Your Attention Please!

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. Yo, welcome back. For anyone listening to this on audio only, there’s a video version on YouTube if you prefer to experience this with my beautiful face staring out at you. I’ve had a bit of a struggle getting the next episode of this podcast out. This is in part due to general life circumstances and in part due to my latest obsession which is wood carving. If you look at my YouTube channel then you’ll see plenty of evidence of this and I’ve talked about it in past episodes of this podcast and it’s taking up quite a lot of my time. I can get lost in the process of taking woods and drawing out the forms within it to produce something else and something new and I just love the sort of tactile experience of it and the way that I can work with something in three dimensions, really not knowing what it is I’m going to produce and just see where the wood itself leads me. It’s such an ephemeral experience. You never know what’s going to come out of the wood, what you’re going to find when you saw into it or sand it down and I find myself getting completely absorbed for hours and hours on end and I can’t draw myself away from it. This is in part due to a little known fact of ADHD which is hyper focus which either inflicts or affords ADHD as with the ability to focus on something for long periods and find it very, very difficult to tear ourselves away. This can be a help in such cases as this or when you’ve got say a project at work or something that you need to desperately focus on. If your brain gets engaged enough in it and you trigger some hyper focus then you’re going to be super productive. The flip side is if whatever you’re trying to do or you need to do is not particularly interesting or engaging for your brain at that point then you’re going to find it very difficult to do it and your focus might well be drawn somewhere else perhaps to hyper focus on something that is far less useful or valuable and helpful and at the expense of the stuff you need to do so it can be a real hindrance. At the moment I’m finding the wood carving obsession to be quite absorbing, very, very relaxing, very, very mindful and given I have relatively few pressures on my time at the moment it feels like a good way to spend my time so I’m sort of letting it happen but I tend to let my hyper focus episodes drag on longer than they should. It’s pretty typical, it’s very hard to untransfix yourself once you’re in one of those modes but I have some ability to do it. I have a small amount of willpower and if there’s something I desperately need to do I’ll tear myself away and do it eventually but it does mean that I’m sort of left with less time to focus on other things and I knew for a while at the back of my brain I was overdue at another episode of this podcast and I started writing one fairly feverishly over the last couple of days and took a look at it this morning with a view to sort of finishing it off, read it top to bottom and realised it was largely incoherent, didn’t make much sense although it sounded great it was largely nonsense and there’s still something in there which I’ll dust off and rewrite at some point in the near future but I was like well this isn’t good enough and it got me really thinking well you know why have I struggled to get this out, why did I have to rush this? Well because my attention is somewhere else and it got me thinking about attention and I’ve been wanting to talk about this in more detail for quite a while because at the heart of it attention is arguably the most valuable commodity in the world. It’s more valuable than gold, it’s more valuable than oil, it’s simply the thing that more money and more focus has been placed on mining over the last decade or so than any other single thing. Everything that Facebook or Instagram, TikTok, Twitter stroke X, all of these apps exist to attain and hold your attention and to then mine that for value in terms of advertising money or selling you stuff and they’re designed specifically to get you locked in to the experience and not wanting to go and do anything else, not wanting to go look at another website or another app and they’ll pay vast amounts of money to do that and then we find ourselves also in a certain political environment that is dominated by two of arguably the most able and effective attention seekers of all time, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are dominating people’s attentions on every possible medium and set their whole stall on it. These two may have other interests on the outside but the way they got their power, the way they got their wealth was simply through being big old attention seekers and being particularly good at it and and so your attention is really really important. So I’m talking about this in terms of your attention being important to other people but it’s also the most important thing that you yourself have. We have a finite amount of attention, we have a limited lifespan and we spend around a third of it asleep. You can lose hours and hours and hours by sitting in a car and the world passes you by and you don’t even recognise that that time has passed and it feels like you’ve got in a time machine and you’ve just lost two hours or something and that part of your life was gone, you have almost no memory of it. We have this ability to sort of transcend time via the suppression of attention but the time you do experience, the times that matter, the times that create memories and the times that you experience things like joy or fear or any intense emotions, these are the times when your intention is front and centre and placing all the emphasis on what it is you’re doing and and this is all there is. So a good portion of the time you’re either asleep or tuned out, the rest of the time this is where life happens. So you might think the most valuable thing in your life is your new baby, your partner, your family, your beloved pet but really what it is that you’re valuing there is time spent directing your attention towards those things and that’s the most valuable time you have. So when you’re doom scrolling through x, finding yourself getting all worked up but also not able to disengage, you are spending that valuable attention on something that probably isn’t worth your attention. It’s worth a lot to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, it’s worth way more to you because these are the times that your memories are formed, these are the activities that inform how your nervous system should behave and that will inform your emotional reactions to things and maybe you’re passing the time playing Candy Crush or whatever the current gaming app obsession is or maybe you’re scrolling social media or watching inane videos on TikTok and maybe this is exactly what you want to be doing. Maybe this is truly your best use of your time and that’s what you should be doing and good on you and keep doing it and I hope it continues to be good for you