3 Ways To Be Sure You’re Doing Focused Attention Exercises Correctly
Your ability to focus can improve even when it doesn’t feel like it.
Some formal mindfulness exercises improve your ability to focus, others invite you to relinquish control over your attention, and still others provide ways to cultivate magnanimity from the inside out.
Regardless of which areas within the “attentional fitness gym” you decide to explore, it’s not uncommon to feel like you’re doing mindfulness exercises wrong for a few years.
Addressing your confusion as soon as possible significantly reduces that frustrating phase and helps you stay with this counter-instinctual endeavor long enough for it to quietly transform your life.
Here are three ways to be sure you’re strengthening your ability to focus even when it doesn’t feel like it.
Be clear about the perceptions you intend to foreground and flexible with the ones in the background
Focus-building exercises involve selecting one or more categories of perception to observe closely.
Moment by moment, a perception briefly occupies the foreground of your awareness while all other perceptions are underemphasized in the background.
This is similar to the shift that happens when a soloist steps up to the mic and into the spotlight as the rest of the choir takes their volume down a notch but keeps singing.
Observing the sensations of breathing means allowing sights and sounds, mental activity, and emotional reactions to operate in the background. If you decide to emphasize sounds or mental chatter, the sensations related to breathing will shift to the periphery.
No category of perception qualifies inherently as a distraction. They are all versatile—including thoughts and feelings—and can be the focus or a distraction depending on the exercise.
You don’t need to get rid of background perceptions. Forgoing their tug on your attention strengthens your ability to focus.
Becoming less at the mercy of what demands your attention requires lots of practice and stays challenging even as your ability improves.
Collect a reasonable number of repetitions
One repetition of a focus-building exercise is simple, but stringing a bunch of them together isn’t easy.
Why not?
Our attention wanders from sensing into making sense after a handful of seconds.
When we accept this as a feature of our humanity rather than a bug, we can design attention exercises to be challenging while remaining doable.
Expect each repetition to last only a handful of seconds. Anything greater than zero seconds is a win. Half a second totally qualifies.
You never need to strain to sustain a single iteration beyond four to eight seconds. How long does one pushup take? One bicep curl? One inhale? One exhale? Shoot for durations within a similar strength-building range.
This part is important: Be ready to follow each repetition with another one.
Experiment to find a rhythmic yet leisurely pace of collecting repetitions. Be ready to nudge the speed up or down based on your circumstances and energy level.
Establishing a good groove is surprisingly satisfying. Labeling them helps.
Getting better at this doesn’t take as long as you might think. Easing up on the internal pressure to do it perfectly helps set the stage for being absorbed by ordinary, drama-free moments more often.
Treat each instance of attention wandering as an effective focus-building opportunity
It’s easy to interpret the wandering of your attention as a failure. This understandable misinterpretation leads most people to develop an unfavorable view of themselves or mindfulness practice itself.
As contemplatives throughout the ages have discovered, though, there’s a powerful paradox at play here.
Resting your attention on the sensory target develops concentration. Realizing when your attention has drifted completely away from the target is equally effective.
This realization, when you experience it to be true for yourself, erodes the confusion that prevents so many people from establishing a consistent mindfulness practice routine.