What is present attention?
Pretend you are looking at your mind for the very first time. At the beginning you may notice that, in any moment, there are things to which you are paying attention. You are paying attention to these words, but you’re not paying attention at the moment to what the weather is like. Except that now it has been mentioned, you may be.
In those terms, you have present attention, and to have present attention you need to ignore other things that you’re not presently attending to. This type of attention has limited capacity and knowing that your present attention has limited capacity is one vital way to understand how your mind works.
Your present attention has three things that can keep you rooted in the present moment (and by doing so make you ignore other things happening in the present).
Language-Conveyed Thoughts: maybe you’re reading, or listening to the inner voice that you use to discuss things with yourself. They may even be thoughts that occur during a conversation with other people. These language-conveyed thoughts can be complex and have been around for as long as Humans have had language.
Memory-Sourced Thoughts: Most memories are not stored in a linguistic form. You might remember written words exactly, but you wont remember a film or experience as language. Both memories and feelings fit into this category. Here is an example of how that might work:
You may suddenly feel anxious or worried. As you investigate your thoughts to find the cause for this feeling you begin to realise that there is something you have mislaid of forgotten, but for now it remains out of reach. Then, into your present attention the words “Call Mum” appear. Whether you notice it or not, once you get to this point, the tension that had caused you to examine your thoughts, has faded away having done it’s job. These thoughts come out of our memory into our present attention. Once there, we can change them, or discuss them using our inner-voice, in other words using language before returning them to our memory.
Survival thoughts are the third type of thought that come into your present attention and they are the most important to you. These thoughts will appear in your present attention with very little need for language. They are rich in powerful emotional intensity, fast to recall and powerful in their ability to push their way straight into your present attention causing all other thoughts to scatter.
‘Someone’s following me’, ‘I’m up too high’ ,‘What’s that noise?’ are what survival thoughts are about. They arrive very quickly as strong feelings, not as phrases. These word-poor survival thoughts are the main reason that your relatives survived through the ages, long enough to pass on their genetic material. Survival thoughts draw on your senses and push their way into your present attention whenever they judge there might be danger and they just don’t care if they are wrong. If they are wrong, you get a fright but everything is actually fine. To do nothing, on the other hand, means you may not be ready to act to survive.
Having an idea of what is happening in your present attention can be a very effective early step in the therapeutic journey and beyond, but don’t worry if you can’t keep it in your present attention for long. The long-term storage happens elsewhere!