In a world of constant digital noise, by reclaiming our attention we can improve the quality of our lives. Jodie Jackson, a specialist in the way the brain forms habits, explains how
If you had a bag of £1 million in cash, would you leave it on the pavement with the zip open? Of course not – you’d lock it away, protected with pin codes and other security measures, because you understand its value and you don’t want it stolen. And yet, every day, we risk leaving something far more valuable wide open for others to take at any given moment.
You might assume I’m referring to time? In fact, our most valuable resource is our attention. This is what gives time its power. Your attention decides how your hours are spent, what you notice, how you feel, and ultimately, what gets created in your life.
Your attention is your superpower. But as Johann Hari argues in his book Stolen Focus, we’re living through an attention crisis. In a world engineered for distractions, it’s not just your attention that gets hijacked, it’s your energy, your emotions and your potential.
The good news is, you can learn to guard and guide your attention. And when you do, you also have more influence over your future.
How your attention guides your reality
To begin with, let’s just talk about the mechanics of attention. Your brain is presented with 11 million bits of information per second. But you can only consciously process about 40. That means that the vast majority of reality is filtered out – you never even notice it.
At the heart of this filtering system is a part of your brain called the reticular activating system (RAS). Think of it as your personal search engine, constantly editing reality. And it is not random, it automatically filters reality to allow in what aligns with your beliefs, your identity and your goals.
For this reason, your attention is not just passively noticing reality, it is actively creating it. What you focus on expands. If you focus on problems, your RAS will filter the world so that problems are all you see. If you focus on possibilities, it will just as eagerly reveal opportunities.
Your attention is the director of your experience. It shapes how you feel, what you believe, and how you behave. And those three things together determine the quality of your life.
The good news is, you can learn to guard and guide your attention. When you do, you have more influence over your future.
In these times of information overwhelm, attention isn’t just our most valuable personal resource, it’s the one that’s most sought after by the outside world. It’s the natural currency of our time, often described as the attention economy. Your attention has become a commodity, and countless apps, platforms and algorithms are engineered to capture it as often as possible for as long as possible. But when every platform is battling for your gaze, what we end up with isn’t an attention economy at all, but a distraction economy.
Those distractions come at a cost: fragmenting your attention, making it harder to think deeply, learn effectively, and be productive. Research shows that after even a brief interruption, like a notification, it can take an average of 23 minutes to return to a state of deep focus. So, every time you get distracted, you don’t just lose a second – you lose momentum, clarity and the compounding power of focus. That loss builds up day after day, becoming an invisible tax on your potential.
Three ways to reclaim your attention
Protecting your attention isn’t about just using willpower. It’s about having a better system. In a world designed to pull your focus in a thousand directions, having a strategy is essential.
Here are three practical steps you can take today to reclaim your attention and, ultimately, your life.
The first step to protecting your focus is identifying the intruders. What apps, habits or environments are distracting you? Once you see what’s hijacking your attention (and how often), you can start to take action. Begin to observe in real time and make note.
Image: Thom Holmes
Design your environment to protect your attention. Start by setting boundaries with the biggest thieves of it: your devices. Turn off non-essential notifications, create no-phone zones in your house, and plan blocks of uninterrupted time for deep focus, whether that’s work or play.
Image: Thought catalog
Boundaries are important, but the most powerful way to protect your attention is to have a strong intention. When you have a clear purpose that you’re emotionally connected to and are pursuing with passion, distractions lose their grip. Instead of relying on willpower or discipline for focus, intention pulls you forward. With a strong why, focus becomes easier, more natural, and almost effortless.
Image: Vitaly Gariev
When you learn to direct your attention, you’re not just managing distractions, you’re reclaiming your most valuable asset. This is a deep act of self-respect.
Change your focus, change the world
It doesn’t stop with you. Psychology tells us attention is also contagious: what we notice, share and talk about influences what others notice too. In today’s attention economy, where we place our focus doesn’t just shape our private experience – it acts like a vote for what grows in our culture. When attention is poured into fear, it multiplies division. When it’s directed toward solutions, it multiplies possibility.
So now that you know its true power, my invitation is to guard your attention like it’s your £1 milllion bag of cash. And remember that when you invest your attention with an intentional approach, it allows you to upgrade your reality. The more of us who choose to direct our attention consciously, the faster we can upgrade the world we all share.
Jodie Jackson is a coach and writer who specialises in neuroencoding, a methodology that combines neuroscience and psychology to rewire the brain for success. Jackson has also carried out extensive research on how the negativity bias in the news affects our mental and societal health
Main image: iprogressman
Attention: use it for good
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