Like I’ve mentioned before in this blog I’ve been meditating lately. Most of my meditation is very rudimentary mindfulness meditation - so just sitting and focusing on the breath and whatnot. I’ve found it helpful both for improving my ability to focus and reducing my anxiety.
But I’ve found that if I stop meditating, I lose the benefits very, very quickly; within a few days I’m back to square one.
I’ve been thinking about why that is lately. One thought that’s come to mind is that while meditation is a practice to increase focus and mindfulness, almost every other activity I engage in is built in a way to specifically to counter that.
Most activities that I engage in involve a screen of some type - a phone, or a TV, or a computer screen. And those screens are delivering a non stop, constant barrage of attempts to get my focus. Adds, push notifications, fancy animations, blinking red lights, unread message indications - they’re all things that say “Hey, look at me! Pay attention to ME!”. They’re that way because what they’re trying to do is re-orient your focus from something else to them. Of course, right? A push notification is meant to capture your attention and say “Something happened”. An add, more nefariously, is trying to capture your attention to buy something. A blinking unread indicator is trying to get your attention to notify you that something important happened. The purpose of all of these things is to pull your attention from something else to them.
It’s also true within some of the programs that I’ll use in any given day. If you open YouTube and just scroll down the feed, every video you pass is trying, desperately, to capture your attention. To be clear, they’re not actively trying to destroy your ability to focus, they’re just trying to stand out from the crowd. And this effort for every piece of content to stand out leads to an evolutionary arms race of attention capturing technology. For example, I’ve noticed lately that the still images on YouTube videos have become extremely bright, loud, and full of over-the-top facial expressions from people. Again, in an effort to get you to watch the video.
I want to reiterate that for most of these distraction sources I really don’t think anything nefarious is happening. Rather, this is a natural evolution of the mechanism of communication that the internet offers.
Naturally, when we’re barraged with this constant distraction engine for most of our waking hours, it’s going to take toll on our ability to focus.
I also suspect that my inability to focus fuels a lot of my anxiety. I’ll bet that just the action of your brain constantly searching for new stimuli creates anxiety.