earlier you mentioned attentional spotlights and I'm fascinated by this I know that most people hear that we can't multitask but primates again of which we are old Old World primates in particular can do covert attention if I were not completely focused on you I could focus an attentional Spotlight on you and your voice and pay attention to you but I could also monitor components of the room I can merge those spotlights mhm I can divorce those spotlights that's right but it's very hard to generate three kind of compatible attentional spotlights at once it seems like
we kind of have two yeah maybe some people can manage three but I'm betting most people can't manage more than three well I think it becomes um especially difficult to manage even one when you're experiencing uh an emotional episode that is essentially highjacking your attention and attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons so number one as a species we have the most sophisticated attention deploy deployment system on the planet right we have the ability to strategically deploy our attention so we can we can willfully place it on the things we want
or yank it away from the things we don't want or we can go we can sacot our attention back and forth when it comes to emotion though we are often taught certain maxims about how to deploy our attention that I think can sometimes be problematic I because they fall into the uh category of prescriptive advice about magic pills so often we hear for example that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions things that you're anxious about or fearful you should not avoid the problem you should focus on it and there's been a lot
of research on this and what we have learned is on the one hand chronically avoiding things is not good it's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond our physical lives too our health but often times the the signature for adaptively coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand deploy your attention elsewhere take a break and then come back to it and so this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently my grandmother was this very interesting woman who grew up in um
in Poland uh during World War II had her entire family slaughtered during the war one of these kind of devastating experiences lived in the forest uh for years back and forth all this terrible stuff family massacred and so forth and growing up she made it out of the war moved to the states I remember being just so exceptionally curious about what she experienced and how she was able to overcome it and whenever I would ask her questions about this she would ALS she would always say you know don't ask me why or what happened why
is a crooked letter that was a phrase she would use which was really interesting cuz she didn't speak English very well at all heavily accented language but she mastered this curious ID idiom like why is a crooked letter in other words nothing good comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things your life is awesome you're in a safe place you have a loving family just enjoy life so she's trying to shelter me so she for most of the the time that I would know her during the year she would never focus
on this horrific event that she experienced except one day a year there would be this this um Remembrance Day and we'd all pile into a a synagogue and we' talk about or I would listen to them talk about their experiences and the emotions would would come come out so she would dose her exposure to to the emot information turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic and how she deployed her attention she was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her but at other times when it didn't
serve her well she occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences and a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that this capacity to be flexible in how we wield our attention when it comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really really useful asset and so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing a problem or always avoid it they aren't always true and that often the the magic that surrounds emotion regulation I mean the magic not supernaturally but the beauty
surrounding it is in being really fasile in how we can deploy our attention really appreciate you sharing that um personal anecdote um I've long struggled with the fact that so many of the sayings that were fed um like you know absence makes the heart grow fer oh yeah well I also heard out ofsight out of mind so which one is it that's right you know and that's why eventually I became a scientist that's right um because you know it's both right and uh you know and you can see this in the fields of nutrition and
exercise I mean there are certain core truths and I think the goal is always to get to those core truths and then there's some flexibility around those truth there's margins of error I I love what she shared you know why is is is a crooked letter um it reminds me of the the Bob Dylan Like Don't Look Back yeah I mean it's an these are profound questions yeah right like how much of our um Consciousness should we use to enforce that we don't spend time thinking about the past and and therefore miss out on the
present and creating a best possible future and yet we don't want elements from the past to kind of you know fet into our psyche and then show up in ways that are destructive it's a it's a complicated dance oh it's I mean our emotional eyes are anything but straightforward but we we do have guideposts to steer Us in how we deploy our attention and so so a couple of common her istics uh that I that I I like to use and describe to folks is so let's say something bad happens and you divert your attention
away you distract with a positive distraction not a harmful distraction and then the problem doesn't resurface keep going like you don't have to go back in time there's actually I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad around this issue so my parents were divorced and um you know I dealt with the the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life and when I think about it now I don't get upset like I understand why it happened I love both of my parents I've moved on I'm well adjusted but my dad likes to talk about this
a lot whenever we speak and he you know we'll often bring it up and when he does I'm like well we don't have to talk about I'm actually totally fine this isn't a source of ongoing distress sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives and when that happens you know that's our our our cognitive Machinery operating really really well we don't have to go back and revisit every single thing if on the other hand we are trying trying to get a mental break we're distracting and
we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting that is then a cue okay well let's focus in on it and then once you focus in on it of course there are multiple ways you can engage with that experience sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation so getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance and
we have wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things we can look at it from different perspectives we can focus on the silver lining we can contextualize it so you have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus but you don't always need to refocus on the problem so you want to be flexible flexibility in how you deploy your attention is really the Mantra that that I personally live by based on what I know of how all of this works there are a couple of caveats I want to throw out there when I'm
talking about distraction and and avoiding I'm talking about healthy distractions healthy avoidance there are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are are are not productive like substance abuse we also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding not good so you want to be balanced could we add to the list of um tools for avoidance that tend to be unhealthy and this isn't one that I default to but I know someone that told me that um she used to default into um overc consumption of of story like of
of of audio books not that audio books are bad but you know of fiction audio books and just kind of when when there was a problem rather than dealing with the problem you know overindulgence in in narratives that would just kind of consume the mind I guess any Behavior where we're not um dealing with the the kind of uh itch that we probably need to scratch at least for a short while yeah it's probably going to be maladaptive in the long run yeah I mean if the problem keeps like you want to be you want
to listen to what your mind and body are are telling you and so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it but a lot of the the experiences we have on a daily basis which may not be positive negative experiences as time moves on sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives and we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks like you have to do it this way that tends not to work out very well
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