Your Thoughts Are the Product of the Attention That You Give Them

How life is made of yellow cars and washing machines.

You have a single awareness. It can move so quickly between things that it gives us the impression that you are aware of everything at once, but that is an illusion. The brain bundles all our sensory experiences into what feels like a full awareness of everything happening. But in the end, what you focus on is what your life consists of.

This single-focus priority explains why worry grows the more you think about it and why resentment or anxiety can take over an entire day. Thoughts are the product of the attention that you give them. Give a thought your attention, and it intensifies. Take your attention away, and it subsides. Nothing else about the thought has changed. Only our attention on it.

Your brain’s selection process

Your brain doesn’t show you the world. It shows you a selection of it. Scientists call this selective attention, and it is one of the few things in psychology you can prove to yourself in a couple of minutes, which is what I teach in my courses, classes and retreats.

The brain prioritises threats because this is a survival trait. The ancestors who looked out for tigers survived, and we are their children. The ancestors who were daydreaming or only looking for a honey tree didn’t make it.

After threats, the brain selects what matters most to you. There are no yellow cars on the road until you decide to buy a yellow car, and then they are everywhere. There are no adverts for washing machines until your washing machine breaks down. Nothing has changed, only your attention.

How attention builds the loop

Now, if you put those two things together, your brain selecting for threats and significance then we can understand the focus of our minds. You’re not being negative, you’re being human.

Every time you return to a thought, you are telling your subconscious that this thought matters. So it makes sure you notice everything connected with it. The worry about money finds price increases everywhere. The argument with a colleague shows up in the tone of every email.

Thoughts and emotions act like a magnet for our attention. Once attention locks onto something intense enough to hold it, your mind and body organise around that one thing, and that state then draws in whatever else is intense enough to keep it going.

This creates what I call a negative feedback loop. Attention makes the thought significant. Significance makes the subconscious select for it. Selection gives you more of it to think about, which earns it more attention. Round and round it goes. I sometimes call this process the hamster wheel, or the conveyor belt, or the escalator of thoughts and feelings. Different images, same process. And I have yet to meet anyone whose problem was solved by another round of rumination.

I know this from the inside. When I was suffering from generalised anxiety, what I wanted above all was to understand this process. It was understanding the feedback loops that showed me the way out, because a loop that is built by attention can be unbuilt by attention.

Stepping out of the loop

Here is the good news. Becoming familiar with the mind has nothing to do with investigating your thoughts, or having better thoughts, or changing your thoughts. It is all about awareness and focus. We do not control our minds, but we do increase our control over our focus.

The first step is noticing. In meditation, we train what is known as the ‘moment of recognition’: the moment that you realise that your attention has been captured. That is the whole foundational skill of mindfulness meditation, repeated gently, over time. Each time you notice, you interrupt the loop, and the thought loses one more repetition of the attention it was living on.

Our culture tells us that we should keep ourselves busy, which is code for distract ourselves from intense thoughts and feelings. This isn’t a reliable strategy because so many adversities leave us with only our minds, and the usual distractions aren’t accessible. For example, with illness and injury.

Once we have accessed presence (the experience of the present moment), the next step is to focus on something neutral. The breath is ideal for both, which is why breathing meditation is the backbone of meditation as mental training. The breath carries no memories or judgements, and also reconnects you with your body.

Memory isn’t like a filing cabinet. It is like a compost heap. The things at the bottom rot down and disappear, unless we keep digging them up and placing them on top again. Every revisit keeps a thought fresh. Every time you leave it alone, it composts a little more.

How to create positive feedback loops

Selective attention isn’t your enemy. It is a natural mechanism, and it works just as well in the other direction.

Give your attention to three good things at the end of each day, and you train your subconscious to learn that good things are significant. It starts letting them through, and you have a counterbalance to unhelpful thoughts and uncomfortable emotions. The more you seek good things, the more you find. Calmness and gratitude form a loop of their own, each one feeding the other, and they grow together.

So the practices I teach are not about fighting your thoughts, emptying your mind, or thinking only happy thoughts. They are about noticing where your attention has gone and choosing, gently and repeatedly, where you would rather it went. Your thoughts will follow your attention. They always do. They are the product of the attention that you give them.

Photo by aamir on Unsplash.