Three Signs Your Attention Just Got Hacked

Have you noticed? There is a war being waged for your attention. In the so-called “Attention Economy” your attention is now someone else’s precious (and monetizable) commodity. The more you scroll, click and “like” information, the more your data can be packaged and sold. Because you only have so much attention to give, systems have evolved to capture and keep your attention as long as possible. Another word for this is “seduction.” The best seductions are those that you don’t notice are happening, or that even make it appear as if you are willingly choosing to do something.

Why should you care? It is hard to understate the role attention plays in your life. What you attend to is what your life becomes. Spend time giving attention to baseball statistics, and that becomes part of your life.  Focus on the healthy development of children, and that becomes part of your life. The choices you make about how—and what—you invest attention in form your life’s structure and content.

As demands for our attention become ever more seductive, it has become essential to be more conscious of how you’re using your attention. Because these systems exploit your natural curiosity (or fears) for their own ends, you can no longer rely on your own impulsive interests to make choices.  By taking a moment to slow down and consider what you really want, you can invest your limited attention resources in what’s important to you, and live the life you want.

By taking a moment to slow down and consider what you really want, you can invest your limited attention resources in what’s important to you, and live the life you want.

The key to doing this is noticing what your attention is doing. These are fleeting moments that at first are almost imperceptible—however, with practice they will start popping out at you like the “Magic Eye” puzzle in the Sunday comics.

Three Signs Your Attention Just Got Hacked

1. You experience “Lift-Off”: You are writing an important memo when midway through, your attention shifts to checking the scores last night’s game. Lift-off is when your attention is focused on one thing and involuntarily moves to something less relevant.

2. You’re in Scrolling Zombie Mode:  A college student wakes up and spends 30 minutes swiping through her social media every day. (FYI: That’s 6.5 surrendered hours a week.) When you feel a low-level daze as your finger robotically swipes for the next hit of stimulation, you are in Scrolling Zombie Mode.

3. You’ve descended the Rabbit Hole: You are researching a new car purchase. The consumer magazine suggests that maybe a Volvo isn’t a bad option. “Volvos are made in Sweden, aren’t they?” You think to yourself.  Sweden…Sweden…that triggers a cascading set of curiosities in your mind, which land on Swedish meatballs. “Mom used to make Swedish meatballs, haven’t had those in years. I wonder how you make them?” Your fingers type “Swedish Meatball Recipe” in the search bar.  But wait, those are made of meat and you’re a vegan now. That triggers another cascade. Your browser gets pointed to vegan versions of the recipe. <type> <type> <type> <scroll> <scroll> <scroll> You wonder, are there vegans in Sweden? <type> <type> <type> <scroll> <scroll> <scroll> Were the Vikings vegan? <more typing>  Before you know it, 45 minutes have passed and you now know a lot more about the food history of Vikings, but still know nothing about the new car you were going to buy. That spiralling loss of focus is the Rabbit Hole.

Here’s How to Regain Focus and Control of Your Attention:

Notice. Noticing breaks the spell.  So, begin to notice when you do these things.  Notice what the feeling is like while you do them.  What do you feel in your body? What are the stories in your head?  What emotions do you feel? Is this what you actually want? A mindless diversion isn’t necessarily evil, but 6.5 hours of your life down the drain adds up to what?

Question and Shift. Questions help you orient. After noticing comes inquiring and shifting.  Ask yourself, “Is this where my attention needs to be right now?” If what you’re doing isn’t what you intend to be doing, stop doing it and return to what’s important to you.

Repeat.  Building the habit of noticing, questioning and shifting strengthens your choice-making muscles.  Gradually, you’ll begin to see how much of your attention you’re wasting away. Alternative pathways start to be forged and you can step out of the seductions more easily.  You can more quickly return from the rabbit holes of distraction and keep focused on what’s important to you.

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How to Gradually Introduce Kids to the Idea of Forgiveness

This past weekend, my preschooler’s neighborhood buddies didn’t want to play frisbee with him. Despite his insistence, they left him to go play with his soccer ball—and, unsurprisingly, he was fuming.

Although my son didn’t stay mad for long, kids, like adults, can hold on to intense anger when they feel wronged. At its most extreme, this anger can lead young people to ruminate about betrayal and seek revenge through acts like physical aggression that can devastate families and communities.

Can we teach our kids to forgive instead?

