Attention as a Health Habit

The chai was still too hot to drink, so I watched the steam lift off the cup and thin out near the kitchen window. My phone buzzed face down on the bench. Then again. I didn't turn it over, not straight away. The steam kept curling. Then I picked the phone up anyway, and when I looked back the steam was just steam, a thing I'd stopped seeing.

Nothing was lost. I'd simply swapped one moment for another without deciding to.

Plenty of things get counted for my health. Steps, glasses of water, hours of sleep (badly, these days). Where my attention goes all day has never made the list, and lately I've started to think it belongs there, as a habit of the same quiet kind as drinking water.

Here's what made me think so.

In 2010 two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, published a study in the journal Science. They used a phone app to ping 2,250 adults at random moments and ask what they were doing, how they felt, and whether they were thinking about something other than what they were doing. People's minds were wandering in 46.9 percent of the samples. And they were less happy while their minds wandered, even though the wandering often drifted somewhere pleasant. The study has limits. The volunteers were mostly Americans with iPhones, and it measured mood in the moment, not long-term health. Still, that number sat with me for days. Checked at random, nearly half the time we're somewhere else.

Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has measured the same restlessness on screens. In her 2023 book "Attention Span" she describes her team timing how long people stayed on one screen before switching. In 2004 it was about two and a half minutes. By 2012 it was about 75 seconds. In recent years, about 47 seconds. The bit I can't shake is that about half the time, nobody else does the interrupting. We interrupt ourselves. Screen switching isn't the whole of attention, and the measure is narrow. But I recognised myself in it straight away.

Then there's the buzz you ignore. In 2015 Cary Stothart and colleagues reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that people doing a dull attention task made more mistakes after their phone went off with a call or a text alert, even though they never picked it up. The text result was less certain than the call result, so I hold it loosely. My chai would back it up, though.

Mr. Mummu, two doors down, decided his new health habit would be mindful eating. Being Mummu, he made it measurable. Out came the notebook titled "Urgent", which is mostly shopping lists, and at dinner he kept a tally of every chew. Dal, rice, a little lime pickle. Pencil, jaw, pencil, jaw. Four pages of neat little gates of five. His partner watched the whole performance and then asked, kindly, how the dal had tasted. Mummu flicked back through the pages. He found the count for the rice. He found the count for the pickle. He went very quiet, then wrote one more line at the bottom of the last page: "Taste: not recorded."

I laughed when I pictured it, and then I stopped, because that's exactly what I'd been about to do with this whole idea. Turn attention into another number. Another ring to close. Counting is a different thing from noticing, and it can quietly eat the very thing you meant to notice.

Our son is four and a half months old, and he's the most attentive person in the house. In the mornings he lies on his mat and watches the light from the curtain slide across the wall like it's the best film ever made. He doesn't check anything. He doesn't half watch. When he's done, he's done, and he lets us know, which is honest too. I'm not saying babies are wise. He also tries to eat his own foot. But watching him watch, I can feel how rarely I give anything my whole face.

Running the Auckland marathon barefoot is the closest I've come to that as an adult. I'd prepared for more than four months, so it wasn't a whim, and I'm not recommending it to anyone. What I remember most is how the road took over my mind. Every step wanted to know about the ground: grit, a smooth patch, a painted line, a cat's eye. There was no room to wander. Hours went by and I wasn't anywhere else. I didn't feel calm, exactly. I felt present, the way you do when you're carrying a cup filled to the brim.

Trees give the hopeful result. In 2008 Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan published a study in Psychological Science. After a tiring mental task, students who walked about 50 minutes through a tree-lined arboretum did better on a memory and attention test than when they walked the same distance downtown. It was a small study, a few dozen students, so I'd call it a hint. I don't know whether it was the trees or simply the quiet. But it suggests attention can be refilled as well as spent.

A beach walk not long ago was my small test of that. Low tide, and the wet sand held the shape of my foot for a second before the water smoothed it out. A gull stood on one leg by a heap of kelp. The light was doing that flat, bright thing it does here before rain, which makes the water look like a sheet of tin. I noticed all of it. Then I noticed myself noticing, felt very pleased, and was promptly off thinking about whether we had milk at home. I came back. The gull hadn't moved. The light had shifted a little, though I couldn't have told you how.

That coming back, I think, is the whole habit.

New Zealand's Mental Health Foundation promotes the Five Ways to Wellbeing, and one of them is "Take notice", me aro tonu: paying attention to the present moment, to our thoughts and feelings and to the world around us. The five ways came out of a 2008 evidence review by the New Economics Foundation for the UK Government's Foresight project. They're described as everyday habits, not a treatment, and I like that honesty. None of this is medical advice either. If your focus or your mood is worrying you, talk to your GP or a health professional, not a man with a cup of chai.

So I'm not starting a programme. No tally marks. I still pick the phone up when it buzzes, and I still lose the thread a few times before breakfast. What I'm trying is smaller. When I catch myself gone, I come back to one thing in front of me and give it a few honest seconds. Steam off a cup. A small hand gripping my finger. The cost of drifting is small and it repeats all day, like a dripping tap you stop hearing. Coming back is small too, and it can repeat just as often.

This morning the chai went cold while I watched our son watch the curtain. I didn't mind. I drank it anyway, and for once I tasted it.