You Are What You Focus On

What if you are focusing on the wrong things? In this podcast we discuss the concept of selective attention and focus, why we have selective attention, how this interacts with our beliefs and expectations, how it can hold us back unconsciously, and how we can make conscious changes to help move us forward. 

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant general adult psychiatrist with a sub-speciality in addictions who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

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Transcript

This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and related topics. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today we're going to be talking about how we all have selective attention and focus, how this interacts with our beliefs and expectations, how it can hold us back unconsciously, and how we can make conscious changes to help move us forward. 21s When people are going through problems, the advice they receive is often something like look on the bright side. Focus on the positive, or what you think about is what will happen in your life. In these moments, those pieces of advice generally come off like glib platitudes, or perhaps something out of New Age philosophy or something like The Secret. In today's podcast, I'd like to unpack why that advice may be more profound than you think, and how, on deeper analysis, it can reveal a lot about our psychology and how our psychology interacts dynamically with our environments. There's one fact about psychology I wish more people knew. It's that we have an incredibly focused and selective attention. By focused, I mean that we can only pay attention to a tiny, tiny minority of the information that's present in our environment. And that is necessarily so because there is a functionally infinite amount of information in our environment that we could be taking in. Take a look around wherever you happen to be right now. Take a moment to notice how many tiny, small details there are in your environment. If you're in a street you've walked down before, realize how many details and that street you've never in fact noticed before. If you're in a room we spend a lot of time in, take a moment to appreciate how many aspects of the room you never focus on or pay any attention to whatsoever. So there's an overwhelming amount of information in our environments, which is a big reason why we can't pay attention to it all. It's too much for our brains to process. But there's another, more functional reason as well. And this is where the selectivity comes in. 1s Most of the information in our environments is simply unhelpful. It's not obstructive. It's not an impediment. It's simply irrelevant. The reason you never noticed certain corners of your room, or the particular house in a street, or a billion other tiny details in your world, is because they are not necessary to help you achieve your goals. They play no part in your story, your psychological narrative, and therefore they are functionally meaningless to you. So essentially, your brain automatically and mostly unconsciously divide sensory information from the world called extra reception, but also sensory information from your internal world called intersection into three broad categories category one useful or good. Category two obstacle or bad. Category three irrelevant. Don't pay any attention to this, and the vast majority of information, probably like 99%, is put in category three. This really is an extremely elegant and helpful mechanism that the brain has evolved in order to help us navigate our world in accordance with whatever your goal happens to be in any given moment. It's why, when you're hungry and therefore your goal is to eat food, stands out to you in sharp relief over something else, and will be much more distracting to you than if you are not hungry. Similarly, if you are thinking about buying a Toyota and you walk down the street, all the Toyotas will automatically become much more conspicuous to you. And similarly, any obstacles to your goals will stand out in your sensory environment. Probably the best illustration of this is the classic psychology YouTube video, which probably most people have watched by now. The gorilla video, where the audience is instructed to count how many times a ball is passed from one participant to another, and they focus on this task, and then they feel good about this task because they got it right, only to be told at the end of the video that the gorilla, in fact, walked right across the screen, and most audience members failed to notice this entirely. And when you're watching this video, it might seem like a quirky kind of trivial fact about our psychology, but in fact, this video is pointing to these very profound insights about our psychology, which we're discussing today. 1s As with any mental process, many different parts of the brain are involved in selective attention. In particular, the Ras or reticular activation system, which is a group of nuclei in the brainstem, is thought to, among other things, help to filter out sensory information from the environment to prevent information overwhelm. Other parts of the brain are, of course, involved in selective attention, such as the frontal cortex, the thalamus, the parietal cortex. Dopamine in our reward centers is thought to play a big role in holding our attention towards goals. In fact, many researchers studying ADHD suggest that many of the symptoms may be arising from an underactive reward center, which causes people to have difficulty locking on their attention and maintaining focus on goals. Which is why certain drugs that increase levels of dopamine, like Ritalin and Adderall, help a lot of people with ADHD to maintain focus and concentration because they're activating the reward center. 