As psychologist Robert Enright and psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons write, forgiveness is a choice to let go of anger toward someone who hurt you and to think, feel, or act with kindness toward that person. They clarify that forgiveness is not being weak—it takes strength and courage to forgive. It is also not forgetting, condoning, or putting up with being hurt; you can forgive while still seeking justice. And forgiveness is different than reconciling with someone; you can forgive without receiving an apology.

Forgiveness might seem like an impossible feat for a child who doesn’t yet have all the tools in her toolbox that adults do to handle emotions like anger and the desire for vengeance. But a wide range of studies have found that forgiveness programs can help kids of different ages feel better, strengthen their relationships, and improve their academic performance. According to Enright, we can learn from these programs about how to teach age-appropriate forgiveness skills, so kids grow up to be more peaceful and forgiving adults.

Teaching forgiveness around the world

Forgiveness programs typically invite families or students to participate in facilitator-led weekly group sessions over multiple weeks. Children are introduced to conflicts between fictional characters before they are guided to reflect on their own personal conflicts. They explore the different ways to deal with the hurt that results from conflicts, including the option of forgiveness. After children learn the foundational concepts of forgiveness and what forgiveness is and is not, there is facilitated reflection on how to forgive—as modeled by a story character first, and then as a choice they can make toward forgiving someone who hurt them.

In studies, while some kids go through a forgiveness program, other kids are part of a control group so that their results can be compared. Those kids either go about life as usual or learn something else, like effective communication, conflict resolution, assertiveness, or empathy.

First graders all the way through 21 year olds have participated in forgiveness programs like this. They have been implemented in Belfast, Northern Ireland—the most impoverished area of the United Kingdom, which has a history of conflict between Irish Catholics and British Protestants; Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a highly segregated city where children struggle with poverty and there is conflict among racial groups; and some areas of Turkey that are stricken with poverty and violence. They have also been offered to Midwestern teens who experienced a deep personal hurt, like being abandoned, cheated on, emotionally abused, or raped; and to young women in South Korea who were victims of aggression.

After learning forgiveness, some children even perform better at school, have fewer conduct problems and delinquency, and feel more positive about their parents and teachers.

In these studies, forgiveness programs offer kids a variety of benefits compared to control groups—ranging from more empathy and hope to less anger, hostility, aggression, anxiety, and depression. After learning forgiveness, some children even perform better at school, have fewer conduct problems and delinquency, and feel more positive about their parents and teachers.

Forgiveness skills for different ages

In researching forgiveness for over three decades and implementing some of these programs, Enright has gained insights into how to help children and adolescents learn and practice forgiveness. Here, he describes how to set the stage for forgiveness in your very young children and start building their forgiveness skills as they become young adults:



Ages 4-5. Before introducing young children to the subtleties of forgiveness, you can first introduce them to the concept of love—caring for the other for the sake of the other. For example, you can do this by reading picture books to your children in which there are loving family interactions.

Ages 6-7. Starting at about age 6, children have the capacity for what Jean Piaget called concrete operational reasoning, meaning that they now can understand the causes and effects of people’s actions. Because of this advance in reasoning in young children, you now can begin to introduce forgiveness systematically. There are five sequential steps you can take to help such young children become rather sophisticated in their understanding and practice of forgiveness.

Step 1. You can introduce the theme of inherent worth or the idea that all people—no matter who they are or how rich or poor they are or how smart they are—have value. Each person is special, unique, and irreplaceable. Again, you can introduce this concept apart from forgiveness and through picture books like Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! This is a helpful story for introducing inherent worth because of the repeated theme: “A person is a person no matter how small.”

Step 2. Before introducing the theme of forgiveness itself, you can then lay a further foundation by showing children the themes of kindness, respect, generosity, and again love. You can continue this learning apart from forgiveness and through story books.

Step 3. Once young children know about worth, kindness, respect, generosity, and love, you can then introduce them to forgiveness, but only through stories and not through their own experience of forgiving those who hurt them. You can explain forgiveness this way: When people forgive, they are kind to those who are not kind to them. When people forgive, they try to show respect to those who have not shown respect to them. When people forgive, they try to be generous to those who have not been generous to them. When people forgive, they try to be loving to their family members even if the family members are not loving to them, at least at the moment.

