Tag: Stress Reduction

In an age of hyper attention

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We are in the midst of one of the most profound cognitive shifts in our intellectual history, moving from a “deep attention” to a “hyper attention” society, to quote Duke University professor Katherine Hayles. She defines “deep attention” as the cognitive preference for input from only a single information stream, to be engaged for an extended period. “Hyper attention,” by contrast, is marked by a hunger for a high level of stimulation and a desire to shift rapidly among different information streams. Surfing the Internet while IM’ing and watching a YouTube video, all with music playing in the background: Yes. Reading 100 pages of a novel in one sitting or writing a term paper: No.  Evidence of this shift can be found just about everywhere in our culture…. And so one must ask: Where in our culture do we encourage sustained thinking and provide a quiet, reflective space to ponder, reflect and develop ideas? 

Vanessa Silberman, Mindfulness, Focusing the Mind’s Eye in the Digital Age, Dot Magazine.

Hitting the pause button

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A reporter asked a boy who was participating in the [mindfulness training] program to describe mindfulness. “It’s not hitting someone in the mouth”, the eleven year-old said.

His answer is wise, wide and deep. It illustrates one of the most important uses of mindfulness – helping us to deal with difficult emotions. It suggests the possibility of finding the gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it, and of using that pause to collect ourselves and change our response. And it demonstrates in a very real way that we can learn to make better choices……Working with emotions during our meditation session sharpens our ability to recognise a feeling just as it begins not fifteen consequential actions later. We can then go on to develop a more balanced relationship with it – neither letting it overwhelm us so we lash out rashly, nor ignoring it because we are ashamed or afraid of it.

Sharon Salzberg, True Happiness.

Is worrying helping?

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If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying?

If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?

Shantideva

Its not in the future, but here today

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Mindfulness encourages us to pay attention and rest in what is happening in the present moment.  However, we often prefer to be elsewhere, or that the present moment be other than what it actually is. What we learn through our practice is the key to finding contentment is to be fully present with whatever we are doing, no matter how ordinary. This realization that the fulness of our lives is right in front of us, and not to be found in the future, is an insight found in all wisdom traditions and leads to true contentment .

The everyday tedium of our lives is the desert we wander, looking for the Promised Land. Our relationships, our work, and all the little necessary tasks we don’t want to do are all the gift. We have to brush our teeth, we have to buy groceries. we have to do the laundry, we have to balance our checkbook. This tedium — this wandering in the desert — is in fact the face of God. Our struggles, the partner who drives us crazy, the report we don’t want to write — these are the Promised Land.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Study shows we are on autopilot most of the time

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I came across this study,  carried out by Dan Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth,  just yesterday, even though it was published last November.  It confirms that most of us are ‘mentally checked out’ for a good portion of the day, operating on a type of autopilot which does not lead us to feeling very content.  For 46.9% of the time during their waking hours people are engaged in ‘mind wandering’,  not really focusing on the outside world or the task at hand, but rather looking into their own thoughts. And what this study of 2,250 people shows is that this activity  – despite its obvious attraction – doesn’t make us feel happy.

The study was designed to find out what kind of activities people did throughout a day, and which made them happiest.  So people were asked to indicated what they were engaged in at different random moments chosen during the day.   Mind wandering was just one of 22 possible activities people could list, but turned out one of the most common. And here is the interesting part – the participants reported being unhappy during the periods of mind wandering. Thus how people deal with mind wandering is a better predictor of happiness than many other indicators which we normally use, such as relationships, careers or the  actual activities people are engaged in. The study is another support for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation, with its emphasis on just staying in the present moment and recognizing our stories as stories, as an aid toward greater happiness.

Teens Day 16: Staying with difficult feelings

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It is absolutely fundamental that we learn, that when difficult situations and feelings arise, they are not obstacles to be avoided, but rather these very difficulties are, in fact, the path itself

Ezra Bayda