Attention
Think about where your attention goes when you're not doing something that requires full concentration. Do you make a conscious decision about what to pay attention to? Sometimes, yes, but usually it seems more like the reverse: attention snaps involuntarily from subject to subject and your conscious mind simply begins thinking about whatever has been placed before it. This feels normal because it's been happening all our lives, but it also seems quite strange—what is this thing leading consciousness around as if on a leash?
Learning to notice these moment-by-moment shifts in attention, and how difficult they are to control, is one of the main practical benefits of mindfulness meditation. But learning to concentrate on the meditation cushion has limited carryover to everyday life, so what more can be done?
- Often we sabotage ourselves by focusing on the attractive aspects of things we want to avoid and the repulsive aspects of things we want to attend to.
- What are the most negative, unsatisfying, boring, or disgusting aspects of the thing you want to steer attention away from? Surely there are some, or you wouldn't want to avoid it in the first place.
- What are the most positive, satisfying, enjoyable, or pleasurable aspects of the thing you want to steer attention toward? Surely there are some, or you wouldn't have been interested in it in the first place.
- Practice the skill of not immediately elaborating upon or chaining off of thoughts that come up.
- Semantic satiation — meditate on the basic concept of the thing you want to avoid, but without thinking any further thoughts about it or elaborations on it, until it dissolves into meaninglessness or at least boringness.
- Deconstruct — notice how the thing you want to avoid can be seen as an incomprehensible jumble of disconnected syllables, pixels, jarringly disjointed sensations, &c.
- Recontextualize — life is inherently finite, every minute is a minute closer to death, &c. (This is still the case even given the possibility of radical life extension.)
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
- On the other hand, sometimes a context of expansive spaciousness is more useful. Or fluidly switching back and forth, or even both at the same time. Try experimenting.
- You-5-minutes-from-now came back in time and are looking over your own shoulder. How embarrassed are you?
- Trigger-Action Plans — Associating specific situations with the intention to do the above. Put these into Anki.