The Open-Focus Life: Practices to Develop Attention and Awareness for Optimal Well-Being

INTRODUCTION

WE DON’T OFTEN think of paying attention as a learned behavior—your parents or teachers told you to pay attention when you were growing up, even scolded you for not paying attention, but they didn’t show you how to pay attention or teach you the many different kinds of attention you could use. They simply expected that you would focus very intently on what they wanted you to do, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s how we all learned, unconsciously, to pay attention.

Our hectic, fragmented modern lives encourage us to stay in that narrow, intently focused mode of attention in order to tune out all the distractions. But constantly paying attention in that way is taxing and contributes to the depression, stress, and stress-related conditions that so many of us suffer from these days.

Human beings evolved to pay attention to their surroundings—their space—in an intuitive, instinctive way, much the way other animals still do. Reconnecting to that more fluid, flexible way of paying attention can return us to a more natural state of calm and relaxation, even when our lives are busy and demanding.

That’s the reason for this book. The Open-Focus Life is a practical guide that offers a practical solution to our modern problems of disconnection and stress. That solution lies in the power of your own awareness; more specifically, the solution is to become aware of physical space in a way that’s different from the way you’re accustomed to.

When we talk about space, we’re talking about the space you’re in right now: the outer space that is the room you’re in and everything beyond it, and the inner space that makes up your own body, feelings, and thoughts. For over forty years, Dr. Les Fehmi has been studying the impact of our awareness of physical space on brain-wave activity, on our central nervous systems, and on the way we experience ourselves and the world around us. This book distills those forty years of research, peer-reviewed academic studies, and private sessions with individuals, couples, and groups into a method for changing the way you pay attention that will positively affect your life.

By observing subjects’ brain waves, Dr. Fehmi came to realize that a significant increase in a brain wave called alpha occurred when subjects directed their attention to the physical spaces around them and inside them. Alpha brain waves are produced in greater abundance when the autonomic nervous system reduces the sympathetic overarousal of the fight, flight, or freeze response, allowing the parasympathetic part of the nervous system to produce balance. In other words, when the nervous system’s balance is reinstated, all the peripheral systems normalize, including the endocrine, muscular, and vascular systems, which is why stress symptoms reduce, pain can dissolve, and life can become more fluid when you’re paying attention in the ways we’ll discuss.

The Open-Focus Life gives you easy-to-understand guides and models, with almost effortless changes that you can begin making right now, even as you’re reading. This point is worth emphasizing, because, at first, it may not sound revolutionary: changing the way you pay attention to the spaces around you will change your life. This new way of paying attention can solve or prevent common problems, relieve stress and chronic pain, and help you find more joy in your everyday experiences and relationships.

Our natural way of being—our natural way of paying attention broadly, intimately, and fluidly to the world around us—has gradually been subverted by the speed and ever-increasing demands of the modern world, which has led us to a chronic and rigid narrowing of focus. By opening our focus through simple habits of attention, we can reverse the negative effects of this artificially created stress and live calmer, more contented lives in which we’re healthier, more optimistic, and more deeply connected to our hearts, minds, and bodies.

The Open-Focus Life is a practical book, a simple yet transformative guide to using the greatest tool we have as human beings: the power of our attention.

How to Use This Book

This book will open new avenues of health and well-being to you by doing two things: making you aware of your attention styles, and showing you how to move fluidly among different styles of attention for maximum benefit.

We have discussed many of the principles included here in our previous books The Open-Focus Brain and Dissolving Pain, but this book will give you quick, practical shortcuts to achieving a calmer, more relaxed, less stressful life by illustrating how to handle challenges great and small, ease worries and anxieties, and relieve chronic aches and pains with easy-to-learn and easy-to-apply methods. Changing how you pay attention will change your life for the better, right away, and this book will show you how to do it.

The first two chapters provide an overview of attention styles and what we mean when we talk about space, which is different from the ways people typically think about space. Each subsequent chapter covers common challenges and difficult situations that we all face. When you need to discover how to deal with a particular workplace or family matter, or how to address a particular emotional problem, you can simply flip to that chapter. There you’ll find a brief discussion of the problem, our Open-Focus solutions, and a scene or two that illustrates how you can use the practical techniques we’ve developed to get through these situations or solve these problems in your own life.