1s So all of that being said, the focus of your attention is constantly shifting in accordance with your goals. But of course, goals exist at different levels. So far we have mentioned short term simple goals like buying a new car or getting some food. Of course, we have goals that are short, medium and long term. We have goals which are not just about satisfying the needs of the moment, but we have goals that are etched in a deeper way into our psyche. And some of these longer term goals we may be unconscious of. As revealed by the psychoanalysts. Indeed, a goal may not even be the best way to think about these long term trajectories, but rather we could talk about it as the fulfillment of a narrative or a script that you have for your life. And that could be a narrative like I'm a winner or I'm destined to be successful. But it could be a much more negative narrative, like people will always ultimately dislike me or I take up too much space. So when referring to this narrative, we're not just talking about goals, but how goals combine with our beliefs to form a set of expectations about how things are likely to turn out for us in small, medium, and large situations in our lives. And all the while our attention systems are being adjusted in concert with these expectations. I'll provide some illustrations of this. For example, someone with social anxiety often possesses the core belief that people won't like them, or worse, perhaps that they are inherently unlikable in some way, the way they would look at the social landscape. Therefore, if they were at a party or a family event or a work conference, is inherently different to someone who has a different set of beliefs, a person with social anxiety is going to be hypersensitive to any signs from other people that their negative beliefs about them are true. For instance, they would be much more likely to focus on a group of people in the environment laughing, and they may even come to the false conclusion that they're not just laughing, but they're laughing at them. This highlights the difference between sensation and perception, which I think we've covered in other podcasts. Sensation can be thought of as the raw data we pick up from the environment, whereas you can think of perception as the impression you get when that data is filtered through your expectations, beliefs and past experiences. So all of a sudden, to the socially anxious person, a group of people laughing becomes a group of people laughing at them, and many psychodrama which confirms their worst fears about themselves. 1s The West aspect of these kinds of processes is that sometimes they can cause us to actually create the outcome we do not want. Going back to the socially anxious person, if they are discouraged because of what they perceive as a group of people laughing at them when meeting other people, this might cause them to be less confident, to take up a less confident posture, to avoid eye contact, to start to leave early. And these signals can all be misinterpreted by other people to suggest that there is actually something wrong with that person. And this can lead them to becoming more and more isolated. 1s These processes are of course, happening moment to moment very quickly. And the frightening thing is, as I mentioned earlier, this is largely happening outside of our awareness. For most of us, this can be detrimental to relationships. For example, when you are angry with a friend or a family member and all you can think of is all the different ways they have wronged you over the years. In this case, your emotions are hijacking your attention systems to hyper focus on all the evidence that this person has been unjust to you, and ignoring all the evidence that this person has actually been a good friend or a positive influence in your life in some way, this can lead to a positive feedback loop where we become more and more angry and self-righteous, and whilst consumed by that anger, we can do and say things impulsively which are very destructive. 1s Often in relationships. It's not the conflicts themselves which destroy the relationship, but the dysfunctional ways we try to handle the conflicts. All of this being said, having an awareness of our selective attention and how it's influenced by our goals, expectations and beliefs opens up a huge opportunity to make conscious choices. Everyone has the ability to deliberately influence all of these mechanisms. You can open up your awareness and attention, you can alter your goals, and you can also shift your beliefs and your thinking. And all of these will combine to shift your perception of events, but also how you behave in different situations, which will ultimately likely lead to a better outcome. This kind of approach features prominently in certain kinds of therapeutic approaches, such as cognitive behavior therapy and neuro linguistic programming, which is an approach made popular by people in the self-help industry like Tony Robbins. This approach, then, can not only help to ease our problems like social anxiety, but it can also be extremely valuable as a tool in trying to achieve more success. 1s A huge part of success is the ability to seek out and perceive opportunities, which will be much more automatic if you feel like success is attainable. If, on the other hand, you want some level, feel that for you success is not attainable or that you don't deserve it, or that success is always a result of cheating. Then your attention systems will unconsciously filter out such opportunities and possibilities, but will instead focus on the obstacles and the impediments in front of you and all the other evidence that confirms your beliefs. Progressing in life is often a potent mix of intention and serendipity. Setting a specific goal, taking some action towards it, and then allowing chance and faith to take their course. But it is much harder to both take intentional action and take advantage of serendipity. If your attention is focused on the wrong things, if, for example, you'd like to get into a good, long lasting romantic relationship, there are any number of things you could focus on. You could focus on how to present yourself in the best possible light. 