Here, There, Everywhere: How Our Attention is Split and What to Do About It
Of particular difficulty in a world of constant social media presence and information overload is how areas of life bleed into one another. We carry with us the news, analysis, and opinions of those around the globe in the palm of our hands. Each tweet, news headline, and status update pulls at our various identities every moment of the day. Separate personal life from work? Not when every drama and emotionally-laden piece of the lives we connect with is popping up on screen after screen. Focus on just one person? Not when we're over-saturated with the need to form quick opinions on everything from someone's dinner to geopolitics. Being you in all your social spaces is a challenge.
This isn't a call to limit technology. The reality of our world is a digitally connected one that comes with many advantages. Instead, it's a recognition that in an informational age, we rarely stop to consider how our minds are attempting to work within it. Our brains have not evolved in the past 50 years as we've gone from newspapers and church gossip to 24-hour news cycles and pop-up filters. The basic cognitive shortcuts we call biases have not suddenly disappeared.
As an example, the environments within which they evolved were far simpler, particularly when identifying threats. We call headlines “click-bait” and yet don’t pause to recognize that they are so enticing precisely because they’re hitching a ride on mechanisms that initially rose to deal with overt threats to our survival. The power of imagination coupled with language allows us to see threats where none actually exists, to feel as if language itself is the equivalent of a tiger stalking us.
Picture the process of association as the building blocks of narrative construction. Pieces of experience are linked to form a whole picture, given a structure through narrative building that we can share with others that helps us select our behavioral responses. This way of ordering chaos allows for nearly unlimited variations in our personal storytelling and ways of connecting with others. The areas of our lives, work, and personal lives are short-hand for a collection of those narratives. They are not hard and fast boundaries. Think of sponges instead of brick walls.
The permeability of the areas of our lives means any attempt at completely avoiding spillover is not only impossible but fundamentally contrary to our human nature. A study on how the practice of therapy changes the therapist offers an example for consideration:
Instead, the researchers describe how clinicians “acquired a capacity to exist in parallel realities, and that one of the ways in which they accomplished this was to co-construct, with others in their lives, a set of practices that enabled them comfortably to move across contexts, such as the shift between work and home.” (Shannon Peters)
This "set of practices" is behavior set up to remind us of being in the present while acknowledging the pull of wanting to reconstruct our past and guess at the future. It is based on the notion of living our lives as conscious appraisers, noting that our thoughts and emotions are not synonymous with who we are but ways of directing attention to what may be important to us. We are no more required to believe the stories that pop up in our heads, than we are required to act on our emotional assessments in the same ways we’ve done before. By acknowledging this separation and seeing how the identification of what is important largely depends on social context, we can practice how to direct attention to what behavior may be the best version of ourselves we want to express.
Directing Attention is About Exploring Social Context
1. Structure
What building or social space are you currently in? Which Values are most important to you in that space? What behaviors do you typically engage in here and are they best suited to accomplish your goal now? Is the space set up to do the work that's supposed to occur there? Do you find yourself getting bored and wanting more/different stimulation? Are there means of alleviating that feeling in line with the Values associated with the space?
2. Relationships
What form of connection do you typically engage in within that space? Are you keeping in mind the Values you wish to support in light of the particular relationship you’re attending to? Have you clarified to yourself and others involved what your desired outcome of the situation is?
If we begin by assuming that the perspective we are holding is the only one or that it contains all that we need to make a decision, we’ll end up missing what the other person is sharing with us or missing pieces of the environment that may be influencing us. By slowing down to critically consider the nature of the space we’re in and what assumptions we’re bringing into it, we can better determine how best to show up as the best versions of ourselves and in line with what Value(s) are important in the moment.
Go for it. Be you. Just slow down enough to be the you that you want to be, not what mindlessly has reacted to stimuli you blindly accepted without knowing it.
References:
The Effects of Practicing Psychotherapy on Therapists’ Personal Lives. Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Socia
Further Reading:
"Fierce Conversations" by Susan Scott