Have you ever been working on a project and become distracted? Of course, we all have. Perhaps that annoying leaf blower starts up, a provocative email arrives in your inbox, or the children in the next room are getting rambunctious. We can easily get distracted from the task at hand and have difficulty getting back on track. In this month’s column, we’ll take a mindful look at distractions and how cultivating greater mindful awareness can lead to less distractedness and a greater ability to get back on track quickly.
Let’s begin our dissection of a distraction with a riddle:
How can a distraction not be what you think it is,
while at the same time being what you think?
Take a moment and consider or jot down a few distractions that you recently experienced.
You may have noted such things as receiving an after-hours email just when you’re ready to call it a day, being rudely interrupted by someone while you are trying to focus, or the endless sound of a car alarm. To be sure, all these events can be a source of irritation and may make focusing on the task at hand—be it reading a case, working on a motion, or winding down for the evening—a more daunting enterprise. While you could refer to these and countless other external events as distractions, it might be that the true distraction is a lot closer than you know.
Let’s parse the above “distractions” into two parts: (1) the obvious and (2) the often overlooked. Each event momentarily captures your attention—an email, a person, an alarm. This is the obvious. One of the telltale signs of the obvious is that everyone agrees on what it is. In contrast, the often overlooked is the internal experience that accompanies the event, often reactive thoughts and feelings that form when we resist our experience—wishing it were different than it is. These, in sharp contrast, are not objectively considered. They are a subjective read on reality.
Look back over each of the above examples and notice the adjectives you might layer on top of the event: “annoying,” “provocative,” “disrespectful,” “after-hours,” “rudely,” “just when ready to call it a day,” “intolerable.” Look over what you wrote and consider the adjectives that would come to mind if you were asked to elaborate on them.
So often, a story accompanies an experience. It may take the form of a narrative, a judgment, or an evaluation. It is easy to point to the alarm, the leaf blower, a loud sound, or an email as the source of our discontent because our attention is drawn to it. But at the moment of impact—leaf blower on eardrums, email on eyes—a story can emerge that adds insult to injury. And unlike an external event that is “out there” and easy to detect, stories emerge from the interior. We may not even detect them, but we are influenced by them. They grip the body as tension mounts, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, and levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, rise. All are fairly unpleasant shifts. And amid the agitated state, the experience takes on an emotional life of its own and can mobilize us to take action to remedy a misperceived problem, which we prioritize over returning to the task at hand. Often enough, the action taken is but a veiled attempt to reduce the physiological and emotional distress.
Mindfulness practices enable us to notice the stories we tell ourselves. Sitting and focusing attention on the breath (as a popular practice instructs) almost always delivers on developing a greater capacity to notice thoughts and feelings as they arise in real time, so we are less jerked around by them. This practice also enables us to more readily discern the difference between thoughts that are useful and responsive to what is arising as opposed to reactive and counterproductive.
Were it not for the “story” and the physiological arousal set in motion by getting caught in a story, we would be able to get back on track relatively easily. A momentary shift in attention to notice what has arisen is followed by another shift, back to what we were doing. In rare cases, as with the leaf blower, taking action might be called for. Without the noise of the story obscuring the signal, an efficient assessment of whether to make a request, put on headphones, or momentarily shift gears comes easy.
Understanding why external events are not the true distractions allows us to target the source of our agitation more directly and minimize time spent needlessly spinning our wheels to fix something that is not a problem.
Mindfulness teacher Sharon Salzberg sums this up nicely when she writes,
Mindfulness is telling the difference between what is happening and the story we tell ourselves about what is happening.
The Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius offers an insight that points in the same direction:
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it.
And the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti makes this point resolutely:
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
Mindfulness involves seeing things more clearly, and the more clearly we see the stories unfolding in our minds, the less affected we are by the events from which they emerge. Mindfulness practices are one path to seeing more clearly the stories we tell ourselves.
There is perhaps no domain in which mindfulness can be of greater benefit than the landscape of our own mind. The next time you become agitated by something, turn your attention inward and see if you might detect the true source of distraction and agitation. It’s not what you think, or is it?
Looking for more on this topic? You might find these previous GPSolo eReport columns to be of interest:
