Attention, Emotions, and the Body
We operate more effectively online, I proposed in Chapter 1, when we are more attentive, relaxed, and emotionally balanced. And we can learn to be more attentive, relaxed, and emotionally balanced, I further suggested, through self-observation and awareness: by noticing what is happening in our mind and body while we’re online, by noticing when and why we become distracted, stressed out, and upset, and by using this understanding to adjust and tune our digital craft. In the exercises beginning next chapter, you will have a chance to try out this kind of self-observation for yourself. But before we get there, I want to look more closely at the importance of attention, the emotions, and the body for the health and effectiveness of our online lives.
Two Modes of Attention
“Everyone knows what attention is,” William James, the founder of American psychology, wrote in 1890, devoting an entire chapter to the subject in his book The Principles of Psychology. “It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” And its opposite is distraction, a “confused, dazed, scatterbrained state.” While we all know from experience what attention and distraction are, research on the brain, most of which has been conducted in the hundred years since James wrote these words, has helped to explain the mechanisms that underlie both of these states. Our propensity for distraction, it turns out, arises from a central feature of the human attentional system, which is crucial for our survival. For while we need the ability to focus narrowly on one thing, we also need the ability to remain open to interruptions, and thus to potential distractions.1
Human attention is, among other things, a focusing mechanism. It involves systems that make it possible for us to select an object—an event, a person, a sight, a sound, or a sensation—from all the stimuli potentially available to us at any one time. We might think of focused attention as a flashlight beam that can be used to explore a dark room. Point it this way and you will see the armchair in the corner. Move it slightly to the right and you will see the side table and the lamp resting on it. The beam is highly selective: whatever isn’t within its immediate path is invisible to our conscious awareness, or it shades into darkness. We employ this selection mechanism when we listen intently to music or to a friend, or when we engage in deep, concentrated reading.
But human attention operates in another mode as well. Not only can it narrow down to focus on a single object, it can open up, becoming receptive to what’s going on in the surrounding environment. (Imagine a flashlight that has two settings: one that focuses an intense beam in a small region, the other that bathes a larger space in a diffuse light, allowing us to take in a great deal more, but with less visual acuity.) We employ this kind of open attention when we take in a broad swath of our environment, without resting our focus on any one object in particular. Writing these words, for example, I have been narrowly focused on what I’ve been trying to communicate. But I am pausing now to open my attention to what is happening both inside and around me: I hear the hum and chatter of other people in the café, I feel the pressure of my palms on the laptop keyboard, I notice the rhythm of my breathing. (Both of these modes, focused and open, are what James calls “attention.” When he uses the word “distraction,” he is referring to those states of mind we all know only too well: when we are “confused, dazed, scatterbrained”—when we are unable to focus with any clarity on a single thing or on our inner or outer environment.)2
As the flashlight analogy suggests, these two modes can be engaged exclusive of each other. It is possible to focus so narrowly on a single object that you block out all awareness of your surroundings. And it is possible to be so caught up in the swirl of sensory and perceptual events that you aren’t really able to notice any one thing. Most of the time, however (this is where the flashlight analogy breaks down), we are operating in a mixed attentional mode: somewhat focused and somewhat open. The challenge we face is how to employ both of these modes skillfully when we’re online.
All creatures exhibit both of these abilities, to some degree. Living organisms need to be able to focus intently on their prey while stalking it, and at the same time to remain sufficiently open to their surroundings to avoid other predators. Most of us today don’t live with these kinds of threats, but we still require both of these attentional modes to get through our day. Think about crossing a busy street. You need to be able to focus on getting to the other side. But you also have to remain aware of your surroundings, on the lookout for threats, such as a car or bicycle that runs the light.
Attentional Shift, Attentional Choice
So when we’re on our computer, phone, or tablet, we are typically in a mixed attentional state. The challenge is to figure out how to deploy our attention, how best to deploy our task focus (focused attention) and our self-awareness (open attention). This means keeping in mind what our current intention is, what we’re trying to accomplish, so we don’t just drift aimlessly. It also means skillfully handling the interruptions that will inevitably occur.
