Even if you don’t believe in a spiritual power behind your attention, it is a powerful tool at your command.

Attention bankruptcy

By paying attention to something, you are giving your energy to it. Just as sitting upright in a desk chair burns a few calories at a time, you are spending your physical and emotional energy with whatever you choose to watch, read, listen to or care about.

You know the feeling: stress drains you of minor amounts of energy for every moment you give to it.

Some things we choose to give our attention to: if you are chatting with a friend about her new boyfriend, you are listening to her words and watching her body language. You would be leaning toward her, and raising your eyebrows and smiling a bit while you nod in encouragement to reflect her joy back to her. You might be waiting for her to take a breath so you can say something about the spinach between her teeth.

The benefit of this kind of attention is that it is an equal exchange. Your friend will return this attention to you while you are telling her about your new boss.

Some things we choose to worry about: when you’re watching a troubling news segment on television it’s likely your eyebrows are knitted together, you’ve tensed your abdomen or jaw. You may even have to call someone to discuss this latest development. You might lay awake in bed that night thinking about this problem, giving it your sleep and even your weariness the following day.

The truth of the matter is that the government has levied a tax on your mind. Every time you turn your tired thoughts to the news about what our government has or has not done, will or will not do, does or does not stand for – you are giving it your energy. Do you really want to “pay” energy to the War in Iraq? Do you really want to “pay” for the 2008 Election?

Those distant people or events may not “receive” your energy and attention payments, but you certainly expend them. Why do you think the phrase is “pay attention”?

The good news is that you don’t have to pay this tax. The IRS will never audit you. They get their energy paychecks whether you participate in the system or not. You can choose to save your attentive energy for something more worthy: children playing, a sunset, your favorite song, a good book.

You are what you watch

Looking at a heaping salad bar you know what you should choose to eat. You know that high fat, high-carb dressing is no tastier than light vinaigrette. You might make your selections based on comparative nutrients, your cravings at the moment, or perhaps simply out of habit.

The same selection is presented to us each and every day in the smorgasbord of mass-media. We choose what we take into our bodies. The problem is that most of the mass-media buffet is not healthy. There is not equal representation among the mental and emotional food groups. There is no Recommended Daily Allowance for bad news.

It is an accepted fact that mass-media engines have to stick with news that sells. They thrive on headlines. If they can’t find something big and splashy, they will make something mundane seem sensational.

In order to “hook” audience members, the media must evoke an emotion in their readers, listeners or viewers. Emotions like fear or anger will captivate large numbers of people. Especially those who are habituated by years of picking up fear and anger like croutons on the salad bar.

Happy stories make so little money that “good news” is rarely even considered to be real “news” anymore. That’s because happy people aren’t the target audience. (It is generally assumed we have better things to do with our time.)

YOU are the Target Audience

Once you’ve noticed the media you are faced with each day, notice what you do with it. Do you frown or smile? Do you tense up or relax? Do you feel compelled to buy something? Eat or drink something?

Have you ever noticed what “target audience” categories you fall into? Do you see the same previews every time you see a film in the theater? Do you see the same car commercial every time you turn on the television? These previews are expensive – they haven’t been broadcast willy-nilly to precede every film this summer. Those car commercials are targeted to a viewer who will watch a particular program during a specified time frame. You.

Pay attention to the advertising you end up seeing regularly. Notice what it says about who you are – what parts of your life it appeals to.

Advertisers prey on our fears. Ads targeted at the teen / young adult market are about trend setting and fitting in, being pretty enough and cool enough. Those aimed at parents are about child safety and long-term planning. Ads aimed at the elderly are about health, personal safety and life insurance!

Do you fit in with your “target audience group”? Are you properly pigeonholed?

McNews

Are you ready to try a media-free attention diet?

Believe it or not, there are enough information sources surrounding you in daily life that even if you never watch the news or read a single newspaper article, you will still know the gist of what’s going on. What will amaze you is how little the headlines change over time, and what passes for “news” on a daily basis.

Like most diets, the long term benefits will be more effective as a lifestyle change, rather than a temporary purge.

Also similar to nutritional dieting, the first step is awareness. Like the Food Log that a dieter is asked to keep and simply watch mindfully what they are eating every moment of the day for a week, you will need to know where and how you take in your mass media information.

Where do you get your news? Where do you seek entertainment? Do you read the newspaper every morning? What about television? Films? What sites do you read online? Who emails you the latest juicy tidbits of gossip?

Like the omnipresence of McDonald’s restaurants – Big Macs that splatter all over the world – notice the inundation.

Notice how much the world clambers for your attention.

When I get up and get ready to go to work in the morning, I choose not to turn on the television.

The first news I read is the headline on the local paper in the newsstand at the commuter train station. The Watchtower I politely decline each morning. Animated digital news & advertisement tickers on the train platform. On the train itself, there are closed-captioned television screens with taped local news and commercials. Billboards out the windows, on-train advertisement placards for fast-food and cars for sale: “Low-credit, No-Credit, OK!”