but I suspect for most people actually that if they thought about it the time spent scrolling through social media was not the highest quality time that they spent in their day and that maybe they wish in retrospect that they’d spend that time with their partner, with their pet, with their kids or doing something creative, making something valuable, contributing to the world and contributing to community. Now I don’t mean this in the haughty sense in that you have to spend all your time doing valuable things that contributes to the furtherment of the human race but I do think people spend far more of their time and therefore their attention on things that don’t even matter to them. If what matters to you is scrolling through social media then you’re using your time really well but if what matters to you is time with your family then you’re wasting it and what matters to me is time spent creating things and exploring the world, learning, trying new things and also spending time with my family, also spending time within the community. This stuff matters to me. I enjoy doing it. I’d rather be doing that stuff than almost anything else and I recognize that myself as well as everyone else we have responsibilities and commitments. I hope that some or most of you have for example a job that you at least don’t hate or maybe you’re lucky enough to have one that you love and the place where you would want to focus your attention is also the place that you are paid to focus your attention and I can’t imagine a better life to live than that but for most of us it’s a bit of a trade-off. What is the value of your job versus the value of time with your family or on your passions and for the most privileged among us it’s a trade-off in terms of well how much do you have to pay me to not spend time on those things and spend time doing something for you. It’s a trade-off I think many people don’t really think about especially when you get yourself into a career trajectory that seems to eat up more and more of your time and then suddenly you find you’ve got a family and other responsibilities on your hands and it feels a lot harder a trade-off but that trade-off still exists. Ultimately you need what you need to stay alive, to feed yourself your family, to clothe yourselves and to keep a roof over your head but if you’re spending lots and lots of time on a job that pays lots and lots of money to upkeep yourself and your family’s opulent lifestyle you need to question as to whether where you really deeply want to be paying your attention is actually your job and really the thing that you’re doing your job to support is that lifestyle because if you really truly valued time with the people you loved then you would trade off the lifestyle and therefore the job with time spent with them. Now I realize this is quite condescending life is not that simple I’m just trying to paint a picture of the trade-offs that we all have to make all day every day and I recognize there’s plenty of people perhaps the majority of people out there that don’t get to make that choice that they have to do the job that they do because that’s the one they can get and they need to do that and they need to spend a certain amount of time on that to be able to just simply survive and my sympathy goes out to those people and it’s a struggle these people don’t get to make the choice as to where they put their attention but for any of the rest of us who have a little bit more agency over our life I think it’s our responsibility to use our time how suits us because we have the ability to do so and this is not just a factor of the present I’m deliberately restraining myself from going all zen on you all right now there’s plenty of references to zen in in the past episodes of this podcast and no doubt there will be in the future but zen very much focuses on the now and of course that is the important moment in time but what the now is what attention really is is your memory factory because time is fleeting because it’s constantly moving because situations change priorities change the weather changes everything changes around you your environment your needs you can’t stand still you can’t experience this wonderful moment for the rest of your life there will be a time where this moment is very different and and so the things we pay attention to or are forced to pay attention to are the bedrock of our memory the thing that you paid attention to that created strong emotions in you be they negative or positive are the things that’s going to root themselves in your memory most strongly these are the things that your brain will use to inform itself in in terms of the decisions that it makes and your emotional response to your environment in the future the moments with the most emotional resonance are the ones that will stick with us most strongly and that that seems fairly intuitively obvious but I think a lot of people don’t think about that in the moment if you’re not really present with the thing that you’re doing if you’re not really focusing your attention on something that matters and that will feel like it matters to your future self then either you’re not creating memories i won’t remember much about what happened in this this moment in your life or you’re creating memories that are trash and so if you spend your whole time on x getting angry about donald trump or wanting to take down the next celebrity you’re going to have a strong emotional response to that that’s going to form memories that are going to inform how you remember this era in your life and are you going to think back and see these things as perhaps traumatic right now is donald trump actually directly impacting your life to the negative or i guess to the positive well for some people yes but for me no so why am i scrolling through uh what in my case blue sky seeing comments and articles about donald trump and getting annoyed and angry about those well it’s not really much value to me i i can see value in keeping abreast of these things so we understand what our environment is really like but outside of that continued doom scrolling is a very little value and i’m not sure my future self will be very happy with me if it felt that i’d spent a lot of time doing them so you have to remember that this this moment now is your memory factory your creations are are distillations of a moment that they are memories made manifest and so your creation could be a painting or a sculpture or a photo or a or a film or a piece of writing and and why did you make that you make that because there is some reason some part of your brain or your life or some necessity that you needed to do that i think my my necessity right now is the need to be calm and focused and and relaxed uh and to not repeat my mental health problems while i have the ability to do so and therefore my time spent hacking into pieces of wood is valuable and i think my future self will be pleased about it not least because i have these objects to either remind me of