If you’d like more in-depth discussions of the science behind these methods, you can flip to the epilogue for references to peer-reviewed academic studies by the authors and other psychologists and counselors, as well as books about the neuroscience of awareness, the biological processes involved in creating the body’s sense perceptions, and other issues related to how our brains interpret and understand the physical world around us.

The surprisingly simple, straightforward techniques in this book are based on sophisticated neuroscience, but the methods themselves are easy to use in everyday life, and you can start using them right now.

1

Paying Attention

WHEN PEOPLE SAY pay attention, they rarely acknowledge what the payment of attention costs you. It requires your effort, your energy, your emotional investment, and your time.

When you’ve heard the words pay attention, the tone that accompanies them often implies displeasure: your teachers, supervisors, and parents have scolded you with these words, admonished you for not listening in the specific way they wanted or not looking at whatever they wanted you to look at. But usually when someone tells you to pay attention, you already are paying attention to something that interests you: letting your mind wander to the birds and the sunshine outside, daydreaming, following a stream of imagination that the words of your teacher or boss have inspired. By telling you to pay attention in a narrow way, your teachers and parents trained you to focus only on the person, thing, or—these days—the computer screen right in front of you, and they’ve rewarded your attention with good grades, or praise, or promotions. This narrow style of attention is the one our culture values most, and it’s also the one that costs us the most.

You can pay attention in many different ways besides the narrowly focused way we rely on in today’s media-saturated, hyper-stressful society. And learning to be flexible in the way you pay attention can change your life, reduce your anxieties, and increase your sense of contentment and well-being.

Opening your mind to the space you’re in allows you to pay attention to what your teacher is saying in class or your boss is saying in a meeting and simultaneously enjoy the birdsong and sunshine out the window. You can listen to a presentation in the meeting room and at the same time feel connected to everything that’s going on around you, and—surprisingly—that feeling will actually help you work more efficiently.

By opening your focus, you can pay attention in ways that reward you rather than cost you, and your ability to consciously change how you pay attention from moment to moment can relieve anxieties, dissolve pain, and let you enjoy physical, mental, and emotional sensations more fully. Your brain will begin to produce brain waves that normalize your nervous system and shift you into an effective but effortless state of awareness.

Let’s look at how we pay attention.

FIRE!

If you yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire, the police will probably come and arrest you. Why? Because yelling fire will send everyone into a panic, possibly causing people to rush to the exits and hurt themselves or each other. Even when a crowded theater is actually on fire, yelling fire is probably a bad idea, because it activates a primitive response in the brain—fight, flight, or freeze. This is an emergency mode of paying attention that costs us the most energy and anxiety of any kind of attention, and it has a very specific function. When an emergency happens, it’s invaluable: it can help you run faster than you ever thought possible, lift cars off of trapped accident victims, and perform all kinds of amazing, almost superhuman feats. But it also narrows your focus to only the danger at hand, and it increases your heart rate and blood pressure.

In our culture, we spend a lot of time in this emergency mode even when there is no emergency, because we’ve been trained to pay attention very narrowly, attending to one small aspect of our environment at a time. In some kinds of emergencies—when a speeding car is coming at you, a vicious dog is chasing you, or a vase is about to tumble down on your child’s head—that narrow focus can save your life or someone else’s. If you stay in that mode for too long, though, it can cost you your life, through heart disease, high blood pressure, and many other anxiety-related diseases and disorders.

Even though such narrow focus can be effective in an emergency, it may still be inferior to a more flexible repertoire of attention styles. In the example of a fire in a crowded theater, panicking and focusing very narrowly on your own survival may actually work against you, because of all the other people between you and the exits. In order to have the best outcome in this situation, you have to pay attention both in a narrow way to the danger at hand and in a more diffuse way to the environment and the people around you, so that you have a better chance to move with the crowd to reach safety. By using this book to exercise your ability to become more aware of space, you will be better prepared for emergency situations of all kinds as well as everyday situations that aren’t truly emergencies but may feel just as urgent.

