Here are three reasons that you need to “pay attention to your attention.” These three lessons are based on both research, personal experience, and the experiences of my clients.

Reason #1 - Paying attention to what you can’t control leads to anxiety and depression.

The focus here is “self-efficacy.” The more we believe that our actions are meaningful, the greater our self-efficacy. Lower self-efficacy correlates with anxiety and depression. Higher self-efficacy correlates with greater self-confidence and similar positive emotional states. The tricky thing here is that some situations are beyond our control - so I’m not advocating we develop a sense of hyper-responsibility to take charge of everything. Instead, I’m affirming the words of the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

This is one of the reasons I’m big on separating your weaknesses from your liabilities. Weaknesses are those things in your life that are less than ideal, but don’t prevent you from achieving what really matters in life. We you make peace with your weaknesses, you can focus on the things that really matter.

The podcast interview below discusses that idea in more depth.

Reason #2 - Paying attention to what you can control gives you energy and confidence.

If you’ve not read the classic leadership book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you’ve missed out on a gem. It’s focus is how to lead yourself so that you can lead others as well.

Using Covey’s concepts here, we are talking about the “circle of influence” (where you can have self-efficacy) vs. the “circle of concern” (the stuff we can’t really impact). As we focus on our circle of influence and take action on it, we experience a host of positive benefits (including greater skill at influencing our circle of concern!).

Reason #3 - Paying attention to what you can taste, touch, see, hear, or feel helps you “wake up” from rumination.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has done some really helpful work on the difference between “stress” and “pressure.” Essentially, pressure is unavoidable in life (some people call this eustress, which refers to the good pressures that motivate us to get out of bed and get stuff done). On the other hand, stress (what some would call distress) is avoidable. The root cause of that avoidable stress is rumination - where we continually return to the past and beat ourselves up or we worry about things we can’t control in the future. One of the cures for rumination suggested by CCL is that we “wake up” from our distracting thoughts to focus on what is really going on around us. I’ve found it especially helpful to focus on physical sensations like the temperature of the air that I inhale vs. the temperature of the air that I exhale.

Don’t miss these two points:

1. Watch out for rumination. Rumination occurs when we focus on past mistakes or things we can’t control in the future. One of the reasons I developed the ACT model for my clients (downloadable here), was to help them avoid rumination.

2. Watch out for attaching negative emotions to life’s inevitable setbacks. In effect, watch out for the saboteurs that Shirzad Chamine warns about in this TED talk below.

Here are three ways to apply all that.

1. Name your demons.

   Chamine and others have suggested we “label” the thoughts that constantly distract us - like our sabateur thoughts and emotions. There is something about simply “naming the demon” that begins to take away its power.

2. Reconnect to the physical.

   I’m more prone to stress when I spend a lot of time in my head instead of saying connected to the physical world - what I can taste, touch, see, hear or feel. I’ve learned from Chamine’s book on Positive Intelligence how to do brief exercises that help me reconnect and refocus, and I’ve added regular routines to my week that include spending time outdoors and reconnecting with my physical environment.

3. Close your open apps.

   My clients frequently report positive results from this activity. In the same way that open apps on your phone drain your phone’s battery, open apps in your head drain your mental and emotional energy. Your attention is being slowly leached to these unresolved things in the back of your head taking up important real estate. Basically your are using “computing” power without the benefit of actually accomplishing anything. To access the worksheet I use with my clients to close their open apps, please complete the form below and click “I want to pay attention to the good stuff!” This form will help me send you the latest version of this helpful client tool.