Meta-awareness allows us to track our attention itself—noticing, for example, when our mind has wandered off from something we want to focus on. This ability to monitor the mind without getting swept away introduces a crucial choice point when we find our mind has wandered: we can bring our focus back to the task at hand. This simple mental skill u

Such awareness of awareness itself lets us monitor our mind without being swept away by the thoughts and feelings we are noticing. “That which is aware of sadness is not sad,” observes philosopher Sam Harris. “That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m as confused as anyone else.”

better impulse inhibition went along with a self-reported uptick in emotional well-being.

cognitive control helps us is in managing our impulses, technically known as “response inhibition.”

“suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy.13

“What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”

Known in cognitive science as the “cocktail party effect,” this sudden awareness illustrates part of the design of our brain’s attention systems: we take in more of the stream of information available than we know in conscious awareness. This lets us tune out irrelevant sounds but still examine them for relevance somewhere in the mind. And our own

Ordinarily we notice something unusual just long enough to be sure it poses no threat, or simply to categorize it. Then habituation conserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing once we know it’s safe or familiar. One downside of this brain dynamic: we habituate to anything familiar—the pictures on our walls, the same dish night after

The ultimate source of peace, he said, is in the mind—which, far more than our circumstances, determines our happiness.33