How do I stop wasting my attention?

The Drift’s advice column #4

Welcome to the April installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

Hi Sophie,

In your first column, you said that we should focus our attention instead of letting it wander. I felt a jolt of painful recognition reading that, because my chronic habit of letting my attention wander has caused me a whole lot of trouble. Usually this looks like daydreaming, introspecting, retrospecting, falling into internet rabbit holes, and so on. And usually the consequences are small too, but sometimes that unfocused drifting leads to bad life decisions that barely involve any conscious thought — very stupid and certainly not agentic.

I’ve tried to curb this tendency, but I’ve found it difficult. Some of my daydreams involve being sent to an army boot camp for a few months and returning with an iron will and a mechanical ability to turn thought into action. I do grasp the basic truth that the only thing that can bring about a change in your behavior is a change in your behavior, but this insight has failed to transform me.

How do I stop wasting my attention on every stray impulse?

— Dazed and Distracted

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Dear “Dazed and Distracted,”

Your fantasy of a military-style boot camp for correcting your wandering attention is relatable to me. It’s a bit like when I go on a sugar binge, or spend a week eating only enchiladas, as I recently did in New Mexico, and then suddenly want to eat only vegetables and forgo even the little squares of chocolate I have after dinner. It makes sense: you feel bad doing one thing, so you expect that doing the opposite thing will make you feel better. Oscillating between extremes isn’t a great long-term strategy, however, and it’s particularly difficult to browbeat or boot camp your way into better attention.

Attention — whether focused on work, projects, books, the people in your life, or the dogwood trees flowering outside your window — is an art, a careful calibration of your brain and your senses and your body. It’s hard to say what it is exactly, but I like this line, borrowed from Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove in the recent Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement: “So crystal clean, the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table.” Attention, then, is like a goblet: you can fill it with anything you choose. The question is less how you can will yourself into submission, and more what you want to fill your cup with.

You list a few things you view as negative uses of your attention. Some of these, I have to say, seem like very strange things to feel guilty and ashamed about: “introspecting, daydreaming, retrospecting.” I don’t know where we got the idea that those things are negative. (A version of this was recently articulated by archvillain venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who tried to claim that great men of history weren’t sitting around introspecting. To which I can only say: ???) Attention paid to the past, to dreams, to the strange things that pop into your head while you’re doing nothing — that’s the stuff of life! I find myself wondering why you feel guilty or ashamed of these pursuits; is it because you believe you can turn yourself into a machine who will do rather than think? Even if that were possible, why would you want that? The endless pursuit of productivity is not a happy place to put all your attention.

Even “internet rabbit holes,” to which I’m deeply susceptible, are not inherently bad. I wrote a bit about this for The Drift a few years ago, but online distraction can be part of the fabric of working and thinking and living. The internet and our phones have become part of our intellectual life — which now includes Wikipedia-hopping, texts from friends, even tweets. Most of us live plugged in, and the persistent fantasy of throwing our phones into the sea forever is neither realistic nor (to me) altogether desirable. Live a little! Look at some memes!

All that said, I understand what you mean when you say that something feels wrong with your attention. Something feels wrong with mine, too. Lately I’ve been on my phone a lot, especially on Instagram. I’ve been reading less than I’d like to. I’ve been struggling to focus on one thing for long periods of time, flitting between things. While I believe there is room in life for internet rabbit holes, I don’t think it’s good or normal to spend all day staring at a screen, to feel your phone like a phantom limb when it’s in another room, to refresh your email while you’re trying to read. It’s objectively true that big companies are monetizing our time and brains — the Attensity! authors use the metaphor of “human fracking.” (Another reason to try to ditch the shame: your addiction or attraction to your devices is not some purely individual failure.) I think the clearest evidence that someone has a problem is that it feels like one. And for both of us, it seems, the cups of our attention are not being filled in the ways we want them to be.

So what can we do? First, practical stuff: I use tools to limit the tools that suck me in. I have a Brick on my fridge for certain apps, and a lockbox where I can store my phone when I really, really want it away from me. These techniques are helpful because they create physical boundaries. I also seek out phone-free places when I can: I’ll do a walk sometimes without my phone or go on airplane mode at the gym. Churches, museums, libraries, movie theaters, saunas, and (to a lesser extent) concerts can all be good places to allow yourself to detach from your devices and direct your attention somewhere else. And if you feel yourself struggling to focus on what’s going on, reaching in your pocket to check notifications — that can be a sign that you need to undertake a program of attentional reset, a gentle version of your fantasy of the boot camp.

Such a program would look different for everyone, but here’s what I do, and I think it’s broadly adaptable. Start with reading a book that seems “hard” to you, ten or twenty pages a day. (Check in with our friend Henry James, perhaps.) Be disciplined about actually doing this every day — even if you fall short of your page goal. Do a physical activity (practicing yoga, running, going for long walks, biking around, even doing some push-ups), if not every day, then three to five times per week, and don’t look at your phone while you’re doing it. Attention is not just about floating in your brain; it exists in your body, and feeling yourself embodied in physical space can be surprisingly healing. If you’re inclined, you can mix in meditation, but here I’ll admit that I’ve never once felt like I’ve gotten any benefits from it, so, to each their own.

Some of this might sound really basic, because it is. We might crave extreme solutions, but I think this is a case where repeated small steps are better and sometimes harder. You might find yourself shirking these commitments more than you expect, and pushing through those moments is where change occurs. You also may find that in this journey, you are introspecting, daydreaming, retrospecting, and going down the occasional internet rabbit hole. And to that I would say: great! May the cup of your attention runneth over.

If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

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Image credit: John Sloan, The Masses, December 1912