Module 2 | Drawing Your Attention
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Module Video:
Paying attention to yourself
Scroll down for a transcript of this video.
Paying attention to yourself
The ability to recognize our emotions based on bodily sensations can be very useful. For instance, let’s say you are having a heated disagreement with a colleague which is very quickly turning into an argument. Sometimes we get caught up in the moment. In this case, the argument may escalate very quickly, we become angry, and we may say offensive things or act out aggressively… things we may regret in hindsight. At times like these, it can be helpful to attend to what our body is trying to tell us. Identifying that we are angry early can help us to pause and consider whether we need to cool off before we say or do something we’ll regret.
There is a flipside to this, however. It is also possible to fixate too much to our emotion-related bodily sensations. Let’s have a look at Lauren’s uni presentation again:
Lauren had noticed that she was feeling anxious. Her hands were shaky, her face felt flushed and her heart was racing. As Lauren focused on these body signals, she thought to herself that she must be appearing really nervous and started trying to hide her shaky hands by clasping them together.
This kind of worked for a moment, but not really. Lauren could still hear the fluttering sound her notes were making despite having her hands clenched together tightly. She then noticed that her heart was racing even faster now. The more she focused on it, the louder each thud of her heart sounded to her. It resonated downward, and throughout her whole body, making her feel weak and shaky and light headed. At this point, Lauren realized that she wasn’t sure how long she had been silent for now… nor where she was up to in her presentation.
Lauren has gotten herself stuck a bit of a vicious cycle here. The more she attends to her body’s signs of anxiety, the more anxious she gets and the less attention she pays to her actual presentation. In this case, we can think of Lauren as getting caught in an unhelpful attention trap.
We can’t stop our attention entirely. However, we can redirect it in more helpful ways, which is often the task at hand or the activity that we are trying to get done. In the context of giving a uni presentation, if you notice you are getting anxious, it’s often best to acknowledge while refraining from further self-judgement or blame, and then gently guide your attention back towards your presentation. Your attention may wander off again, and that’s okay. You just have to gently guide it back again. It may be difficult at first, but the more you practice doing this, the better you will become.