Your ability to direct your attention is one of the most valuable commodities you have, especially in our newly distracting digital world. Since so much is competing for your attention, the action of directing your attention signifies more and more of what is most important to you. This concept has been properly studied through the availability heuristic: what you pay attention to is most important to you.
Is an article breaking down the President's last tweetstorm representative of what's important to you? What about the latest Netflix special? With so much vying for our attention, how can we decide where our attention belongs? Enter practical mindfulness.
Most people associate mindfulness with meditation and Eastern traditions, but it seems to have been watered down since entering the mainstream in Western culture. Many think mindfulness is meditating for 10 minutes a day. While meditation is a great way to practice mindfulness, there's more to it than that.
What is Practical Mindfulness?
Simply put, mindfulness is the practice of paying attention with intention. Being more cognizant of our attention helps us direct our attention towards our values.
Compassion is a noble value that particularly hinges on mindfulness. Compassion is a noble value because it is rarely self-serving, and it actively aims to improve the lives of others. Merriam-Webster defines compassion as the following:
Sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it.
This means there are two distinct components necessary for compassion:
1) An understanding of someone’s suffering.
2) Taking action in an attempt to relieve said suffering.
Understanding is the first crucial component of compassion. Taking action to relieve suffering without understanding can have catastrophic results. As the popular aphorism goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you don’t want to pave the road to hell, you may want to sharpen your understanding capabilities. Luckily, understanding and any resulting compassion relies on something within our control: our directed attention.
The first person worth directing your attention, understanding, and compassion toward is yourself.
Mindfulness to Understand Ourselves
While meditation isn't the end-all be-all for mindfulness, it is a great way to understand yourself better. A common technique in meditation is the practice of watching your thoughts without judgment. When you watch your thoughts without judgment, you can see which emotions are at play. Analysis of your emotions helps you understand yourself and your motivations better.
Emotions are a lot like the warning lights on your car's dashboard. Warning lights blink on and give you some insight into the condition of your car. Similarly, emotions click on, giving you insight about your own condition. With guidance from your built-in warning lights, you can take a closer look under the hood to see a clearer picture. You may find that it was a false alarm and things are running smoothly. Or you could learn that some maintenance is needed. As Jordan Peterson said in Twelve Rules for Life:
Damaged machinery will continue to malfunction if its problems are neither diagnosed nor fixed
This is true for both the human brain and that hooptie you drive around. Unless you want your car's engine to blow up at an inconvenient time, it would be wise to pay attention to your warning lights. Likewise, you could ignore your personal warning lights and risk having a total mental breakdown while your #BFF4LYFE is reading her wedding vows. Or you could practice mindfulness by paying attention to what your emotions are telling you from time to time.
As you watch, listen to, and analyze your emotions, you develop a better understanding of your wants, needs, desires, and self. This better understanding of your emotions and motivations allows you to be more compassionate towards yourself.
More specifically, this mindfulness can lead you to take actions that are better for you. For example, if you are like me, you may find that constant exposure to politics can lead to feelings of anger and anxiety. So you may decide to unfollow social media accounts that share content designed to cause outrage. Easy #selfcare.
While it's important to direct some attention to ourselves, we shouldn't go overboard. Nobody likes that guy who makes everything about him. Practicing mindfulness with others can be a great way to boost our self-esteem while also showing others we care about them.
Mindfulness to Understand Others
It can be easy to fall into the trap of listening to others for the sake of formulating a response. This tendency could be from an anxious focus on ourselves, where we want to appear interesting. By focusing on the noise created by our anxiety, we tune out some signals generated in the conversation. We may notice words spoken, but fail to sense facial expressions, body language, tonality, and emphasis.
Using our eyes and ears to pick up on these signals is like transforming a 2 lane road into an 8 lane highway. Significantly more cars pass through an 8 lane road, resulting in the capacity for more efficient travel. Similarly, when more signals pass through our brains, we can achieve more efficient communication. This could be why students who read, speak, and hear their material tend to understand more than those who only read it.
When we pay attention to more modes of communication, we have more engaging conversation. Engaging conversation leads to deeper understanding. Everyone wants to feel understood, so employing practical mindfulness helps others see us as interesting people when we are really just more interested people.
Pay more attention to people and you will be rewarded with more engaging conversation. More engaging conversation then allows us to reach a deeper understanding of others.
While it feels great knowing people view us as interesting and confident, the true benefit of practicing mindfulness with others is our increased capacity for compassion resulting from increased understanding.
How Mindfulness is Compassionate
We earlier discussed that there are two components to compassion: understanding and action.
Casler's Hierarchy of Compassion is a tool we can use that further explores the roles understanding and action play in compassion. In this model, each level is an act of compassion. The top is the highest act of compassion while the bottom is the most basic act. Movement up the hierarchy to stronger acts of compassion requires a greater understanding of the recipient.
