Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

Thanks to positive emotion’s expansive effect on attention, your immediate reward for that effort is not just a more comfortable, satisfying affective state, but also a bigger, better worldview. Where the long-term benefits are concerned, you’ve come closer to making a habit of the focused life.

That’s not to say that when something upsetting happens, you immediately try to force yourself to “be happy.” First, says Fredrickson, you examine “the seed of emotion,” or how you honestly feel about what occurred. Then you direct your attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light.

The point of a secular attentional workout is not spiritual experience but the enhancement of the ability to focus, emotional balance, or both. In the “mindfulness meditation” that’s the most widely used form, you sit silently for forty-five minutes and attend to your breath: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. When thoughts arise, as they inevitably d

All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.

you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.

Attention is woven into the warp and woof of James’s defense of your freedom, individuality, and ability to create your own unique experience. Because your mind is profoundly shaped by what it imposes on itself, he argued, where you choose to focus it is vitally important. This conviction underlies many of his best maxims, such as “The greatest wea

Attention has created the experience and, significantly, the self stored in your memory, but looking ahead, what you focus on from this moment will create the life and person yet to be.

cognitive scientist Don Norman. According to his conceptual model, the brain has three major parts, which focus on very different things and sometimes conflict. The “reactive” component, which handles the brain’s visceral, automatic functions, concentrates on stuff that elicits biologically determined responses, such as dizzying heights and sweet t

human beings are the only creatures to know that we must die, but we’re also the only ones to know that we must find something engaging to focus on in order to pass the time—increasingly, a lot of time.