Fortunately, we have a certain amount of control: at times we can consciously choose what to focus on. If I were to ask you to pay attention to the sensations in your left foot right now, you could probably do that. You could will yourself to direct the flashlight beam of your attention to your foot. But if a car were suddenly to backfire loudly a few feet away, you would startle and orient to the sound. And this would happen without any conscious control on your part. The brain, it turns out, has two different attentional systems. The top-down system is under conscious control. It’s what allows you to focus on something at will. The bottom-up system, an earlier evolutionary development, is completely automated. Its job is to scan the environment for potential threats, alerting us to them whether we want that information or not. We can’t turn off this alerting mechanism—it is essentially hard-wired into us.3
Interruptions come in two varieties. External interruptions are the sounds, smells, movements, and physical contact that our senses pick up from the world around us: the ringing phone, the knock on the door, the hand on the shoulder, the pop-up ad that suddenly shows up on the screen. Internal interruptions arise from within our own minds and bodies. We feel hunger pangs, or suddenly remember that we’re due at the dentist. We read an email message and feel anxious, we feel a sudden pain in our neck.
Much of the time the mind seems to have a mind of its own. We aren’t in charge—if “we” here means the conscious, willful self. Indeed, recent neuroscience, as well as the experience of meditators, suggests that the mind’s “default” mode is a kind of inner monologue. When we aren’t focusing on something, we are generally talking to ourselves, telling ourselves stories about what has happened in the past, or what we imagine will take place in the future. During such times, which seem to occur quite frequently, we aren’t present to what’s happening immediately around us—we are “lost in thought.” (Being lost in thought—caught up in our internal mind chatter—is an example of what James means by “distraction.”)4
Although we can’t simply turn off the alerting mechanism, there are ways that we can minimize distractions when we’re working online. By observing the conditions under which we normally operate and their effect on us, we can discover which of these conditions limit our effectiveness and do something about them—closing down unnecessary applications and turning off our phones, for example. But we can’t eliminate all interruptions—least of all those that are internally generated, those thoughts and feelings that seemingly arise on their own. What we can do, however, is notice them as they arise and make skillful decisions about how to proceed in the face of them—whether to respond to them in the moment (and if so, how) or to ignore them. In other words, by strengthening our self-awareness, we can increase the possibility of exercising choice, and thus avoiding largely unconscious reactions.
Multitasking as an Attentional Practice
Attention lies at the heart of the practice we call multitasking. Although it is often assumed that multitasking means attending to several things at the same time, it is now clearly established that we can mainly focus on only one thing at a time. Thus when we are reading our email while talking on the phone, we are actually shifting our attention back and forth between the two tasks—we are moving the narrow beam of our flashlight from our email to our conversational partner and back again to our email. But at the same, we are also typically maintaining a degree of open attention, which will allow us to notice other interesting attentional opportunities as they arise. And at those moments that we are faced with more than one potential object of attention, we have the possibility of choosing which one to focus on. (These three attentional functions—focused attention, open attention, and choice—correspond rather closely to three brain networks that neuroscientists have identified: those concerned with orienting, alerting, and conflict-resolution.)5
Of course, we can get ourselves into trouble in a variety of ways while multitasking. (How many of us have gotten caught out reading our email while talking to our partner or to a friend?) Sometimes, multitasking is more like “multiflailing,” to borrow a term coined by one of my students. Our attentional strength is weak, and we aren’t actually focusing deeply or carefully on anything. And we aren’t making informed choices about what to attend to next—indeed, we may not be consciously choosing at all. Under such circumstances, we are engaging in distraction rather than consciously crafting our online activity.