Kinds of Attention

You don’t normally think about how you pay attention, but paying attention is a way of behaving, and the more consciously you pay attention, the more control you have over your life. Paying attention fluidly and shifting appropriately between modes of focus will become second nature with a little practice, and when you begin feeling the benefits of this practice, it will become a pleasure. And the benefits will begin right away.

You’ve been taught rules of etiquette, or you’ve learned them through observation and trial and error. You behave differently at an informal barbecue with friends than at a formal work luncheon or a classical music concert, because different ways of behaving are appropriate at different kinds of events. The same is true of how you pay attention, except that, in our culture, no one teaches you how to manage your attention, and the person most affected by how you do that is you. Learning how to pay attention in different situations is just like learning how to interact with other people in different kinds of social settings, except that the person you’re learning to interact with when you learn different modes of attention is yourself.

This is an important point, so we’ll repeat it: learning how to attend flexibly to the world around you is learning to interact with yourself in the way that is most appropriate to every situation.

Learning flexible attention will help you move easily and comfortably from one situation to the next, and it will help you discover important things about yourself. This is true of family gatherings, business meetings, first dates and breakups, sitting in classes at school, and virtually every other situation you routinely find yourself in. How you pay attention affects literally every moment of your conscious life.

It’s relatively simple to make the normally unconscious, habitual act of paying attention conscious and to learn how to move between attention styles, combine them, and ultimately to trust yourself in almost any situation.

Let’s take a look at the styles of attention we have at our disposal.

Narrow Attention

Paying attention narrowly means focusing intently on a particular task, event, or emotion to the exclusion of everything else going on around you and to the exclusion of the physical space you’re in. Narrow attention helps you concentrate energy. For example, if you’re trying to untie a tangled knot, you might focus on finding the right bit of string to pull on, and then on picking it out of the knot and pulling it free, and your attention might be so focused that you don’t really hear the question someone is asking you. A cat will focus narrowly when hunting or chasing a toy on the end of a string; a dog will focus narrowly on a tennis ball or a bone that you’re holding out. Narrow attention is a style that causes all your energy resources to converge on a single focal point for a period of time, and this convergence of attention is often conscious. When trying to untie a knot, you intentionally narrow your focus. When hunting, the cat must narrow its focus to its prey, or it may be distracted by other stimuli and the prey will get away.

These conscious kinds of narrowing usually help us, but we can also unconsciously narrow our attention in ways that may hurt us. If you’re in an argument and someone is speaking to you angrily, you might focus narrowly on that person’s angry words or on your own emotions of fear or resentment, and it may become more difficult to resolve the disagreement. Narrowing your focus can have tremendous benefits when used for a specific purpose or task, but when done unintentionally—reflexively or habitually, as your response to every situation—narrow focus can keep you from perceiving other aspects of the environment, other sights, sounds, and emotions that can help you. It also increases stress, which has long-term physiological consequences. Too much narrowly focused attention can literally make you sick.

Objective Attention

The words objective and objectify have a lot of currency in our culture. We value the trait of objectivity—being impartial and detached—and many of the principles of democratic governments are based on the implied fairness that objectivity brings. Objectivity allows us to judge disputes and discern among a variety of possible choices based not on self-interest but on sound reasoning, and the framework of checks and balances in the American Constitution is based on principles of objectivity that we hold almost sacred. By objectifying a thing, a process, or a set of circumstances, we can see it more clearly and make decisions with less interference from our unconscious prejudices.

The word objectify also has negative connotations, particularly where it concerns people and personal relationships. When you objectify other people, you reduce them to things that you evaluate, instead of seeing them as whole human beings and empathizing with them. Objectifying people reduces them to particular characteristics that have some use value for you but may not include or recognize them fully, and thus puts up barriers to understanding other people and their points of view.

Objective focus, as with all the other attention styles, thus has both positive and negative applications, so it’s important to be aware of how you’re using this mode. Detaching yourself from ideas and propositions can help you make wise decisions in business, finances, and relationships, but distancing yourself from other people by making them into objects can create conflict and tension.