There is the music blaring from headsets of other commuters. Not to mention the various covers of books, magazines, and newspaper headlines in the hands of everyone around me. There, are of course, more news tickers, newspapers and ads at the station near my office. Branding on buildings, banners, and the sides of trucks on my short walk. News, trivia and advertisements scroll on a Captivate Network LCD screen in the elevator of the office building.

I unwillingly receive this in one hour, even before I’ve turned on my PC, checked my email, or gone online.

Life outside the box

You will notice a resistance to your media diet from friends and loved ones. Like an alcoholic sometimes has to make new friends to stay on the wagon, you might have to talk to different individuals.

Some people feel very insecure about the idea that you aren’t watching television. I find that my media diet triggered a defensive response in many people. At first, they were confused asking me questions like “What do you do?!” or “Where do you point your furniture?”

When I respond that I write, read, listen to music, practice yoga, surf the net, garden, walk my dog, experiment in the kitchen, clean the house, paint, sew, or get a little extra sleep… They wonder if perhaps they should be joining me on this unconventional quest for peace and quiet. When they decide that they cannot possibly give up their time with the mass-media, my friends started trying to give me television sets. Literally. It became a point to make all of them feel better to know when I finally accepted one.

It is commonly accepted social etiquette to have something interesting to talk about in casual conversation. If you’re reading great books, then you don’t need this. If you’re renting quality films that you really want to see (or borrowing them from the library?) again, you’ve got plenty there. But if you really need current events to be able to chat about, I highly recommend a fun site called Happy News.

The media-free diet

One of the more insidious sources of “information” I’ve encountered has been the informal kind.

The news at the water-cooler is actually the most helpful. I tend to hear most of my breaking news from concerned coworkers who know I don’t watch the news. In fact, we always benefit from our friends giving us their attention.

They don’t bother to ask my opinion about the latest election candidates. Instead, they make sure I’ve heard about the e-coli in my spinach salad, or the recall on cat food. I end up getting the need-to-know data, rather than all that other stuff.

Before you grow too concerned about side-effects of your media diet, you don’t really need to rely on them for the information. I’d have found out the instant I went to the grocery store and couldn’t find a bag of baby spinach leaves to buy. Nor do you need to trust them as a reliable source. Often, after receiving a tip from someone about anything that really concerns me, I will go online and look up more information from a few sources.

Email is the hardest informal news source to weed through. Memos, company announcements, gossip, and chain letters.

The best thing I have ever done for my peace of mind is this: In Outlook, under the Tools menu, select “Options”. Then click on the button for “Email options” then on the button “Advanced Email Options”. In the section entitled “When new items arrive in my inbox” UNCHECK EVERY SINGLE BOX. This means my PC will no longer beep or blink when a new email is received. A dozen new messages can pile up before I have a moment to check them. I’ve never fallen behind in my work. Productivity is enhanced because my stress levels have decreased as my time management abilities have skyrocketed.

As far as personal email is concerned, I have a few preferences.

First, I never buy in to those “send this warning to everyone you know” notes. Even if I’ve had the time to look it up on Snopes and it really is true. If it isn’t true, I reply to the sender with a link to the article debunking it. I like to request that they fact-check these things before sending them out. Repeat offenders usually get a warning that in the future, such discrediting emails will be sent via “Reply All” and would they please remove me from their distribution list.

I usually read the “feel-good” ones and the jokes, but very seldom pass them along. There are two kinds of senders from whom you receive emails from. There are friends who always have an interesting personal note, an invitation to a party, or a fascinating detail that made them think of you. Then there are the people who only send messages to large groups of people at a time, usually with the telltale acronym FW still in the subject line. I prefer to not have my email address be synonymous with SPAM in my friends’ minds.

At the office, we give our energy and attention to our work. If it’s something that challenges, interests or excites you, it’s likely that your energy is recycled right back into your mind – you remain enthusiastic and engaged in your work. If it’s something that is not quite as fascinating, you are likely to feel your energy draining out of you as you give it your attention.

If you are feeding your mind to your work, doesn’t that make it doubly important to love what you do?

After a hard day of paying attention for pay at the office, the one place where we have the most control over what we choose to attend is at home. Do you open all of the mail you receive? Pay bills? Watch television? Listen to the radio? Go online? Flip through a magazine? Is there something on playing just for “background noise” around you?

If you turn all of these things off, what would you hear? Birds singing? Maybe the squeals of neighborhood kids playing tag? Or a dog barking to be let inside? Perhaps it’s the sounds of traffic – cars, trains or airplanes. Can you hear your neighbor’s TV turned up too loudly?

Or is it quiet? Can you hear your breath? What about your heartbeat?

The real question is this – can you leave it all turned off? For one night? Like people who can’t have ice cream in the refrigerator without hurrying to eat it, some people simply can’t have access to all of the media available in daily life and not give it their attention.

I defragged my PC because it’s what I wanted to do with my head.