that moment or that i can sell to someone else and i’m manifesting a flavor of my present in an object that could sit on someone’s mouth piece or hang on their wall and and that’s really good for me it’s good for future me it’s good for now me and and it will create good memories not perhaps spectacular memories like that time i went to tokyo and had the best party i’ve ever had with a bunch of really cool people after a really really stressful project at work it won’t have the same resonance of that time that i was in crete but i couldn’t enjoy myself because i was so depressed and stressed and burned out because of the state of my life it’s not going to have the same resonance of those things but i think we can’t always have exciting extreme moments and we don’t always want that otherwise we’d be psychological wrecks what we want is a mix of highs and lows and and and our median state the state where the vast majority of our attention is is occupied to be a happy place to our future self to be a happy place for our current self and and i think that creativity and creation and art is literally one of the best ways that you can do that i’m not saying that it’s better to spend time in front of an easel than it is caring for someone who is in distress or you know spending time with your family or your newborn baby or or even watching telly because these moments are important to us too sitting down in front of the tv with my wife most evenings is a vital part of my daily routine and and a vital part of me keeping my mental health and spending time with my wife it’s it’s important to me that i do that i don’t consider that time wasted and i do like most of the things we’re watching there’s plenty of amazing tv out there at the moment and and i don’t think my future self is going to be too grumpy with me about having spent my time doing that i spent hours last night with a bunch of people framing artworks from um the local school kids for an art competition they entered and we wanted to make it really special for them so we we acquired a bunch of cheap frames and we all got together and framed them and we put them up gallery style in the building next door and that is a good use of my time i spent my time around some interesting cool people doing something that felt really positive i think is going to absolutely delight those kids and their parents will that be a strong memory for me but almost certainly not it wasn’t a particularly interesting thing to do it was just a good thing to do and a thing that i felt was positive and for me that’s going to contribute to probably more like a melange of ambient memories from this moment in time that will in general turn out to be something quite positive and to help my future self and and i think that’s the thing that we really have to think about is that it’s not that you have to be doing something positive but by all means go and do that it’s not that you have to spend every minute trying to change the world by all means do that if if you have the facility and the desire to do that it’s more a case of are you doing the thing right now that is really benefiting you that is really benefiting those around you that’s couldn’t achieving something no matter how small that is something your future self is going to look at and go well that was worth doing and that’s the litmus test if if you think about what the thing you’re doing at the moment you think well look this was rubbish but it was a means to an end and you achieve that end your future self is going to forgive you if you are scrolling through x getting angry not doing the things you were supposed to do not really seeing any value or benefit in that and and and generally feeling all the wrong types of emotions for the wrong reasons then that probably isn’t something you should be doing your future self is not going to feel proud that you spent your time doing that your memories of that period are not going to be great so if all you need or want to do is chill then find ways to do that and look at the things that you’re doing in your life so that you have some level of agency or control over and try to understand whether or not they are something that you really want to be doing and that is you’re giving you the value in the in the current moment that it it should be and i’m guessing if you are listening to or watching this the creativity forms a fair amount of your existence and that it’s something you want to be doing so you’re the part of the way there with that anyway if you can find the time to do this and it really does benefit you then you should find whatever time you can to do it while also not sacrificing the other things you need to do for example recording a podcast episode and indeed in recording podcast episodes i both achieve something i quite enjoy doing i i like the fact that they’re out there and and they’re given my future self a uh a souvenir of the present that i think i will consider really valuable and i hope i manage to keep recording these even if it’s a little bit erratic anyway that’s all i really wanted to say um i could probably say quite a lot more on this subject and really your ability to focus your attention on creativity is something inherently positive to help improve your state of mind and your well-being in the present which in turn will improve your state of mind and well-being in the future and so in that way you can see it as an investment and if you think about attention as being the most valuable thing that you have because it’s everything then you can consider investment of that attention on something valuable and positive as an investment in the future something that will grow something that will accrue and pay it forward as it were to your future self and indeed will shape their outlook on on everything that they’re experiencing in their present um it feels a bit like time travel here and maybe some of this stuff’s a little bit abstract but i i tend to find myself thinking about all the awful things i’m doing to my future self and it sort of helps me to try and be a bit more charitable to him and and this is probably the best way that i can do it that’s uh that’s all for now i i feel like i’ve got a lot more to say on this but i’m i’m not going to um i’m going to let you put your attention somewhere else maybe this podcast is the place where you most like to put all your attention and uh thank you very much if you think that’s the case but i think i’m here to urge you to go and do something else and to go and use your attention in the way that makes you happy so go and do that thank you for joining me again i hopefully get this other episode that i started writing uh recorded now for next week’s i’m looking for other creatives to interview so if you’re a creative and listening to this and and want to do an interview with me for this podcast then please get in touch in the meantime please rate review share like whatever help me spread the word about this podcast and i’ll be back again soon bye