And distancing yourself from your own experiences by constantly judging and evaluating them instead of immersing yourself in them can deprive you of the rich textures of life. For example, eating chocolate to evaluate whether it’s Swiss or Dutch chocolate or objectifying your experience by telling yourself that you shouldn’t be having the chocolate at all are both very different from letting yourself melt into the pleasures of the tastes.

Immersed Attention

Immersed attention occurs when you merge your conscious awareness with a project, person, or experience outside yourself. Musicians in a band or orchestra can immerse themselves in the experience of playing music, just as concertgoers can immerse themselves in hearing music; in both cases, the individuals lose themselves in the common experience that they’re creating. You can immerse yourself in the experience of lovemaking, in playing a sport, in viewing art or seeing a movie, in doing almost anything where the experience overtakes your self-consciousness and you feel that you are completely absorbed in the activity you’re participating in. Losing your self-consciousness can be liberating and can make your experiences more immediate and vital.

The negative side of immersed attention is personified in the absent-minded professor, a figure so absorbed by her own thoughts as she walks around in everyday life that she bumps into walls and walks into traffic. Choosing to immerse your attention can have fantastic benefits—think of a great violinist at one with her music and the heights of aesthetic experience she can give to an audience—but it can also have extreme drawbacks, as when you become inappropriately immersed in your own emotions or thoughts and unintentionally withdraw from the world, especially when the situation you’re in calls for a different kind of awareness.

Diffuse Attention

Diffuse attention is the opposite of laser focus: instead of one single, powerful ray of light, diffuse focus opens the lens to allow light to shine in all directions at once, like the projector at a planetarium shining panoramic images of the sky. Diffuse attention both projects a wide-open, inclusive stance and allows into your consciousness stimuli from all around you at the same time. If you’re out in the forest birding, your attention may be narrowly focused on a particular birdsong or a particular color of plumage, as you search for the bird you’re longing to see; but if you’re in the forest hiking, out to enjoy all that nature has to offer, your focus will be more diffuse, allowing you to feel the gentle breeze, hear the buzzing of insects and the cries of all the different birds, see the cascading of the waterfall in the distance and the puffy white clouds overhead, all at once. The positive side of diffuse attention is inclusiveness and openness; the negative side is that diffusing your attention can make it more difficult to make decisions, because you allow into your consciousness a wide variety of different feelings and ideas. Diffusing your attention can make it difficult to accomplish certain tasks, because you’re processing many different external stimuli all at once (driving a car when your attention is diffuse or all over the place would be almost impossible).

Moving between Attention Styles

In the example of driving a car, what is the best way to pay attention? You must simultaneously evaluate a wide variety of external events and stimuli and predict what is likely to happen next, be aware of the traffic laws, and operate your vehicle. Most of us do this so commonly that these tasks no longer occupy our complete attention, but they are still complex—it’s no wonder that adding such equally complex everyday tasks as talking on the phone, flipping between radio stations, eating a sandwich, or fixing your hair while behind the wheel can be dangerous distractions. What style of attention should you use when driving a car, then?

Ideally, you would use a combination of styles. In fact, almost everything you do every day requires a combination of attention styles, but the way you learn everyday tasks often concentrates more on the tasks themselves than how you pay attention to them, and so your approach to your everyday life, the way you pay attention to daily tasks, can usually be improved by attending to how you pay attention. Bringing attention styles into your consciousness, allowing yourself to choose how to pay attention, can make everyday tasks easier and can make your life calmer and more free-flowing.

When you’re driving, you’re ideally moving fluidly between the immersed attention style that allows you to merge with the skills of driving that you’ve learned and practiced and the narrowly objective attention style that allows you to evaluate situations with detachment—while also fluidly moving in and out of diffuse attention, which allows you to see and hear the whole environment around the car as it changes. As you move through constantly changing traffic, you should be moving between diffuse attention (taking in the whole environment all at once) and narrow attention when the situation demands it (a soccer ball flies into the road and a child chases after it). When you’re not free to move fluidly among different attention styles,