Your Greatest Asset(?)

Your greatest asset is your attention. Specifically, what you pay your attention to, and how you pay it. I know this sounds like overreach but I don't think it is.

When it comes to a good life, I believe it's more valuable than time or money. When it comes to psychological health, I've found it's greater than your reason, emotion, or memory.

This is because without attention you can never know your experience, at least not meaningfully. For this reason alone, it's at least near the top of our psychological capacities.

Of the mind's core workings, it's also one you have real influence over, and can reliably learn to control.

So if you are struggling psychologically. Whether it's anxiety, depression, or whatever. Learning to harness our attention is key to finding the way out.

It's the gateway to the "self"

To really understand attention, and its importance, it probably doesn't hurt to think a little about how and why it evolved in the first place.

Let's begin at the beginning. Ok, maybe not the beginning since no one really knows for sure, so let's start big picture.

The entire universe is moving and transforming energy. And since energy can't be destroyed, it's always transferring from one object to another.

Life on Earth has evolved to capture that energy and use it for its own good. It's also simultaneously evolved to protect itself from expressions of that energy that might be harmful. Such as getting crushed by heavy objects, etc.

Over millions of years our ancestors' brains evolved their own ways of tracking all of this energy transfer. They learned to track and react to this movement going on all around them. They were looking for the good while avoiding the bad.

Our ancestors were paying attention, but it was automatic, and not something to be thought about consciously.

But then, some million years ago or so, our ancestors began to evolve towards something truly extraordinary. They began to develop an ability to not only notice the objects of their attention, but notice the fact that they were paying attention at all.

How quickly did they change? We don't know. But over the course of hundreds of thousands of years they developed something like "self consciousness." Their "minds" had become objects for their attention.

And more than that, they learned to share with each other the things that were on their minds. They began to share not just the "what", but their thoughts about the "why" and "how" as well.

Up until this point, our ancestors lived by instinct. They evolved particular habits of behavior that helped them survive long enough to reproduce. Things would move and we would react.

But now they could actually attend to their thoughts and feelings about the world. They could imagine future movements and work with others to either prepare for, or create, that future.

As much as I think my dog is like me, Scarlett can't reflect on why the squirrels bother her so much. That's because, as far as we know, and it's still an open question, the ability to consciously reflect on the what, why, and how of our attention is a power limited to humans. Or so we believe for now.

And it's easy to take this power for granted. That's because we sense and react to the world so quickly, so habitually, that there's often no need to ask, "what just happened?"

But once we step back and attend to our experience — an entire world of the self becomes available to us.

Like noticing when we are hungry or need to go to the bathroom, our attention can learn to witness our thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes, and fears.

And each mental pattern means something. Something often connected to our needs for safety, connection, or independence. And in this way, our attention is the gateway to the "self."

Attention to the self can change the self itself

It reads a bit like a riddle doesn't it? But I believe it's true.

But what do we mean by "self"?

By "self" I mean two things. The first thing I mean is the self as we experience our lives on the inside, our subjectivity.

The other way in which I mean "self" is the mental activities that create our subjectivity.

Imagine you have been invited to a party by your new neighbor. It's the night of the party, you are walking in with your date, and you recognize a car belonging to your ex parked in front of the house.

You might suddenly experience dread, or maybe joy. That would be your experience as we understand the "whole" self.

But why are you having that experience? Well, it might have something to do with your memory of your ex, or your beliefs about why they left the relationship. It could be any combination of mental factors, arising from your memories, beliefs, etc.

And it's happening automatically. So quickly in fact, that our automatic and instinctual reaction goes unnoticed.

But if we can slow down and pay attention to our experience, we open up the possibility of being in a relationship with those different workings.

"Wait a minute. I'm really nervous all of a sudden. I wonder why?"

We begin to reflect. To use our attention to notice the varied processes at work.

"Why am I nervous? That car looks just like my ex's. I wonder if that's it?" We notice a shift inside our chest. "Yeah. I think that's it."

And it's at this hinge that we enter into a bona fide relationship with ourself. A hinge that makes psychological change possible.

I feel stuck...

Writing this, I want to say something to tie it all together, bring the neuroscience in, and end it. I think I'm feeling impatient, because as much as I want to communicate this idea I'm aware that my brother is coming to the house later today. This means I need to clean the downstairs toilet, or my wife might get upset.

Now that I'm noticing this stuckness, and sharing it with you, I'm feeling a little less tight in my gut.

I'm paying attention to my experience and I'm letting my gut guide me.

But what do I need to write next?

I think I need to write that nothing mystical just happened. I'm just noticing what I'm thinking and feeling in the moment. It's very natural, and it's a small example of what needs to happen for meaningful psychological change.

It's not a big thing. It's actually quite small. It's bringing our attention closer to ourselves and allowing ourselves to begin there.

Asking ourselves questions like, "what am I feeling right now?" and "Where do I feel it?" opens a door into ourselves and the opportunity for change.

The world moves fast, and to keep up with it our minds have learned to move just as quickly, often communicating with us through our “guts.”

The good news is we are able to take a step back and notice how it moves us. We can shift from reaction to attention.

This is a really useful skill to learn, because once we have, we can slow our reactions, and little by little, move with intention.

Maybe all of this feels very alien to you. Noticing the what, why, and how of our thoughts can feel strange if you've never been shown how to do it. This is where psychotherapy can help.

At their core, different psychotherapies help us learn to pay attention to the world around us in different ways. And to learn to pay attention to the way our insides are reacting to the world we are living in.

In the next article I'll introduce an area we want to focus our attention. One that is often overlooked, but might be the most important: our senses.

If you live in the Houston area, and you're struggling emotionally, or there are problem patterns that need to change, I invite you to contact me. I might be able to help.