A Collection of Three Articles on Focus by Dr. Daniel Goleman
Attention Regulates Emotion: Focus and Self-Control
By Dan Goleman, Ph.D., Psychologist
“Executive attention holds the key to self-management.”
When my sons were just two or so and would get upset, I sometimes used distraction to calm them down: “Look at that birdie,” or an all-service, enthusiastic “What’s that?” with my gaze or finger directing their focus toward something else.
Attention regulates emotion. This little ploy uses selective attention to quiet the agitated amygdala. So long as a toddler stays tuned to some interesting object of focus, the distress calms; the moment that thing loses its fascination, the distress, if still held on to by networks in the amygdala, comes roaring back. The trick, of course, lies in keeping the baby intrigued long enough for the amygdala to calm.
As infants learn to use this attention maneuver for themselves, they acquire one of their first emotional self-regulation skills—one that has vast importance for their destiny in life: how to manage the unruly amygdala. Such a ploy takes executive attention, a capacity that starts to flower in the third year of life when a toddler can show “effortful control”—focusing at will, ignoring distractions, and inhibiting impulse.
Parents might notice this landmark when a toddler makes the intentional choice to say “no” to a temptation, like waiting for dessert until after she’s taken some more bites of what’s on her plate. That, too, depends on executive attention, which blossoms into willpower and self-discipline—as in managing our disturbing feelings and ignoring whims so we can stay focused on a goal.
By age eight most children master greater degrees of executive attention. This mental tool manages the operation of other brain networks for cognitive skills like learning to read and do math, and academics in general.
Our mind deploys self-awareness to keep everything we do on track: meta-cognition—thinking about thinking—lets us know how our mental operations are going and adjust them as needed; meta- emotion does the same with regulating the flow of feeling and impulse. In the mind’s design, self-awareness is built into regulating our own emotions, as well as sensing what others feel.
Neuroscientists see self-control through the lens of the brain zones underlying executive function, which manages mental skills like self-awareness and self-regulation, critical for navigating our lives.
Executive attention holds the key to self-management. This power to direct our focus onto one thing and ignore others lets us bring to mind our waistline when we spot those quarts of Cheesecake Brownie ice cream in the freezer. This small choice point harbors the core of willpower, the essence of self-regulation.
The brain is the last organ of the body to mature anatomically, continuing to grow and shape itself into our twenties—and the networks for attention are like an organ that develops in parallel with the brain.
As every parent of more than one child knows, from day one each baby differs: one is more alert, or calmer, or more active than another. Such differences in temperament reflect the maturation and genetics of various brain networks.
How much of our talent for attention comes from our genes? It depends. Different attention systems, it turns out, have different degrees of heritability. The strongest heritability is for executive control.
Even so, building this vital skill depends to a large extent on what we learn in life. Epigenetics, the science of how our environment affects our genes, tells us that inheriting a set of genes is not in itself enough for them to matter. Genes have what amounts to a biochemical on/off switch; if they are never turned on we may as well not have them. The “on” switch comes in many forms, including what we eat, the dance of chemical reactions within the body, and what we learn.
The Four Basic Moves to Strengthen Focus
By Dan Goleman, Ph.D., Psychologist
“The less distracted we are, the more successful we can be at whatever we do.”
You’re at your keyboard zeroed in on some compelling task at hand, say, focused on a report you have to finish today, when suddenly there’s a pop-up box or melodious ding! You’ve got a message.
What do you do? Stay with that urgent task? Or check that message?
The answer to that dilemma will be determined by a strip of neurons in your prefrontal cortex, just behind your forehead — your brain’s executive center. One of its jobs is settling such conflicts and managing your priorities in general.
The ability to stay concentrated on what you’re doing and ignore distractions counts among the most basic skills in anyone’s mental toolbox.
Call it focus.
The more focused we are, the more successful we can be at whatever we do. And, conversely, the more distracted, the less well we do. This applies across the board: sports, school, career.
Focus is the hidden ingredient in excellence — “hidden” because we typically don’t notice it. But lacking focus we are more likely to falter at whatever we do. A test of how concentrated college athletes are, for instance, predicts their sports performance the following semester. A wandering mind, studies show, punches holes in students’ comprehension of what they study. And an executive tells me that whenever he finds his mind has wandered during a meeting, he wonders what opportunities he has just missed.
The ability to focus is like a mental muscle. The more we work it out, the stronger it becomes, much like using a Cybex at the gym for sculpting pecs.
In research at Emory University by Wendy Hasenkamp she imaged the brain of volunteers while they paid attention to their breath. They didn’t try to control their breathing in any way, but just concentrated on its natural flow.
She found there are four basic moves in the mind’s workout for focused attention:
1) Bring your focus to your breath.
2) Notice that your mind has wandered off.
3) Disengage from that train of thought.
4) Bring your focus back to your breath and hold it there.
And the next time your mind wanders off and you notice that you’re thinking about, say, your lunch rather than in your breath, repeat that basic mental rep again. And again.
That’s the way to strengthen the brain’s circuitry, centered in the prefrontal cortex just behind the forehead, that both puts your attention where you want it to go, and brings it back when you wander off.
But this seemingly simple mental routine is deceptive—looks easier than it actually is. Try it for one minute, and if you’re like most of us, you’ll inevitably find your mind wanders off to some other thought. And those thoughts are seductive.
It takes mindfulness—an active attention to notice that your mind has drifted, and a mental effort to end that reverie and go back to the breath.
But this mental workout, if done with regularity and persistence, will make it easier to keep your focus where you need it to be.
And that will help you put off checking that message until later, so you can get that report done now.
How Focus Changed My Thinking About Emotional Intelligence
By Dan Goleman, Ph.D., Psychologist
“Children who learn how to focus also enhance their emotional intelligence.”
In a second-grade classroom at a school in Spanish Harlem, the teacher told me that a child had come to class very upset: Someone she knew had been shot. The teacher then asked the students how many of them knew a person who had been shot—and every hand went up.
The children’s school was right next to a massive housing project were most of these children live. On top of the difficulties of such a childhood, half of the children in this class had “special needs,” ranging from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder to the autism spectrum. I expected the atmosphere to be chaotic. Instead the students were quiet, focused, and calm.
The secret? I watched the children have their daily session of “breathing buddies,” where they lie on the floor, each with a favorite stuffed animal on their belly, and count 1-2-3 as their breath rises and as it falls. This simple exercise strengthens the brain’s circuits for attention—and it has changed my thinking about emotional intelligence.
The prefrontal circuitry that focuses the mind has another role: It also calms the body from stress arousal. These children were training their brains to be both more concentrated and to recover more quickly from upsetting emotions (which is the operational definition of resilience).
Those two skills heighten a child’s readiness to learn. They also enhance their emotional intelligence (EI). Here’s why.
EI refers to two kinds of focus. First: an inward awareness of our thoughts and our feelings, and applying that in managing our upsets and focus on our goals. Second: a focus on others, to empathize and understand them, and on the basis of this to have effective interactions and relationships.
What I had not realized until now was how essential the basic skills of attention—focus—are in building these skills.
Linda Lantieri, head of the Inner Resilience Program, which brought the breathing exercise to the school along with a host of other emotional intelligence skill-builders tells me that when children strengthen their focusing abilities in this way, it speeds up by a year or two their acquisition of the rest of the EI skill set.
When I spoke to the teacher of these second-graders, she told me about a day when scheduling glitches made them skip the breathing exercise. The result: the kids were all over the place.
With young people growing up in a world of distractions as never before, it’s time to teach attention skills, the fundamental ability in readiness to learn.
Nurudeen Publishing 