Escaping Distractions
How to achieve mindfulness
You are sitting down. You hold a magazine in your hands. Your fingers caress the pages as you begin reading this article. As these words reach your retina electrochemical explosions light up your brain as it attempts to assign meaning to them. You breathe in. Your heart beats. You are alive but you are not really living. You look but you do not see.
Like most people today, you are a slave to distraction, incapable of engaging fully in your life without drifting off, worrying, or checking the internet. This can't go on, it will go on, it can't go on.
If you are reading in the hope of getting some shallow entertainment to fill an idle minute before you go back to the mind-numbing regime you call an existence, then I urge you to read no further: people like you should be shot.
For those who want to escape the banality of modern life, I have five steps that will enable you to actually experience your life rather than merely watch it pass by.
Step 1: Establish Priorities
It's not that you can't see the wood for the trees, you can't see the trees for the leaves. You need to take several steps back to remind yourself of your priorities. You never stop to think whether what you're doing is of any value. Secretly, you worry that if you did take a step back to see what it all amounts to you'd realise that you'd wasted your life. You did what others expected you to do, rather than creating your own hierarchy of values that would allow you to make more informed decisions. But where to start?
You could begin by fantasising about your death. What eulogies would you want at your funeral? What virtues and achievements would you want people to praise? Because you are the one doing the imagining you can make them as outrageous as you like. After all, you are the person that is going to have to live the life that will make those things possible. From this you can begin to understand what you really value, be it kindness, intelligence, material success, creative fulfillment or whatever.
Step 2: Reduce Cognitive Dissonance
Now you have your priorities, you will find that it is much easier to make good decisions about what to do from moment to moment. If, however, you still find yourself procrastinating it is probably because you suffer from cognitive dissonance regarding those priorities. For example, you may rate highly the idea of clarity, imagining all the deep thoughts you will think when you detox yourself of alcohol and gossip. Unfortunately, you may also want to enjoy the social benefits of the pub and networking sites like facebook.
To avoid this cognitive dissonance, you need to make a concerted effort to be more mindful. Think to yourself "Where am I? What am I doing? What should I really be doing now?"
If you are mindful of the fact that your urges to drink and gossip will come and go, then the power of those urges are diminished. With this new awareness you could also decide to do something else. The Freudian-Hydraulic model of the mind — whereby repressed urges always pop up elsewhere — is inaccurate. Relief comes from being mindful of the urge, not from submitting to it.
Once you become really mindful you'll discover that you can quite easily go to the pub without drinking and use the internet without feeling like you're wasting your time.
Step 3: Focus and Flow
You know what you want and you know how to stop procrastinating, now you need to know how to focus and flow. Flow is the height of human experience. It is when the challenge of an activity is not too easy so as to be boring and not too difficult to be anxiety-inducing. Attend to the details and lose yourself in what you want to do. So many people have awful lives because they hate their jobs. Change jobs. Or find something in your job that allows you to experience flow. Pretend to perform your job as if you were a concert pianist, lost in music, the notes flowing from your fingers.
Our conscious mind can deal with about 7 bits of information per second — our unconscious deals with around 14 million bits of information per second. You have vast reserves of knowledge waiting to be tapped — if only you could get into a state of flow where all of your mental resources are aligned in the same direction then you could achieve great things.
Step 4: Cultivate Limits
You are living in an age of infinite distraction and infinite boredom. Because you have access to everything, you appreciate nothing. The first rule of freedom is to cultivate limits.
Despite our increased longevity, people waste their lives consuming crap. If you are going to achieve any kind of mastery over the things within your sphere of existence, you must apply conscious limits.
Stop reading the news, stop watching television, stop shopping for tat. Read books, think, find a subject that fascinates you then devour it. Above all, focus.
Step 5: Cultivate Cultivation
You've reached the end of the article — an achievement in this age of lazy skimming — but you're not convinced. You didn't expect to be lectured like this. You are thinking of turning the page, and yet a part of you wonders what it might be life to live a life worth eulogizing.
If I can leave you with one piece of advice it would be this: cultivate cultivation. Do the things that allow you to grow, don't submit to distraction. For what would you prefer to be: someone who looks or someone who sees?
This article was originally published in issue four of New Escapologist magazine, Bad Faith.
Read my other New Escapologist articles.