Multitasking can also be challenging because, in a strict engineering sense, it is inefficient. The sequential shifting of focused attention takes time. The brain needs processing time to disengage from its current object of focus and to engage with another. Using an economic metaphor, psychologists call the time spent shifting between objects “switch costs.” The more often we switch between objects, then, the more time is spent in the switching activity itself and the less time paying attention to our task or activity.6
But the kind of open attention that allows the mind to flit from one thing to another can also be quite valuable. Assuming that attention always needs to be narrowly focused on achieving some goal “downplays the fruitfulness of the mind’s tendency to drift whenever left to its own devices,” Daniel Goleman says. Indeed, at times, “a mind adrift lets our creative juices flow.” Sometimes clicking around between sites and devices, wandering here and there, can be a fruitful practice. It all depends on when and how we do it.
There is currently a debate about the value and place of multitasking, as you will see in Chapters 6 and 7. I believe that multitasking has its place in today’s complex world, especially when performed skillfully and at appropriate times. The skills that we will be exploring in this book—for strengthening task focus, self-awareness, and the ability to make wise attentional choices—are exactly those that can help us not only multitask more successfully but decide when (and when not) to multitask.
Emotions and the Stress Response
For decades it has been clear that being online sometimes brings out the worst in people. Perhaps it’s the anonymity—as a famous New Yorker cartoon noted in the 1990s, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Or perhaps it is the lack of face-to-face feedback that encourages people to act out in ways they might not in person. Regardless, there are times when people erupt emotionally online, and with a frequency that has led to the coining of terms such as “flaming” and “trolling” to describe varieties of out-of-control online behavior.
These are the violent outbursts and tantrums of online life, and it isn’t hard to see how disruptive they can be. But these are relatively rare. What is much more common, and perhaps more challenging to our everyday digital pursuits, is the constant play of low-level emotions—such as anxiety, frustration, and anger—that arise as we check email or Facebook, as we surf the Web and text our friends. Indeed, many of us today seem to be regularly stressed out and emotionally on edge when we’re online. It isn’t hard to understand why: We live rushed lives. We feel burdened by what we’re doing, don’t feel we have enough time to devote to our work and our personal lives, and live with a sense of frustration and anxiety about getting things done.
Of course, emotions are an unavoidable dimension of human existence. And they are tremendously valuable. Positive emotions such as love, joy, and contentment not only make life worthwhile but motivate us to reach out to others and to engage with the world in helpful and meaningful ways. And negative emotions, which arise through the bottom-up alerting system I noted earlier, are an essential component of the survival mechanism we have inherited from our reptilian and mammalian ancestors. Indeed, emotions such as fear are designed to trigger the stress response (commonly called the “fight-or-flight” response), which mobilizes us to react energetically in emergencies, elevating blood pressure and heart rate and directing blood flow to the large muscles, thus preparing us to stand and fight or run away.
When fight-or-flight works best, we briefly mobilize for the emergency. The system then quickly recovers once the emergency has passed—returning to the baseline state, to what scientists call homeostasis, in which breathing, blood pressure, and so on return to normal. But as the past fifty years of research on stress has demonstrated, sometimes, when fight-or-flight is regularly triggered, the body doesn’t return to its baseline state. Rather, it maintains a heightened state of vigilance that can contribute to a number of problems, including fatigue, weight gain, heart disease, and diabetes. As Robert Sapolsky, one of today’s main stress researchers, observes, under conditions of chronic activation, “the stress response itself becomes damaging.”7
Thus how we respond emotionally to the events in our online lives can have real consequences for both our effectiveness and our health. Strong emotions can hijack us, diverting our attention from what we were intending to do (as we saw several times in the scenario in Chapter 2). And the accumulated stress of our difficult emotions can compromise our health and well-being over the long term.
Fortunately, we aren’t helpless victims at the mercy of our negative emotions—or needn’t be. Unlike our evolutionary ancestors, we don’t have to react automatically once strong emotions have been triggered. We can, in principle, bring thought and reflection to bear, pausing long enough to assess the situation and to respond differently. We may not be able to turn off this alerting mechanism, but we can exercise discretion when it triggers us, and make conscious decisions about whether and how to respond to the information it is providing. Just because I find a Facebook post upsetting doesn’t mean that I have to respond directly from that emotion—or even respond at all. And I may even be able to reduce the impact of the triggering emotion by refusing to feed it with further negative thoughts (“I can’t believe she said that! I never liked her anyway . . .”).
