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Attention in Crisis
Oftentimes, we might experience our attention as being in a crisis mode: We can’t quite grasp it fully. Why does this happen? Well, there are many circumstances that actually deplete and challenge attention. So what are those circumstances? There’s a shorthand that we can use to think about this. The term is VUCA and it’s an acronym V volatile, U uncertain, C complex, and A ambiguous. The world today feels like it’s a constant VUCA environment. The shifting landscape, the bombarding of information toward us, and always having to work in sort of a 24/7 consuming environment. And if we want to be resilient to those circumstances, we may need to train attention so that it can operate well even under them. But there’s another challenge that our attention faces and why many of us feel like we’re in an intentional crisis. And that I would say is because of growing technology demands.
Now I’m not just talking about having a cell phone or being on the internet. I’m talking about the attention economy, which means that oftentimes you’re engaging with software or platforms in which you may actually be the commodity that is being brokered. Your attention specifically is the product in those circumstances. And when that happens, everything is being done, not just by a person or two, but by teams of engineers to actually capture your attention and keep it there. Frankly, the brain was designed to be lured by — for our evolutionary success and survival — certain kinds of information: threatening information, novel information, self-related information, and even things that are fun and enticing. Now think about your social media use. What is it that keeps you on whatever platform you love, for hours on end, maybe without knowing? Probably some combination of all of those things. And that’s not by accident. Now that may seem very, very disempowering, like how we’re ever going to fight that fight? And what I describe in Peak Mind is another approach we can take where we’re not attempting to fight anything we’re trying to strategize and train our brain so that we do not need to fight. But that takes a very different approach. And that does take our dedicated training.
Meta-Awareness
We do live in a digital soup, so to speak. But even if we could magically make all of our technology disappear — throw our phone in the nearest lake, move away to a place where there were no external distractions — we’d still be faced with a distracted mind. In fact, we’d still be in a situation where our mind would wander often. And there are wonderful tales of this going back to medieval monks, where they talked about becoming monastic so they could focus on God, but instead of prayer, they were focusing on lunch and they found this very irritating. The fact that our mind wanders is actually baked in to the way the brain operates. It’s not going away, even if our technology did. So what are we going to do about it? We can cultivate something called meta-awareness. What is meta-awareness? It’s the ability to be aware of the contents and processes of what’s going on in our mind moment by moment. We’re monitoring our own mind. In some sense, we’re paying attention to our attention.
We all have the capacity to do this, but we don’t do it very often. And under circumstances that are stressful, overwhelming, in a digital sea, we may not do this very much at all. But if we can cultivate this capacity, it ends up it can benefit us with our mind-wandering when we’re quietly by ourselves or when we’re interfacing with our technology and social media. What does that mean? That means we’re aware of, for example, picking up the phone. We’re aware of putting our code in. We’re aware of clicking on the app. We’re aware of every time our finger touches the screen to scroll forward. Now, why would that awareness be beneficial? Because every time we are aware, we can choose a different thing to do next. We have more choice points and with more choice points, we have more control. That’s what I mean when I say we can own our attention. We have it available to us because we’re aware of where our attention is. So meta-awareness may be the thing that arms us against the influx of technology in our lives. And those moments when mind-wandering can make our minds slip away from us when we need it most.