Step 4. You can be very clear to young children that to forgive does not mean automatic reconciliation. Sometimes, a child must stay away from another child if the latter is continually bullying. The one who is being bullied needs to tell an adult.

Step 5. Next, parents can then apply all of this learning to children themselves, but only if they are ready and only if they choose to consider forgiveness. Forgiveness is a choice and should not be pressured. For those who are ready, they can draw on what they have learned from the picture books and consider seeing the other who acted unjustly as possessing worth. For those who are ready, they can then consider offering kindness, respect, generosity, and love toward the offending person.

Because these steps require time, they should be continued for the next several years, using new stories so that the learning deepens in different contexts.

Ages 10-13. As children get older, parents can introduce the three themes of forgiving, receiving forgiveness, and reconciling, which can occur in later elementary school and middle school. To receive forgiveness requires the humility to acknowledge wrongdoing and to wait until the one offended is ready to forgive. To reconcile, the two people are willing to come together again in mutual trust. In other words, the one who was unfair takes steps to change. Forgiving can occur without reconciliation if the one who offends refuses to alter the unfair actions.

Ages 14-18. Once they are versed in the above themes, high schoolers are ready for a more sophisticated forgiving by following the steps in the Forgiveness Process Model. Adolescents in high school may be ready to consider the challenge to forgive not just one person but anyone toward whom they harbor continuing resentment.

They recommend family forgiveness gatherings at least once a week, such as during mealtimes, to talk about what forgiveness means, how it feels, and what is easy and hard about it.

“Forgiveness is a virtue hard to exercise and challenging to implement in the face of injustice but one that offers a concrete hope for peace,” explain Enright and Fitzgibbons. They recommend family forgiveness gatherings at least once a week, such as during mealtimes, to talk about what forgiveness means, how it feels, and what is easy and hard about it.

Because conflict is inevitable, teaching children about forgiveness early on—starting with struggles with playmates over frisbees and soccer balls—may indeed be a path toward building communities of people who prize and cultivate peace.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.

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Guided practices from Mindful’s special edition: Your Guide to Difficult Emotions

The Four Remembrances

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When we attune to the reality of impermanence and death, we remember what most matters to us. But in daily life we can lose precious swaths of time in a reactive trance, on our way somewhere else, and lost in problem solving, judgment and worry. This talk reflects on four remembrances or practices – Pausing, Yes to life, Turning toward love, and Resting in awareness – that help us awaken from trance and live true to the loving presence that is our essence.

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Mindful Books to Refresh and Renew this Spring

AnthropoceneEdward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier • Goose Lane Editions

It’s a museum exhibit, a movie, a podcast, and a book—all in service of a bold notion that shakes you into an appreciation for just what human life on this planet means. The Anthropocene, so the hypothesis goes, is our current geologic age, wherein the largest effects are not a result of natural events (such as volcanism or glaciation) but rather the outgrowth of human habitation, and it is the current passion of master photographer Edward Burtynsky and his colleagues. The book and the movie depict stunning landscapes and tell poignant stories that let us know the depth of the effect we’ve been having during our short history on this rock. It’s one thing to read about it. It’s another to see pictures that put you in places you never would choose to go.

The book and the movie depict stunning landscapes and tell poignant stories that let us know the depth of the effect we’ve been having during our short history on this rock.

In 2017, the Garrison Institute honored Burtynsky as a contemplative—in the sense that his work causes you to pause and reflect. His enormous, sweeping, detail-rich pictures of “global industrial landscape”—mines, factory farms, and manufacturing plants, to name a few—convey a strange beauty, which is part of their allure. As in his acclaimed film and book Manufactured Landscapes, he invites us to linger on images not easily described as beautiful or ugly. They are simply striking. He is not a scold, telling us all that we’ve done wrong. He’s an artist and reporter, showing us the full spectrum of life on earth. If we admire the fine things the earth brings us, we ought also to appreciate what havoc may be wrought in places normally hidden. As Burtynsky’s colleague and collaborator Nicholas de Pencier said, “It is my responsibility to use my camera as a mirror, not a hammer: to invite viewers to witness these places and react in their own individual fashion.”

