Pay Attention to Where you Pay Attention. 

Wherever you are – whatever you’re feeling – here’s a quick attention hack to help inject a little mindfulness into your body, mind and soul.

Simply pause whatever you’re doing.

Notice the breath coming into your nostrils, left and right.

Notice where you feel that breath – in your nose, face, forehead, throat, chest, ribs, belly and anywhere else you may feel it.

Notice the rise and fall of the breath, and the point in your body where you feel it the most.

Now, ask yourself: what has my mind been focused on? Where have I been? Is this making me feel better or worse, empowered or powerless? Would I benefit from some re-direction? 

Because most of us are just so busy these days, we’re often just not conscious of where our attention is directed. Throw in a negativity bias in the brain, some hardwired unhelpful thinking habits and a challenging event or two, and it’s likely that our auto-pilot will think its way into misery and moodiness.

The key to changing this is consciousness;

once you begin to notice that your mind has automatically focused on negativity and problems, you can gently nudge your attention in another direction… either towards solutions to said problems, or towards the present moment.

What you focus on, you get more of. So ideally, we want our focus to be realistic, constructive, calming and supportive.

This isn’t an overnight fix, but paying attention to where you pay attention is certainly a step in the right direction.