Casler’s Hierarchy of Compassion. Each ascending level requires more understanding
While directed attention is great for building understanding, it is also the most basic act of compassion. When you give your attention to someone, it makes them feel important. And ultimately, that is one of the biggest struggles of the human condition: the desire to feel meaningful.
By freely giving your attention to your friend and listening to what she has to say, she feels like she matters. It may feel inconsequential to you, but this can truly make someone's day. We are all wired for social connection, so this feeling of understanding from genuine attention will benefit anyone. By paying attention to your loved ones, you directly contribute to improving their well-being. Who wouldn't want to help their team win?
Paying attention to our loved ones is an easy way to help alleviate the existential suffering caused by the human question of: Do I matter? However, this is just a first step of compassion that comes from practicing mindfulness with our friends and family. If we want to take the next step up the hierarchy, we must remain mindful of others to understand physical suffering.
Through charity we can address physical suffering. Charity could be the classical financial assistance. Or it could be volunteering your time to help someone. Charity could also be as simple as giving your friend a Tylenol for his headache. This form of compassion requires minimal attention since we can easily detect physical suffering in others. However, it is impossible to be charitable without paying attention to those in need.
As we reach a higher level of understanding with someone, we recognize their emotional suffering. At this point, we may not understand the causes of their emotional suffering, but we are aware of its presence. Counsel aims to help relieve some of this emotional suffering.
Counsel can take the form of being a shoulder to cry on, or doing something thoughtful for someone after they had a tough day. Counsel can also take the form of tough love. This could be where you see a friend inflicting emotional pain upon himself, so you respectfully tell him to get his shit together.
As we continue to understand someone, we get to see the motivations and insecurities behind their emotions. To use the previous car example, this level of understanding is the equivalent of us hopping in the passenger seat of their proverbial car to see any warning lights on their dashboard. These lights can tell you whether checking the engine for maintenance is in order, which is especially useful if the driver is not paying attention to his dashboard.
The recognition of this dashboard, or understanding of emotions can lead to the highest form of compassion: acceptance.
Acceptance is when you choose someone as a whole over the insecurities and motivations responsible for their emotions and actions. Acceptance means you are not trying to change your close friend, family member, or partner.
You can support your partner in her pursuit of changing herself, but trying to change your partner yourself is most emphatically not acceptance. Trying to change someone is a subtle form of manipulation, regardless of the nobility of your intentions.
Relating this back to our car example, you are not the driver or owner of your partner's car. It is emphatically not your responsibility to pull over and fix the car. While it may seem thoughtful, it’s a bad idea to try pulling over your partner’s car while she’s driving. And heaven forbid you just fling the hood open and get to work! I shouldn’t have to tell you that trying to pop open the hood while your partner is driving is a bad idea.
Translating Acceptance into Self-Acceptance
Acceptance can help others alleviate what I call intrinsic suffering. Intrinsic suffering is caused by the natural struggle to accept yourself. Failing to recognize and accept your personal flaws can lead to difficulty forgiving yourself of past decisions and loving yourself as a whole.
Intrinsic suffering is a problem because many don’t take the time to understand their motivations, insecurities, and flaws in our increasingly distracting world. Without taking this time to understand yourself, it is impossible to accept yourself.
Just like how only the driver can effectively steer his car, this highly personalized suffering cannot be resolved by anyone but the bearer of the suffering. However, demonstrating full acceptance of your friend can catalyze his self-acceptance. If someone shows me how to juggle 3 balls in the air at once (a skill seemingly impossible to me), I am much more likely to put effort into trying it.
Acceptance is the highest form of compassion because it helps people resolve their own suffering. While counsel can do this too, a large portion of emotional suffering can be rooted in an absence of self-acceptance. If you can help others alleviate their intrinsic suffering, you help alleviate any emotional suffering that branches off of intrinsic suffering. Ultimately, someone’s suffering will always be theirs to deal with, but through compassion, they don't have to suffer alone.
Conclusions
Overall, the ability to direct your attention (mindfulness) is important because it is the root of all understanding and compassion. Without mindfulness, we are unable to reach the highest form of compassion with ourselves and others: acceptance.
In summary, mindfulness helps you:
1) Recognize your built in warning lights (i.e. your emotions), priming you for maintenance
2) Understand your motivations, values, and self as a whole better, giving you the ability to accept yourself.
3) Become more interesting to others by being truly interested in them
4) Understand others’ motivations, values, and suffering
5) Directly alleviate suffering in others and yourself
In the end, you decide what is valuable to you in a feedback loop of attention. What you pay attention to, you value. And what you value, you pay attention to. Knowing the importance of your attention, I leave you with one question:
Do the values you claim align with where your attention lies?