1s On what kind of person would be the most compatible for you on learning how to meet new people and various other things? You could, in other words, take a more reality oriented approach. And within that context, serendipity has an opportunity to strike. And if your eyes are open, you can seize that opportunity. Conversely, if you focus on how your ex is wrong due on how difficult it is to meet new people, on how you can get into a new relationship with the least possible effort, then your whole psychology, your beliefs, expectations, emotions, behaviors, perceptions will follow suit and you'll be making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself and ultimately going towards a goal that you don't want. There's one more example I'd like to mention as to how you can use your attention to your advantage. And that's, of course, mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is essentially learning to take more control over your attention, both by focusing on specific, relatively innocuous things like your breathing, as well as by opening up your attention in a more panoramic way using a technique called open monitoring, where you just allow yourself to take in whatever sensations you can pick up in the moment. What people invariably find when they try this is that their attention involuntarily goes all over the place. You might start thinking about what you're going to have for lunch, how someone wronged you ten years ago, or the book you've been meaning to read, or any number of different things. You may totally forget that you're trying to meditate at all this insight alone, that your attention can be so out of your conscious control moment. Moment is extremely valuable. But as I mentioned earlier, you are also learning to develop control over your attention, to focus specifically on things occurring in the present in a non-judgmental manner. This is extremely powerful for two reasons. Firstly, because having an ability to quickly and easily focus on the present in any situation will make you a better problem solver, but it also robs your suffering of its two most important ingredients thoughts about the past and thoughts about the future. You will therefore become a person that learns the difference between pain and suffering, and you'll learn that while pain is not a choice, the extent to which we suffer often is a choice. 1s Secondly, by learning to focus on something non-judgmental. You are learning to choose what relationship you would like to have with the things and people in your world. And that's perhaps the deepest point I'd like to get to in this essay, and the point that may expand into its own essay in the future. And that is, we have a relationship to all the different aspects of our lives, our work, our passions, people close to us. By mastering our attention, we can put ourselves in a position to have the relationship with our world that would actually benefit us and hopefully benefit other people as well. Many times in life we walk into things voluntarily, whether that's a job, a university course, a relationship, a friendship. Without realizing we can slip into an unhealthy dynamic with these things. For example, we can start a psychology course because we really enjoy the subject. But as we go through the course, it can become a burden or a chore. We can enter a relationship with someone, but then try and control them because they're not doing what we want. Ideally, we should be striving to set up our work and relationships to be beneficial to all parties involved as much as possible. And this again, is an important ingredient to long term success and psychological health. But before we can get to any of that, it all starts with attention. So to conclude, here are a few take home messages. Be aware of the difference between sensation and perception. Sensation is the raw data, the facts. Perception is the meaning we make of things and the way we slot these events into stories and narratives. When in doubt, try to isolate the facts of a situation to strip them of their emotional and narrative qualities. Be aware that your attention will unconsciously shift all the time. Usually to try and confirm the facts which support your beliefs and expectations, however dysfunctional they might be. Attention is extremely important. It's the fundamental currency that can be used to make our lives better, but it can also be hijacked by things like drugs, alcohol, our own dysfunctional psychology, and even things like social media to hold us back and make our lives worse. We can consciously expand our attention to focus on the things that will help us, and avoid focusing on the things that will hold us back. 1s If we practice having a non-judgmental, present focused attitude in a relaxed, calm environment, then that will carry over to our day to day lives that help us navigate some of life's toughest situations with less stress and ideally, a more reality oriented approach. 1s What do you think? Where do you find your attention goes without you realizing. Are there any things that you're focusing on right now that because you're focusing on them, it's holding you back? Are there things you could be focusing on that would help you in whatever situation you happened to be? You can let us know at Thinking Mind Podcast at gmail.com. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and related topics. If you like it, there are a few ways you can support it. You can share it with a friend. Follow us on social media. Give us a rating wherever you happen to listen. And if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thank you for listening.