Taking an Attention Diet

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the idea of taking an attention diet. So these days it's been said that our attention is under siege. There are a few ways in which our attention is really being pulled at. First, there's just a massive amount of stuff to pay attention to these days.

And just the more stuff there is to pay attention to, the more difficult it is to choose what to focus on. And it's not only that is it? Because these days it's also really easy to find your attention being pulled into consuming, what I would call, just mental junk food. Whether it's scrolling on your phone, surfing the web, flicking magazine pages, or just being buffeted by marketing messages. You know, in the same way that a lot of junk food can harm our bodies, the huge growth of junk information in the past decades has really been bad for our minds. So if you care to experiment with the idea of taking an attention diet, here's how it can work.

It's really simple. The diet has two parts. One is to consume just less information in general, but especially junk information. And then that can open up a little more space in your life for other things. And two, you know, it's really decide to deliberately find highly nutritious, uplifting sources of healthy information and build your habits in your life around them.

So the attention diet works very, very similar to a nutritional diet by cutting out a lot of unhelpful consumption for a period of time. Your body and mind adjusts and becomes healthier and stronger. And often, eventually you just no longer crave so much for a fix of the junk because your whole system has kind of recalibrated how good it feels to stop consuming it. So if you're interested in giving this a try, the kinds of stuff that you might think of as junk information is information that's sensational, emotionally charged, stuff that really isn't important, helpful, or useful to you. And also any of those addictive loops where you find yourself just scrolling, clicking, or watching without being fully conscious of what you're doing.

Now offline in the real world, junk information might be gossip, unhelpful relationships or environments or people who don't treat you well. So, and the nutritious information that you might want to increase is information that's reliable, well thought out, helpful to you and relevant to your life. Nutritious information uplifts you, supports your personal growth and wellbeing. And informs you about things that are really important for you to know in your life. Now in the real world, nutritious connections are often with people who treat you well, where there's mutual trust and respect.

People who speak thoughtfully and kindly and make you feel better when you're around them. Similarly, environments such as being in nature, being in a supportive community group, these can make a big difference too. So if this sounds like it might be of benefit to you in your life where you're at right now, I invite you to have a little experiment with this this week. You might like to change only one or two small things in your diet. But you might also feel like you want to do a bigger change.

I'll leave that up to you. But whatever you decide, I wish you really well with this. And I hope it leaves you feeling more uplifted, clear-headed, and happy. Thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.