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Undivided Attention: 6 Ways to Focus That Will Make You Happier
By Eric Barker
June 23, 2014 12:31 PM EDT
Research shows that paying attention to positive feelings literally expands your world. Focusing on the negative makes it tiny.
Based on objective lab tests that measure vision, Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shows that paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it — a fact that has important implications for your daily experience.
As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman famously said, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
As research has shown, lottery winners aren’t as happy as you might guess and paraplegics aren’t as unhappy as you might think. Why?
For each, being rich or being paralyzed eventually becomes one small piece of their very big life. In other words, they stop focusing on it.
Via Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life:
“People think that if they win the lottery, they’ll be happy forever. Of course, they will not. For a while, they are happy because of the novelty, and because they think about winning all the time. Then they adapt and stop paying attention to it.” Similarly, he says, “Everyone is surprised by how happy paraplegics can be, but they are not paraplegic full-time. They do other things. They enjoy their meals, their friends, the newspaper. It has to do with the allocation of attention.”
And controlling that attention can be the key to your happiness.
Kahneman says that both the Dalai Lama and the Penn positive psychologist Martin Seligman would agree about the importance of paying attention: “Being able to control it gives you a lot of power, because you know that you don’t have to focus on a negative emotion that comes up.”
So in a world of buzzing iPhones and relentless emails and text messages, how can you better control your attention and make yourself happier?
Here are six tips from research.
1) Reappraisal
How you react to things is more important than what actually happens.
Research pioneered by Arnold and Lazarus shows reappraising situations, focusing on the good elements of “bad” events, can be a huge step toward staying positive.
… direct your attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light. After a big blowup over an equitable sharing of the housework, rather than continuing to concentrate on your partner’s selfishness and sloth, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a solution to the problem, and to your improved mood.
Directing your attention away from a negative experience not only is not as maladaptive as many of his peers think but, according to the Columbia psychologist George Bonanno, can be a superior coping strategy. Indeed, he finds that in the wake of an upsetting event, “self-deception and emotional avoidance are consistently and robustly linked to a better outcome.” Even when you’re reeling from a severe blow, such as a loved one’s death, diverting your focus from your grief can boost your resilience.
As I’ve posted before, more thinking can cure bad feelings. Meditation can increase your attention span.
2) Focus On Those Who Believe In You
How do politicians and salesmen stay so positive?
Part of it may be acting but they also have a tendency to selectively pay attention to positive reinforcers.
Individuals of sanguine temperament, such as certain politicians, CEOs and salesmen, seem naturally to excel at directing their focus away from negative targets. Research shows that when they confront a potentially unpleasant situation, such as some unfriendly faces at a gathering, these extraverts are apt to shift their attention rapidly around the room and zero in on amiable or neutral visages, thus short-circuiting the distressing images before they can get stored in memory.
3) Seek Flow
You don’t need more time “doing nothing” to recharge, you need more challenges that you find engrossing.
“Flow” (being so wrapped up in what you’re doing that the world falls away) is an active state of attention that research shows we like more than endless hours in front of the TV.
Via Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life:
In a stunning example of the kind of mind-set that undermines good daily experience, most people reflexively say that they prefer being at home to being at work. However, flow research shows that on the job, they’re much likelier to focus on activities that demand their attention, challenge their abilities, have a clear objective and elicit timely feedback — conditions that favor optimal experience.
4) Make Boring Things Into A Game
Even dull jobs can be more compelling if you change the activity into a game and make it a challenge.
This increases your engagement and makes you happier.
With some thought, effort, and attention, says Csíkszentmihályi, you can make even an apparently dreary job, such as assembling toasters or packaging tools, much more satisfying. “The trick,” he says, “is to turn the work into a kind of game, in which you focus closely on each aspect” — screwing widget A to widget B or the positions of your tools and materials — “ and try to figure out how to make it better. That way, you turn a rote activity into an engaging one.”
5) Schedule Challenges For Your Leisure Time
Schedule things in advance that draw you in and you’ll find yourself enjoying your free time more.
Most of us seek unscheduled free time for our leisure but given your brain’s lazy nature, you’re likely to waste that time doing what’s easy vs. what’s really fun.
