Breathing and Attention: Wide and Narrow
I've written about attention before many times. In fact, this blog has a whole category of writings called brain attention. One of the most interesting sources of information about attention comes from Linda Stone, the researcher who coined the term continuous partial attention.
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| Photo by nesster, via Flickr (CC license) |
| narrowing the attention on that tiny screen shuts out everything else in your immediate environment |
I recently ran across another of her articles kind of related to that idea: Just Breathe, Building the Case for Email Apnea. Stone points out that we probably all hold our breath when we read email, or do any other screen-oriented task: twitter, blog, read feeds, what have you.
Needless to say, holding your breath isn't very good for you. Not only does it upset the balance of chemicals in your system, but it can throw you into a pattern favoring the fight or flight sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system over the rest and digest parasympathetic branch.
Not to worry: there are ways around this according to Stone:
Some breathing patterns favor our body's move toward parasympathetic functions and other breathing patterns favor a sympathetic nervous system response. Diaphragmatic breathing, Buteyko breathing (developed by a Russian M.D.), some of Andy Weil's breathing exercises, and certain martial arts and yoga breathing techniques, all have the potential to soothe us, and to help our bodies differentiate when fight or flight is really necessary and when we can rest and digest.
OK, I sort of buy into that, but it takes some real discipline to practice breathing exercises. And, let's face it, if you're always reading email or twittering, how much time are you gonna spend exercising?
The way I look at the situation is a little different, more as a problem of attention than inattention. That is, narrowing the attention on that tiny screen shuts out everything else in your immediate environment. And there's lots of stuff there to attend to if you allow yourself to notice. But you don't notice when your focus is exclusively on your address book.
Narrowing a focus down so much that you exclude everything else may be a form of concentration. But in a body and nervous system geared to survival, that may be an easy ticket to fight or flight. No wonder we hold our breath.
Experiment with becoming simultaneously aware of email, the sounds around you, the contact your body is making with the chair, or whatever. Expand attention rather than contracting it. Does that detract from email reading? Do you hold your breath?
