Mindful Monday - Issue #284
When Focus Backfires
“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your attention.”
- Dr. Les Fehmi
Attention: A cognitive process of selectively concentrating on specific information, sensations, or thoughts. Directed awareness. Filter through which reality is perceived.
Narrow Focus: A contracted form of attention that locks onto a single point, to include a problem, task, or perceived threat.
Open Focus: An expanded form of attention that includes multiple sensations, spaces, and experiences at once.
Distraction. The world is designed to pull attention in a thousand directions at once. Notifications, headlines, conversations, all competing for focus. For many, attention is fragmented, reactive, and increasingly narrow. And when attention is narrow, thinking tightens, perception shrinks, and possibility feels limited.
Dr. Les Fehmi was a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and one of the early pioneers in the field of biofeedback. Over several decades of research, much of it conducted at the Princeton Biofeedback Centre, he studied how attention directly shapes brain function and human experience. From this work, he developed the concept of Open Focus, demonstrating that how an individual uses attention determines how they experience their reality.
Open Focus is a state of awareness in which attention is diffuse, expansive, and inclusive, taking in multiple sensations, spaces, and experiences at once. It is associated with creativity and optimal brain functioning. Narrow Focus, by contrast, is a contracted state of attention that fixates on a single point, problem, or threat. While useful for short-term tasks, prolonged Narrow Focus is linked to stress, anxiety, and reduced performance.
Contracted long term focus and attention on anything creates stress and mental fatigue leading to under performance. When an individual opens their awareness, noticing sensations, perceptions, and space, the brain shifts to a coherent space. In this state of Open Focus, resistance lessens, clarity ensues, and decisions become intuitive. Force becomes Flow.
Instead of tightening focus to control what is happening, expand awareness. When attention shifts, so too does your experience (reality).
The Shift
From Force To Flow
Move Attention Away From the Problem
Narrow Focus is where attention locks on a single point (problem or outcome). Expand the focus beyond the singular.
Add Awareness of Space
This is the core of Open Focus. Notice the space in your head. The space between your eyes. The space in the room. As awareness expands to include space, attention opens.
Expand to Multiple Points at Once
Instead of focusing on one thing, attention begins to include many things simultaneously. The sounds in the room. The sensations in the body. The space around the objects around you. This creates Diffuse Attention, which signals safety to the brain.
Shift from Immersed to Objective Awareness
Rather than being in the thought, become aware of the thought. Intensity reduces when you shift from being the experience to observing the experience.
Allow Attention to Stay Open
When you soften your focus and let it include more of what’s around you, you reduce effort, release strain, and become more responsive to what’s actually happening.
“Trying harder is often the problem, not the solution.”
-Dr. Les Fehmi
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