丟掉不良態度
How to Let Go of Negativity and Stress
By verywellmind
Truly effective stress management involves a mix of habits and thought patterns that minimize the stress you encounter in life and increase your ability to cope with the stress you must face. There are several habits that can increase your resilience to stress, including meditation, exercise, focusing on the positive, and surrounding yourself with positive and supportive people, to name a few.
While building your resilience to the inevitable stress you must face in life can go a long way in helping you to stay balanced with stress, it's by no means the only route to stress relief, nor should it be. Cutting out stressors whenever possible is always a good idea. Letting go of our own self-defeating habits is another important strategy. You may not even be aware of all the ways in which you self-sabotage, so here is an important refresher course.
Releasing grudges, negative perspectives, toxic relationships, and other vessels of negativity in your life may feel difficult at first, but once you have started to release your grip, letting go becomes increasingly easier.
The following are some of the more stress-inducing things you may be holding onto, with some proven strategies for releasing them from your life.
1
Let Go of Grudges
There's a lot of press about forgiveness and its many benefits, and unless we face some serious wrongs that have been dealt in our direction, most people probably think of themselves as basically forgiving. We all know that forgiveness can be freeing, but we may not realize how much we are holding onto, or we may not know how to let go of the grudge.
If you are wondering if you can benefit from letting go of anger, ask yourself, do you find yourself ruminating about things that have happened in your past? Are you holding onto anger from your younger years—either anger at yourself for not doing things differently or at others for things they did intentionally or unintentionally that affected you in a negative way?
2
Cull Your Clutter
Have you ever walked into a messy room (or a messy house!) and just felt tired? How do you feel when you walk into your own home at the end of a long day and do you have a specific room you can go to where you feel truly relaxed? Many people don't realize the toll that clutter can take on our stress levels.1 There are many hidden costs of clutter, and they can all act as energy drains that create stress, even if we don't consciously realize it.
If the clutter you have is causing stress, it may be time to prioritize simplification and streamlining—your space and your life.
3
Drop Negative Attitudes About Yourself or Others
Like subtle grudges, you may not be aware of limiting beliefs you have about yourself or others. Do you find yourself negating your own abilities, minimizing your successes, thinking you can't do something before you even try, even if it's something you really want? In the same vein, do you find yourself begrudging others' success because you feel minimized by their triumphs, even though you logically know this isn't necessarily true? Learn to recognize negative thinking patterns and cognitive distortions, and then change them.
4
Cut Out Tolerations (and Learn What They Are)
Tolerations are those things in our lives that drain us and create stress but we live with them and maybe don't even realize they're adding a small piece of stress to each day. If you take a moment to become aware of your energy drains, your patience drains, and your other tolerations, you can create a plan to eliminate them from your life for good, and cut out untold stress in the process. It's more than worth the effort.
5
Say No to Toxic Relationships
Relationships can act as powerful resources for coping with stress or as prolific sources of particularly heavy levels of stress. It's even more surprising that certain 'friendships' that are conflicted, negatively competitive, or otherwise lacking in trust, can actually create more stress than relationships that are unfriendly but stable.
If you find yourself in an unhealthy relationship—a romantic relationship or a friendship, working to create a healthier dynamic is a great way to minimize stress. But if that doesn't work, learning when and how to let go may be necessary. If you've tried your best to improve your toxic relationships but are still finding them to be stressful, here are some tips that may help.
A Word From Verywell
Letting go of these stress-inducing thought patterns and lifestyle features isn't easy, but it may be easier than you think. And it can be addictive—once you start letting go of some of the stressors in your life, it becomes easier to let go of more.
You may want to choose one at a time to focus on for a few weeks (once a month is a good place to start) and move onto another one when you’ve let go enough to feel relief. Notice and congratulate yourself on the progress you make as you make it, and remember that in the end, it will be worth the effort to have greater peace.
If you are struggling to go of negativity, professional help may be helpful. Consider seeing a therapist, counselor, or other mental health professional who can help you learn strategies to combat negativity and decrease stress.
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