that generates the problem. It intervenes at the level of content rather than structure where problems arise.

The physicist Albert Einstein put it so well: "Problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that gave rise to them."

Fortunately, this state of dysfunction can be corrected with attention training, a procedure that addresses the real cause of the problem.

Enhance brain function to work harmoniously

The effects of attention on the health of individuals were carefully studied in the 1970s thanks to the use of neurofeedback technology, a device that visualized the electrical activity of the brain directly on a computer screen.

The brain contains 100 billion neurons, which communicate with each other with electrical signals called brain waves, and these waves have several categories, and are closely related to the thoughts you think and the sensations you feel.

It was discovered that by controlling attention in a certain way, it is possible to create a specific pattern of brain waves. Different regions of the brain produce alpha waves in a psrefect harmony, and this particular 'electrical' configuration is associated with extremely beneficial effects in individuals.

When you are in this situation:

1. The brain processes information more efficiently, which speeds up the learning process.
2. You naturally get rid of stress and disturbing feelings.
3. You feel safer, more relaxed, spontaneous, and free.
4. Physical pain disappears.
5. You take advantage of the potential of the right brain.

Attention training is at the heart of any kind of meditation practice.

As mentioned earlier, attention training enhances an exceptional state of harmony and mental efficiency, which is why the benefits of meditation are no longer surprising when viewed in this light. When you are checking your body, you are really relying on attention as you do in breathing meditation, and it is at the heart of any form of meditation as well.

The goal of mindfulness practice is to focus attention on the present moment. Attention training has identified the key mental function of meditation and explored it with a depth and subtlety that no other meditation practice has achieved.

An investment in modern meditation practices

Unlike traditional meditation practices - which were born thousands of years ago, when you lacked what you know today about the brain, and current technologies for self-evident reasons - attention training was born and developed by observing the effect of attention on individuals by means of neurofeedback, and this made it possible to improve its practice in a very effective way from the very beginning to obtain the greatest benefit in the shortest possible time.

In fact, this practice has countless benefits in a person’s life, and here are the most important ones:

1. It teaches you to live in the present moment and brings peace to your life

The first obstacle to mindfulness is thoughts, and these thoughts actually, when they emerge on the surface, they drag you with them to worry about something that might happen in the future, or to think about something that happened in the past. Thoughts stimulate narrowed attention, which in turn stimulates them.

When your attention span is wide, the mind automatically calms down, and the thoughts it generates are confined. Then it is easier to focus on the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle, undoubtedly one of the most important authors to have published on the benefits of mindfulness, found useful information after a period of persistent depression and despair when he deeply realized that the voice in his head did not represent him, and that there was no resemblance between him and that voice. At that moment he felt safe and well, and the world seemed to him a place full of vitality in a way he had not known before.

What happened to Eckhart was essentially the transition from a state of chronically narrowed attention to a state of wide attention, with which it is common to feel harmonic and attuned to one's surroundings.

This "liberation" happened to him automatically, but it does not happen in this way for ordinary people unfortunately, and the defect in attention must be corrected with special training.

2. They make you greater and stronger than your problems

When you find yourself in a state of chronically distressed attention, it's easy for your mind to get carried away by its own fears and overreacting. The critical voice within you commands all of your attention that, like Eckhart and millions of people around the world, so you can relate closely to.

Otherwise, when your attention span is wide, the faint voice in your head or any other pain or unpleasant experience becomes a small part of your limitless multisensory experience, and because these experiences occupy a small space of your holistic consciousness, their negative impact is reduced. If not completely gone.

If your mind gets rid of this negative rumination, then living in the present is the natural outcome, and all this without having to fight negative thoughts, or think positively.

In conclusion

The way you pay attention shapes your world and the perceptions you build around it. When you're stuck in narrowed attention mode, you only perceive a small part of reality, often dark and saturated with negativity.

While expanding your attention span allows you to break out of this perceptual prison, and moving from a small mental space that often accommodates only problems and fears to a broad field of consciousness prevailed by harmony. Thus, it is easy to act spontaneously to achieve what you want.