In other words, we can learn to work with our emotions in more constructive ways. (This is the basis of a recent educational movement called social and emotional intelligence.) Emotions don’t have to hijack us so often—and when they do, we have the potential to return to a stable emotional state more quickly. Last chapter, we saw how the guilt I felt about avoiding my colleague’s email message triggered a new act of avoidance (checking the New York Times Web site). This shift of focus happened without any awareness on my part, either of the triggering emotion or the “decision” to shift. But with greater self-awareness, I might have noticed my emotional reaction before it precipitated an unthinking, automatic reaction. I could then have paused and assessed the situation and decided what to do: whether or not to switch tasks. Thus, although strong emotions can hijack attention, skillful attention paid to these emotions at the time they arise can help us manage them.8
The Body’s Place in Our Online Lives
Naturally, the state of our bodies is also important to our online lives. To some, this assertion may seem too obvious to mention. But to others, it needs to be stated and defended. For our Cartesian heritage gives primacy to the mind over the body, at times suggesting that the body is at best a necessary evil. Yet recent work in cognitive science challenges this position, asserting that mind and body are a single integrated system, and that the body is necessarily a full participant in all aspects of our lives. Whatever our philosophical position, however, when we go online we often seem to behave as if we were brains on a stick, pretending that we don’t have bodies, or at least ignoring the signals our bodies are sending us. No wonder that we suffer a range of body ailments—including carpal tunnel syndrome, neck and back problems, and eyestrain—as well as the more serious stress-related ailments I mentioned above.9
While these forms of body discomfort and dysfunction are important in their own right—who wants to live with chronic pain?—they can also affect the quality of our online work. Strong body sensations, much like strong negative emotions, can hijack our attention, making it hard to concentrate. And low-grade, chronic pain can sap our energy, contributing to a fatigue that chips away at wholehearted engagement. (One common response to this, numbing ourselves to the discomfort, prolongs and exacerbates the chronic condition.)
Paying attention to the body can thus alert us to the physical discomfort we’ve been ignoring, and can allow us to address it. Sometimes it is a matter of shifting positions, or getting up and moving around. (There is increasing evidence that our sedentary lives, much of it now spent in front of our digital devices, can contribute to a range of serious ailments, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.) Sometimes, we may want or need to consult health care professionals, or to take up a body-oriented practice such as yoga.10
But all this, while true and important enough, makes it sound like the body matters primarily because it can drag us down (a curious expression) if we’re not attentive to its aches and pains. There is also a more positive spin on the place of the body. It turns out that we can actually improve our mood and increase the quality of our attention through posture and movement. There is now evidence that exercise—something as simple as going for a walk—can not only lift our mood but strengthen our attention and intelligent engagement with whatever we’re doing. And the simple act of smiling can increase positive feelings. So there is little doubt that adopting a relaxed and alert posture while we’re sitting in front of our computers, and taking breaks to move around, can increase both our well-being and our effectiveness.11
While posture, facial expression, and movement clearly matter, the breath occupies a special place as both an active participant in our current state of being and as a passive reflector of it. Breathing is a fundamental life process, which is closely tied not only to survival but to well-being. When we are relaxed and happy, we tend to breathe slowly and deeply. And when we are stressed out, we often breathe rapidly and shallowly—an indicator that we are experiencing the fight-or-flight response. The breath is thus a fairly reliable indicator of our current state of mind. We may deny, or try to ignore, our emotional state, but checking in with our breath gives us a way to hear what our body has to say about the matter.
