Peak Mind Flashcards
What are the four types of lost attention?
If you’re feeling that you’re in a cognitive fog: depleted attention.
If you’re feeling anxious, worried, or overwhelmed by your emotions: hijacked attention.
If you can’t seem to focus so you can take action or dive into urgent work: fragmented attention.
If you feel out of step and detached from others: disconnected attention.
What is the first attribute of attention?
attention is powerful. I refer to it as the “brain’s boss,” because attention guides how information processing happens in the brain. Whatever we pay attention to is amplified.
What is the second attribute of attention?
attention is fragile. It can be rapidly depleted under certain circumstances—circumstances that turn out, unfortunately, to be the ones that pervade our lives.
What is the third attribute of attention?
attention is trainable. It is possible to change the way our attention systems operate. This is a critical new discovery, not only because we are missing half our lives, but because the half we’re here for can feel like a constant struggle.
Why do we struggle to focus?
If attention evolved because there was too much information for us to process, then right now there’s really too much. The content stream is too loud, too fast, too intense, too interesting, too unrelenting. And we are not only recipients of this information explosion, but also willing participants in it. We’re going full throttle to keep up and not miss out, because we or others expect that of us.
Why not fight focus?
Don’t waste your energy trying to get better at fighting the pull on your attention. You cannot win that fight. Instead, cultivate the capacity and skill to position your mind so you don’t have to fight.
Is lack of attention a modern problem?
We think of this as an exclusively contemporary problem—a crisis born out of our high-tech era. Yes, it’s true that we are living in a period of unprecedented targeting of our attention. But we don’t need external stimuli to have a crisis of attention—this has always been a challenge for humans. We have records of medieval monks in the year 420 fretting that they could not keep their thoughts on God as they were supposed to—they complained they were constantly thinking about lunch, or sex. They felt overwhelmed with information, frustrated that the minute they sat down to read something, their restless minds wanted to read something else instead. Why could they not just focus? Why did the mind disobey?
What is the mind’s nature?
Even if we could—with the swish of a magic wand—wipe away all our technology, our glowing late-night laptops and buzzing phones, it wouldn’t work. The mind’s nature is to forage for information and engage with it—whether it’s the phone in your pocket or the bubbling thoughts in your mind.
What should we pay attention to?
The problem is that we often don’t know what’s happening in our own minds. We lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment. And for this, there is a solution: pay attention to your attention.
Is 100 percent focus possible?
In study after study, we looked for circumstances in which people could pay attention without getting distracted. And here’s what we found: there are none. Across our increasingly targeted experiments, there were zero circumstances in which participants maintained their focus 100 percent of the time.
What is the biggest focus culprit?
But before we could devise a fix, we needed to figure out what, exactly, was degrading attention.
One of the biggest culprits? Mental time travel.
What strengthens focus?
mindfulness training was the only brain-training tool that consistently worked to strengthen attention across our studies.
Why do we lack focus today?
We are living in a time of uncertainty and change. Many of us are experiencing an atmosphere of stress and threat that constantly activates our minds’ tendency to mentally travel to an alternate reality. The more stress and uncertainty we face, the more our minds journey to a desired or dystopic mental destination. Often we are in fast-forward mode. We’re trying to puzzle through all the uncertainty. We’re mentally planning for events that aren’t plannable. We’re gaming out scenarios that may never come to pass
What is VUCA?
During active combat, they experienced circumstances that were volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—VUCA for short.
What is pre-resilience?
People talk a lot about resilience. What you’ll learn in this book is really about what I call “pre-silience.” Resilience means bouncing back from adversity. But what we want is to train our minds so that we maintain our capacities even as we are experiencing challenge.
