Mindfulness Skill 3: Regulation of Attention

TRANSCRIPT

Interviewer: 

You're tuned into the morning show on Youth Jam as it's a Thursday. On the other end of the line, I have with me Dr. Patrick Jones, founder of Perth Psychologists, who each week comes on air to discuss a different facet of our mental health. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been looking at mindfulness techniques and the technique that we're looking at this week is called regulation. So Patrick, what exactly is regulation of attention? 

Patrick:

It yeah, well, in a way it does come from having a foundation of being able to just be in the moment first, so present-moment awareness. You could perhaps say that's the foundation to be able to be present, but then once you're present, it's that capacity to be able to direct your attention or your awareness intentionally towards whatever you choose. And that can also be thoughts or feelings or physical sensations or if you're looking at certain practices, certain exercises, if you like. But it's that capacity to be able to put your attention to something and keep it there, ideally for as long as you want, and then to take it off and put it on something else versus, in a sense, being a victim of wherever my mind goes. This one is kind of the opposite. 

It's that ability to be able to put my mind to something and then keep it there. 

Interviewer:

Yeah, and I feel that when a lot of people have been through the experience of having to focus their attention on something and I know that with me in particular, you might then say something like, okay, I'm going to focus on this particular thing. I'm concentrating, I'm concentrating on it. But then your mind will drift and it takes several seconds to realize that you're no longer thinking about what you're meant to be concentrating on, to realize that your attention has gone elsewhere. So why is it difficult to regulate attention sometimes? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, I think the mind has been conditioned over many years to be able to have free rein and to kind of go where it likes. And there is something beneficial about that, sort of what we call rumination, if you like. But there's also some interesting neuroscience these days that says if in a sense you're just a victim of that rumination where it's just continually going anywhere, everywhere, you just don't have the power to choose. I think that's really what's happened for a lot of people their neural pathways or associations of the brain. They go down certain familiar tracks that therefore were gone down.

And it's harder almost to be able to create something new if your defaults go somewhere and you're almost not in control of it. So that's, I think, why it's difficult. But again, if you do build some skill or some muscle, if you like, in this area, then you have that power to choose. And then in that power, you can then create all kinds of areas that you choose to put your attention on, that can take your life wherever you want to go versus it being led by just random thoughts all the time. 

Interviewer:

And you're outlining there what seems to be like different styles of thinking. But if one particular person has got a particular style of thinking that has been all that they've ever known, they might find it difficult to sort of say, okay, this isn't helpful to me. They might just take that as normality. So with that in mind, what are some examples of positive styles of thinking and negative styles of thinking? 

Patrick:

Well, they can have a continuum. Sometimes they are described as a pessimism realism, optimism continuum. And I think we all find ourselves somewhere on that. And it's good to be able to place ourselves in what we call our tendencies, or trajectories am I more towards the pessimistic end, which is if we positively look at that, it's risk management, but it's also, in a sense, fault finding or finding looking for where the issues problems are. Then you've got optimism, you could say, at the other end, which is looking for the opportunities and what's always good about stuff. And there's almost, you could say, two different styles of positive, negative, if you like. And I think it's good to place ourselves in each one of those and say, where do I sort of tend towards? 

Because people do fall into both camps to different degrees. Wherever you are. The goal ultimately is to hit that middle, which is risk management, but opportunity, which we could call realism. There's a phrase every visionary needs a good accountant. Great idea, mate. How are we going to pay for it? So I think that's one of the goals. And then if we do sort of build and I think regulation retention is really important in this because we're able to bring our mind back from a tendency that might be too negative or believe it or not, too positive isn't great.

After all, you miss the problems that you need to be prepared for. I think once we've got that, I see it as almost a little bit like the mind as a machine with good concentration, it can go forever. And, yeah, I did this -Iron Man. Or half Iron Man, actually, last weekend. It's a crazy sports event. So it's a 1.9-kilometer swim in the ocean, then it's a 90K bike ride, and then a 21K run. And by the time you hit the run, the body's registered what it's done beforehand. And I've found the mindfulness work in terms of that ability to be able to concentrate and stay on track. Even if the body is suffering. It takes all those other, you could almost say, physical issues out of the way and you're in the present and your mind's not taking you to places that you don't need to go.