What’s more, the quality of our breathing not only reflects our state of mind but affects it. Shallow breathing deprives the body of needed oxygen, which may contribute to anxiety and to other psychological and physiological conditions. Something as simple as noticing shallow breathing and taking deeper, more relaxed breaths can serve a restorative function. Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, has written about what she calls “email apnea,” pointing to our tendency to hold our breath while doing email. “I predict, within the next five to seven years, breathing exercises will be a significant part of every fitness regime,” she says. “In the meantime, why not breathe while doing email?”12
Training in Our Digital Craft
In Chapter 1, I suggested we think of our online work as a kind of craft, as a highly skilled set of activities. I likened it to playing a sport or engaging in a handcraft. In each case—whether it’s playing baseball or soccer, doing calligraphy or making furniture—there are skills that are specific to that particular craft: how to swing a bat, kick a ball, manipulate a pen, or hold a saw. Equally in our online work, there are many skills that are specific to the digital world: how to use particular hardware devices and different kinds of software, how to communicate appropriately using different social media, and so on. But across all these crafts there are important commonalities. In this chapter we have been exploring some of these: the value in cultivating attention, a balanced emotional state, and a relaxed and attuned body.
The craft perspective also highlights another important feature of our online lives: that we can improve our digital craft through practice and training. Yet I often hear people talking as if they’re simply stuck with the skill level they’ve currently attained. This is especially evident when we complain about our attentional limitations, about how distracted we are. Fortunately, the counterevidence is both definitive and clear: we can train ourselves to be more attentive, both online and offline. Earlier I suggested that attention is like a flashlight beam. Another useful metaphor is that it is a kind of muscle. There is a growing body of evidence that this muscle, much like our biceps and abs, can be strengthened through appropriate use.13
William James suggested that training people in “voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again” would be “the education par excellence” (the emphasis is his). Few of us can sustain our focus on an object with complete, unwavering concentration. But we can voluntarily bring our attention back when we notice that we have strayed. And it turns out that the more that we do this, restoring our focus “over and over again,” the less often we are likely to wander and the more quickly we will notice when we have. If attention is a muscle, this technique is like doing reps at the gym.14
One of the simplest and most widespread forms of attention training uses the breath as the object of focus. You sit (or stand, or lie down), paying attention to your in-breath and out-breath. When the mind wanders (recall that the mind’s “default mode” is a kind of inner monologue), you simply bring your focus back to the breath. This practice exercises and strengthens the three attentional skills I have discussed above: focusing, opening (or noticing), and choosing. For your job is to focus on your breath, to notice when you have strayed, and then to choose to come back to the breath, however tempting whatever has distracted you may be.
Appendix A presents a version of this attention training practice, which I call mindful breathing. I realize that some readers will already engage in such a practice—mindful attention to the breath is becoming as common as yoga in our culture—or will at least have tried it. Others may be curious and willing to give it a go, and still others may feel some resistance to it. To this last group I would say the following: You won’t actually need to practice mindful breathing in order to perform the exercises in this book. But in some of the exercises you will be bringing your attention back, again and again, to a particular object of focus. (Email or Facebook or texting will be your object of focus in Exercise 2.) In other words, built into some of the exercises is the equivalent of the mindful breathing practice. Why then, you might wonder, do I bother to introduce it at all? First, because it is a simple and useful attention-training exercise that some people love. And second, because even those of you who resist it may find that a stripped-down version of it—which consists in periodically taking a few mindful breaths—is a useful warm-up or retuning exercise, like stretching before going out for a run.
Strengthening Self-Observation/Awareness
While mindful breathing is optional, a second attention-training practice, the mindful check-in, is not. The mindful check-in is a means of increasing your self-awareness. As presented in Appendix A, it asks you to become aware of your attention, your emotions, your breath and body—the very conditions of your immediate experience that we’ve been discussing in this chapter. (This practice, too, asks you to exercise your focusing, noticing, and choosing skills, although in a somewhat different way than in the mindful breathing practice. You will be noticing certain conditions of your mind and body, and choosing to focus on some of them long enough to observe them in detail.)
You will be making use of the mindful check-in in all the exercises, and if you like, you can wait until you’ve actually begun the exercises to read through the instructions. But I suggest you read them now and try the practice: How are you feeling right now?