Sustained attention

Sustained attention involves maintaining constant vigilance toward an object, while selective attention refers to the ability to focus on specific stimuli. Typically, attention operates subconsciously, with the brain’s reticular activating system (RAS) alerting the conscious mind to novel or potentially significant stimuli. However, habituation occurs when the RAS no longer finds an object interesting, leading to a wandering mind seeking new stimuli.

In meditation, one can train to stabilize attention and overcome habituation. By developing single-pointed attention, boredom is revealed to be a result of weak sustained attention rather than inherent qualities of an object. Meditation helps practitioners maintain unwavering attention and experience states of deep concentration and absorption.

Research has shown that regular meditation practice reduces habituation, allowing individuals to sustain attention for longer periods. By strengthening sustained attentional abilities, meditation cultivates consistent focus and diminishes the tendency for attention to waver.

Why are we not mindful?

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If mindfulness is so great, then, why aren’t all of us practicing it every day? Why are we still spending our time romanticizing or regretting the past and anticipating the future? I think the answer is that mindfulness is not very natural, and is actually quite hard. Many psychologists believe that as a species, humans are not evolved to enjoy the here and now. Rather, we are wired to time-travel mentally, mostly into the future, to consider new scenarios and try out new ideas. The social psychologist Martin Seligman goes so far as to call our species Homo prospectus.

But avoiding mindfulness can also be an effective way to distract yourself from pain. In 2009, four researchers writing in the journal Emotion showed that people’s minds are significantly more likely to wander when they’re in a negative mood than when they’re in a positive mood. Some sources of unhappiness that lead to distraction and mind-wandering are fear, anxiety, neuroticism, and of course, boredom. Having a negative self-perception—feeling ashamed of oneself, for example—is also likely to lead to distraction from the here and now.

Neuroscience gives us clues as to why we escape to the future or past. A good deal of evidence shows that mind-wandering decreased activity in the brain regions that involve the processing of physical pain. Researchers have long known that emotional or social pain is processed by many of the same regions as physical pain; it stands to reason, then, that avoiding mindfulness is a self-defense strategy for those suffering mentally.

Mindfulness hurts because, well, life hurts.

“If our condition were truly happy, we would not need a diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy,” Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées, published posthumously in 1670.