Protecting your attention is a habit

Protecting your attention is a habit

https://news.virginia.edu/content/trouble-focusing-these-uva-experts-can-help

Protect your attention

It’s easy to take your attention for granted – after all, it’s always there. But it can be depleted, leading to feelings of exhaustion, burnout and anxiety. That depletion is habitual. If someone is used to hopping between their work email, personal texts and The New York Times app on their phone, for example, they may be more likely to let their minds wander even if they don’t have a device in front of them.

Let’s remember our attention is a precious human resource. If we treat our attention as something we need to guard, to protect, and we direct it toward what we want to pay attention to, that resource is strengthened and becomes more abundant.

Imagine your mind as a kind of garden. If you don’t tend to it, weeds will encroach, what you planted may wither, and the garden can become wild. When you tend to the garden, you flourish.