Is Your Mind Wandering?

Is your mind wandering? The Practice: Pay attention. Why? Moment to moment, the flows of thoughts and feelings, sensations and desires, and conscious and unconscious processes sculpt your nervous system like water gradually carving furrows and eventually gullies on a hillside. Your brain is continually changing its structure. The only question is: Is it for better or worse? In particular, because of what's called "experience-dependent neuroplasticity," whatever you hold in attention has a special power to change your brain. Attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: it illuminates what it rests upon and then sucks it into your brain - and your self. Therefore, controlling your attention - becoming more able to place it where you want it and keep it there, and more able to pull it away from what's bothersome or pointless (such as looping again and again through anxious preoccupations, mental grumbling, or self-criticism) - is the foundation of changing your brain, and thus your life, for the better. As the great psychologist, William James, wrote over a century ago: "The education of attention would be the education par excellence." But to gain better control of attention - to become more mindful and more able to concentrate - we need to overcome a few challenges. In order to survive, our ancestors evolved to be stimulation-hungry and easily distracted, continually scanning their interior and their environment for opportunities and threats, carrots an...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news