When you pay attention to one thing, there is an opportunity cost – you could be paying attention to something else, like one of your loved ones, a meaningful project, your source of income, or a hobby you love.

When you get sucked into a dumb argument online or read an upsetting news story (that will never lead you to take any kind of positive action), you’re consuming moments of attention that could be better used.

What is less obvious than that, though, is that we can create more moments of attention – because often we’re not doing anything in particular, or we’re just partially paying attention, or we’re letting our minds wander without attention in a pointless or stressful way (rather than in an interesting, relaxing, fun or helpful way).

We can create more moments of attention within our familiar activities to make them even better – like being more present with a loved one or new acquaintance, noticing more fully the delicious flavor of our food, or being more focused during our work (to get closer to peak performance).

Attention is what our life experiences are made of; it’s worth paying attention to what we pay attention to.

Or, as Sam Harris puts it: “How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.”

This piece was first written on July 9, 2024, and first appeared on my website on September 9, 2024.

It seems easy to underestimate the extent to which one “cognitive load” might sap your capacity for others. This underestimation could be having detrimental effects you aren’t aware of.

For instance, if you are trying to have a deep and important conversation in a noisy and distracting environment, it may seem that it’s merely hard to hear. But, it’s possible that the effort you expend trying to understand the other person’s words causes fewer cognitive resources to be available for actually processing the conversation.

There’s a wide variety of loads that can drain on your cognition in this manner. Basically, ambient things your brain either attempts to process, adjust for, or draw your conscious attention to.

This suggests the idea of trying to make the information as easy to cognitively process as possible when you’re trying to think deeply or do difficult work.

For example, when:

• reading a challenging article, make the font size on your computer bigger and increase the screen brightness so that your brain has to expend less effort visually processing the sentences

• doing work that requires intense focus, use earplugs or put on headphones with gentle white noise or music without lyrics (ideally music that you are very familiar with) so that your brain isn’t trying to make sense of all the natural sounds around you. This neat site let’s you create your own customized white noise, exactly to your tastes: http://bit.ly/2nQIZuN

• you are trying to get difficult work done on your computer, move all the clutter from your desk (or, at least, out of your line of sight) and make the computer window fullscreen

• you’re about to have an important meeting but you are hungry or thirsty, quickly eat or drink something so that your physical needs won’t be subtly drawing your attention throughout

• there is something blinking that you can see out of the corner of your eye from your desk, go put some dark tape over it

• you need to get something done, but you feel anxious and are having a lot of worried thoughts pop up, take 5 minutes to do deep breathing or meditation or whatever else works to quickly calm you down so that your brain doesn’t expend so many resources on the things that are worrying you

• other people you know who are walking by are drawing your attention during a conversation, rotate yourself relative to your speaking partner so that you can’t see the other people moving around the room