Anxiety, Stress, and Mindfulness: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to WellnessAndrew Safer • 2nd Tier Publishing

Mindfulness is often popularly characterized as focusing on a kind of bliss-filled, exultant present moment, as if life were an endless series of stunning Instagram posts. Andrew Safer knows differently. He himself has known hardship, and he’s worked with lots of people in difficult circumstances: youth in crisis, prisoners, addicts, people struggling with mental illness. He teaches mindfulness in Newfoundland, a very earthy place, so he imbues Anxiety, Stress, and Mindfulness with a lot of heart and a celebration of the fact that mindfulness shines brightest when it helps us through our darkest hours.  

A Sloth’s Guide to Mindfulness Ton Mak • Chronicle Books 

“Some days, everything is annoying,” observes author Ton Mak, a Shanghai-based artist and meditation enthusiast. “We forget the small happy things. Happy things that are already within us and around us.” Just such a small happy thing is the star of this book, a sloth—the most adorably lethargic critter out there—who in his “philoslothical” (arrrgh) relaxation represents a counterpoint to our hurried and harried lives. The sloth illustrates basic methods for mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises, and guided visualization, while reflecting lightheartedly on how they help us move through life. Nothing comprehensive—but then, sometimes all we need is a gentle reminder to take it slow.  

The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living ThingsPeter Wohlleben • Greystone

First with The Hidden Life of Trees, then The Inner Life of Animals, followed by The Weather Detective, and now The Secret Wisdom of Nature, Peter Wohlleben is on a roll. In each of these little books, released in rapid succession, Wohlleben presents scientific evidence with the exuberant wonder of your favorite high school teacher, the one who loved nothing better than a field trip to the woods.

The Secret Wisdom of Nature seeks to increase our empathy for the living things that surround us, including our fellow humans, and to take time to appreciate how important our home is—not the home that has walls, doors, windows, and a roof, but rather our bigger home. How easy it is to forget something so simple as the beauty and necessity of light, its life-giving power. When we see how vital the cycles of light and darkness are to the balance of nature, we can come to appreciate the consequences of our predilection to bathe the whole world in artificial light.

How easy it is to forget something so simple as the beauty and necessity of light, its life-giving power.

Wohlleben has been accused by fellow scientists of straying too far from science, of being too emotional, making trees and animals and even the weather seem human. In the epilogue, he defends his approach, asking whether “a language stripped of emotion” can “even be called a human language.” For Wohlleben, so long as we treat our natural world as just another machine, we will lack the empathy required to care for it as we would a beloved family member.

Podcast Review

CBC RadioEpisode: Wearables go beyond fitness tracking to help people with chronic health conditions

Rapidly evolving technologies are revolutionizing health science, a prime example being wearable health trackers—think the FitBit, but capable of feats like tracking the blood glucose of diabetics, or monitoring blood pressure, via a tiny patch on the skin. For people with chronic illness, this may take the constant vigilance and guesswork out of maintaining health. But for healthy people, these devices—like self-driving cars that “remember” the route for us—may tempt us to ignore the feedback we’re always getting from our body, rather than growing to better understand that feedback.

On Being with Krista TippettEpisode: The Magic Shop of the Brain, with Dr. James Doty 

Most people don’t appreciate “the power of their intention to change everything,” says James Doty, a neurosurgeon who also directs Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. He’s talking about the scarcely understood potential of the human brain, but also about the equally miraculous power of compassion arising from it. Doty—for whom learning present-moment awareness as a teenager was transformative—considers our brains’ suppleness (that is, neuroplasticity) to hold the key to creating “an environment where we ultimately can flourish, and give those around us the opportunity to flourish.”

Freakonomics RadioEpisode: Think Like a Winner

When we say we’re “off our game,” it’s understood that there is a psychic aspect involved—a preoccupation, a case of the “blahs,” a nagging self-doubt. Whatever we’re seeking to improve at in life, being able to get back on our game is a crucial skill. In this episode, some well-known athletes describe how their mental game impacts their competitive edge. For many professional athletes, for example, game prep includes affirmative self-talk and visualization. If that sounds a bit woo-woo, just take it from baseball legend Bob Tewksbury: “Confidence is a choice. A lot of people think it’s a feeling. But if you wait for that feeling, it may never come.”

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Meditation: Saying “Yes” to Reality (17:38 min.)

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Our suffering comes from tensing and resisting the life that’s here. This meditation guides us to relax and awaken our body and senses, and resting in presence, allow life to be as it is. As our “Yes” to the changing flow becomes full, we discover the freedom of awake awareness itself.

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To Lead with Excellence, Add Purposeful Pauses to Your Work Day