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“Imagine that you have a vacancy. And they offer you a great candidate. Education, age, work experience, recommendations – everything is perfect. But they tell you that the candidate has one peculiarity – during the day he is a little crazy all the time. What do you say?
Usually at this point, all the directors of the companies to whom I ask this question are laughing. Who needs a man who is “out of his mind”? “Really funny,” I say. “I have just described you and your staff. And it looks like you wouldn’t have hired yourself.”
Of course, at this moment the question arises, what does “on in itself” mean? From the point of view of modern neuroscience, a person is attention. Attention underlies all mental functions of a person and governs all the flows of energy and information in our brain and between our body and the environment. “Where we put our attention determines what we do, how we feel, what decisions we make, and what reality we live in,” says attention psychology researcher Anne Treisman.1. If you are not controlling your attention at will, you are literally out of your mind.
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- Think slow… decide fast
And this is exactly how modern man lives. His attention throughout the day constantly switches (on autopilot) every two minutes between five windows on his computer, his phone, conversations with colleagues, thoughts and worries about household chores or a new initiative from our government. And besides, we live in a civilization where we are not taught to pay attention to our body and be in contact with it, we are not taught to be aware of our emotions and feelings and understand their causes and consequences, to direct attention to our thoughts and manage them, instead of to let them control us. And then one day we have the feeling that our life does not seem to belong to us to the end.
Mindfulness practice is a form of meditation that teaches us to direct our attention at will and to see how our minds work. Sometimes it is called the practice of mindfulness, which is not quite an accurate translation of the English word mindfulness – in order to realize something, you will first have to direct your attention to this “conscious” one. Over the past 20 years, a lot of research has accumulated on how by training our ability to manage attention, we can qualitatively improve our physical and psychological health and get more pleasure from work and life.
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- The choice that makes us
Try a simple experiment right now. Put your attention on the tip of your nose – not a look, but only attention! – and for five minutes, watch and feel the air entering and exiting through your nostrils as you breathe. If distracting thoughts arise, do not worry, but simply gently return your attention to watching the breath – without judging this process in any way, without trying to change or do anything.
What did you discover? Usually people say – it’s very difficult! Thoughts did not give rest. I got pain in parts of my body that I didn’t even know I had. Yet five minutes is the minimum practice time for three to five year olds in American and European mindfulness practice programs for kindergartens.
When asked if I can explain in a few words what I teach in mindfulness classes, I reply, “Back to life.” How to return attention to your body and begin to understand its language and signals, why it hurts and what it wants. How to return attention to your emotions and stop wasting energy on suppressing or repressing them. How to return attention to your thought patterns – and see how, at every moment, our ideas shape the world in which we live. How to learn to hear the voice of your heart and your intuition. One of my corporate clients said, “Everyone is saying now, live in the present. And I would say this – we all need to learn how to live for real.
The practice of mindfulness teaches us exactly this: how to direct attention to your life – and finally return it to yourself.
1 Ann Treisman is a professor at Princeton University (USA) and the wife of Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman.