The freediver's psychological training

In reality, to achieve such an ordered mental condition is not as easy as it sounds. Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training, and without an object in the external world that demands attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. It is relatively easy t

For now, your aim is just to tame the constant movements of attention, while at the same time trying to maintain peripheral awareness of things in the background. In other words, you want to develop stable attention with mindfulness.

I myself like to call it attentive inattention. The concept was pioneered by Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology. Neisser noticed how he could look out a window at twilight and either see the external world or focus on the reflection of the room in the glass. But he couldn’t actively pay attention to both. Twilight or reflection had t

(1) thinking ahead, or viewing the situation as just one moment on a larger, longer timeline and being able to identify it as just one point to get past in order to reach a better future point; (2) being specific and setting specific goals, or defining your end point as discretely as possible and pooling your attentional resources as specifically a

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

There are three basic systems at work, two enabling us to be ON, one enabling us to switch OFF. Both of the ON systems manage and direct our energies and attention towards or away from things in our world in anxiety, fear, reward or pleasure.

Whichever kind of concentration meditation you practice, you start by focusing on one meditative object to the exclusion of all else, and you begin to witness the functioning of your personality. Your mind shares with you all the things you need to feel comfort and have ease in the meditation.