Rapt

Bottom-up attention automatically keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the world, but this great benefit comes with a drawback, particularly for postindustrial folk who live in metropolitan areas and work at desks rather than on the savannah: lots of fruitless, unwelcome distractions.

Abundant research shows that most of the rich and famous, brainy and beautiful are little or no happier than individuals of ordinary means and gifts, because no matter who you are, your joie de vivre mostly derives from paying attention to someone or something that interests you.

Nevertheless, throughout a long, grueling ordeal, I cleaved to the principle that your life is the creation of what you focus on—and what you don’t. Whenever possible, I looked toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or energizing and away from the destructive, or dispiriting.

you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing. As the poet says in Beowulf, “Every life has more than enough sadness and more than enough joy.”

Research on the so-called cognitive appraisal of emotions, pioneered by the psychologists Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus, confirms that what happens to you, from a blizzard to a pregnancy to a job transfer, is less important to your well-being than how you respond to it.

(Freud notwithstanding, Rozin argues that most of us pay far more attention to food than sex, which is one reason why he studies eating.)

At the very least, paying attention to someone else confers the big psychological benefits of structuring your experience and distracting you from the self-referential rumination that so often takes a negative cast.

Attention, from the Latin for “reach toward,” is the most basic ingredient in any relationship, from a casual friendship to a lifelong marriage.

When they’re focused on either a social activity or a task, the moods of even fragile or stressed people, including breast-cancer patients, bulimics, and chronic depressives, are no different from those of average subjects in control groups but drop precipitously when they’re alone or have nothing to attend to.