Techniques to stay focused in the war for attention

Several decades ago, writer Aldous Huxley famously depicted a dystopian society that is ruled by empty distraction in his novel Brave New World. Reflecting on this work, he claimed that people 'have always been a prey to distractions, which are the original sins of the mind.'

Regain focus

In our own slightly less dystopian digital society, distraction has evolved beyond what Huxley could possibly conceive. In what has been termed the war for attention, social media companies’ strategies have tied the amount of time you spend on their apps directly to their advertisement revenues.

As a result, these companies have engineered their products to continually challenge our capacity for attentional control. This continual disruption of our attention now makes it more important than ever to be aware of all the means at your disposal to help you tune out irrelevant distractions.

Novel research in our lab is now trying to understand how connecting our minds to our bodies might help, for example by controlling our heart rate and breathing. Specifically, my team and I are integrating novel research findings with ancient insights from yogic traditions to raise an important question:

Is it possible to learn to control our body in such a way that it can support our attentional focus?

Ancient yogic traditions

For example, when we are agitated or anxious and arousal is high, this distracted state might entice us to start doomscrolling on our phones. If we can learn to counter this anxious, aroused state by decreasing our heart rate, it can help us resist this pull toward unhealthy engagement.

Conversely, when we are tired and find it difficult to disengage from mindless social media activities, we might be able to pull away if we energise our bodily state.

To anticipate objections, one might wonder how taking inspiration from ancient yogic traditions can be cutting-edge or exciting science. 

However, yogis have, throughout centuries, investigated the mind-body link in the 'laboratories' of their yoga mats and provided detailed first-person accounts of this subtle connection. 

Many of these insights can be summarised in the provocative yogic adage stating that 'the mind cannot control the mind, only the body can control the mind.'

Such applications of the mind-body link in the service of mental control reignite the relevance of these yogic insights for current society.

Inhale, exhale

In recent years, investigating the mind-body connection has become mainstream in psychology and neuroscience using more objective, third-person methods. We are showing how bodily sensations strongly colour the way we perceive and interact with the world around us.

For example, attention is often more sensitive during inhalation than during exhalation. Moreover, bodily arousal is linked to both heart- and respiration rate and to attentional focus. When arousal is too high, we are in a distractible state that makes it difficult to pay attention.

Similarly, when arousal is low, our drowsiness interferes with attentional focus as well. The sweet spot for our attentional focus seems to be an intermediate level of bodily excitement. This inverted U-shaped relationship is called the Yerkes-Dodson curve and can provide a more direct window into attentional control.

So, how can we make these insights actionable?

There are several potential techniques that can help us to learn such bodily control. For example, autogenic training teaches practitioners to control their heart- and respiration rate by repeatedly using physiologically-adapted instructions that highlight a certain bodily state (e.g., 'My heart is calm and stable').

We have recently begun to investigate how autogenic training can unlock attentional control, but more research is necessary on this relationship. This embodied angle on attentional control presents an exciting future avenue for cognitive science that could have a real-world impact in many people’s lives.

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