And I think regulation retention is good for sports across a whole range of areas.  

Interviewer:

Yeah, well, it's excellent to see how this could also apply to where we talk about mindfulness. I think a lot of people would initially assume it to be a meditative practice, but it's good to highlight as well that's coming up in physical exercise, which is what a lot of people do. I don't do as much of it as I should, but I know a lot of people do take to it themselves. Patrick, we've been talking about positive and negative styles of thinking and how you can sort of draw your focus to a particular mode of operation and make that a habitual way of thinking. So what is your technique in that way for regulating attention? 

Patrick:

Yeah. Okay, so typically in mindfulness, they do separate what they call open monitoring, which is like present moment awareness, just letting things come and go, thoughts come and go. You just watch them more neutrally versus the other group of techniques, focused attention, which is directly putting your attention on something and trying to exclude all those others. So today we're really in that focused attention group.

And so one exercise could be to choose a single point, say, for example, the rise and fall of the breath or a spot in the room candle sometimes. And then we'll just choose, in this case, the breath. And then on top of that, all you just do is observe the natural rise and fall of the breath. Believe it or not, there are four parts to the breath. 

There's the inhale, and then there's a very small pause. Often can't see it. And then there's the exhale. But usually, the exhale is that fourth bit, which is like a rest before the next inhale. So that's one thing you can do is just watch the natural rise and fall and that pause, if you like, at the end. And if it helps, you can count the breath. I think sometimes having a counter helps, you know, if you've got distracted because you've lost count, can't remember up to and count, say from one to ten. So that's one way of doing it. Another is to also just do in the rising, and falling of the breath. You can, just as it goes up, you can say rising in your mind and falling as it exhales.

There are a few sorts of ways that you can do it. Another one might be if emotions come up during that time or distractions, you can just tell them to wait. In the end, you won't be able to reduce as many things as you can till in the end, you've just got that natural watching of the rising and the falling. The breath, even the counting can fall away.

And believe it or not, over time, when you're clear and present and your attention is very regulated, you can even almost let go of the observing of the breath and you're just sort of being but it's very focused, but there's nothing there. It's just this peaceful being versus there's no doing happening at all. There's just that kind of resting, but it's a very aware present resting. So there are a few options.

Interviewer:

And Patrick, over the last couple of weeks that you've been appearing on the show, we've been looking at different mindfulness techniques and we're sort of looking at these as things that people can exercise themselves to increase their mindfulness. But I think there's a worth in doing these with regularity, of course. So I wanted to ask specifically about the scope of what we're talking about today with regulating attention, but we can also apply it more broadly to what we've talked about in the past. What are some tips for developing these techniques as regular habits? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, the mind is a little bit like a wild horse in that it's used to doing what it wants to some degree, and we can direct it when we want, but then the research has found that the rest of the time it's going wherever it wants to. So it needs to be gently trained to follow requests. So I guess that's the first thing so that we can lead it to where we want to go. Of course, single-pointed concentration is highly efficient in terms of productivity, if we're in charge of the vehicle, which is of our mind, this ability to have attention, I think that's the critical bit here. So I guess that's the first part of it. 

And then I think what you can do in terms of tips to practice would be to practice on random objects or topics where can I just see it like a muscle, which, if I can just direct my attention and hold it there it's like doing one rep. If you like, hold it there for 10 seconds and then release it. And then finally, I guess, even set some challenges. I used to do this count the breath from one to ten without any distracting thought coming in. And then if I could do that, then I'd go one to 20 each breath, one to 20 with no distracting thoughts.

And if that held, then I went one to 50. And if there were no distracting thoughts, then I moved to one to 200. The goal was to simply just observe the breath rising, and falling, counting one end of each breath, two with nothing happening. So there are a few sorts of challenge tips, and yeah, people are welcome to try any one of them. 

The goal was to simply just observe the breath rising, and falling, counting one end of each breath, two with nothing happening. So there are a few sort of challenge tips, and yeah, people are welcome to try any one of them. 

Interviewer:

Great, thank you. 

Patrick:

Wonderful. Take care.