Lesson Five On Happiness - Control Your Attention

0:00Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Let me begin with something you've probably experienced. You're driving home, you arrive outside your house. Switch off the engine and suddenly think, I don't remember half of the journey. You stopped at the traffic light, you turned at the correct roads, you somehow arrived safely. But mentally, you were somewhere else, perhaps thinking about an argument from yesterday, perhaps worrying about tomorrow, perhaps replaying something someone said to you three days ago. Your body was driving through the present, your mind was travelling through the past, the future. And this brings us to Professor Bruce Hood's fifth lesson in the science of happiness, control your attention. The reality is that we spend almost half of our lives somewhere else. In the book, Professor Hood discusses a remarkable study of a psychologist, Matthew Killingzwith,

1:00and Daniel Gilbert. And researchers contacted thousands of people randomly during their everyday lives and asked them questions such as, what are you doing? What are you thinking about? How happy are you right now? And the researchers discovered something extraordinary. People's minds were wondering almost 50% of the time. Think about that. If you live 80 years and this pattern holds across time that you awake, enormous portion of your conscious experience may be spent not fully in attention to what you're actually doing. And this research was carried out with students at Bristol University. Their minds were wondering even more, around 60% of the time. But here's the important part. When people's mind wonder, they generally report being less happy why? Because mind wondering isn't always daydreaming. Very often we're wondering into rumination in worry. Why did she say that?

2:00I shouldn't have done that. What if I fail? What if something goes wrong? The body is sitting peacefully in the lounge, but the mind is fighting battles that have already happened or haven't happened yet. And something fascinating about the brain is called the default mode network. Scientists discovered that when people weren't considering or weren't concentrating on a specific task, the brain didn't apply, simply switch off. Certain regions actually became active. The brain starts wondering, remembering, imagining, thinking about ourselves, thinking about other people, replaying the past, predicting the future. And this ability is incredibly useful. It allows us to plan, to learn, but left unchecked, it can also become a breeding ground of for rumination. You simply replay the same conversation ten times. Interestingly, nothing changes. The conversation ended yesterday, but emotionally you still inside it. Now place a smartphone into this already distracted human brain.

3:04A notification WhatsApp email, Instagram news, another notification, you unlocked your phone. You have to check the time, ten minutes later, you're watching a video, you're having tended to watch. You know, when we look at it, social media is particularly powerful because it captures our attention. And perhaps the crucial word is captures. If you don't decide where your attention goes, somebody else will decide it for you. Technology companies understand that attention is valuable. Your attention can be monetized. So in today's world, controlling attention isn't simply a productivity skill. It's become a happiness skill. The opposite of destruction is flow. So what the author of the book, The Science of Happiness, Professor Wood doesn't merely tell us what is wrong. He introduces us to something beautiful, the flow state. You probably experience it, perhaps while gardening, cooking, writing, painting, playing sport, doing woodwork, reading, working on something, challenging that you generally

4:06enjoy. You become so absorbed that suddenly you look at the clock and you say, where did the two hours go? That is flow. So psychologists have firmly studied the state of complete absorption. Flow stems to occur when the challenge before us is demanding enough to require concentration but not so difficult that we become overwhelmed. And during flow, something interesting happens. The noise itself becomes quieter. You're not constantly asking, am I happy? What do people think about me? Why do I have what we have? You know, you're simply there doing concentrating, living. So the point is that this is accessible to all of us. Outside in nature, walking through a park far as a natural environment can help restore attention. Why? Because nature captures our attention differently. Compare walking through a beautiful park through scrolling through social media. One constantly shouts, look at this, now this, now this nature invites attention more

5:09gently. The trees, the birdsong, the wind, the water, the clouds. And sometimes our overstimulated brains don't need another form of entertainment. They need some way quiet enough to notice the word or the world again. And that is why it's so important for us to be able to engage in meditation and tension. We need to do training in Morakabha. Focus attention, the mind wonders, notice that it wandered, bring it back, then it wanders again, bring it back. The object isn't necessarily to force thoughts away. The object is to be able to be aware of your thoughts. You don't aggressively suppress the unwanted thoughts instead, notice them, allow them to pass, return your attention. It is almost like a muscle that repeated the returning is part of the training. Where is your attention right now? And perhaps this is the most important question that what do I own, not how successful I am.

6:11What am I paying attention to because you have, you can have a beautiful family but never really notice them. You can eat wonderful food while you know staring at your phone. You can sit with somebody you love while mentally answering tomorrow's emails. You can watch your children grow up while constantly being distracted and then one day you might desperately wish you could have had those moments back. So the lesson that we share with you, your attention is your life because ultimately your life consists of the things you actually noticed. So perhaps today put the phone away during one conversation, take a walk without headphones, listen properly when somebody speaks, eat your meal without scrolling, notice the sky, notice the person sitting next to you and when your mind disappears into yesterday or tomorrow gently bring it back because happiness may not always require adding something new to our lives. Sometimes happiness begins when we finally pay attention to the life we already have.