Hey you, awesome people at Read.cash? I hope everything it's been good and productive for you these days.
I've been quite busy these days. And I'm exhausted. I've always been a multitasker, and I could do more than one thing at a time. But the years don't pass you in vain, or these days I have more distractions than usual. And I don't feel I am being as productive as before while trying to do many things at a time. And I should try to start focusing my attention on one thing at a time.
And I thought that maybe it's time to remember some of the Mindfulness practices that I learned a few years ago while taking a Positive Psychology course. Mindfulness is a practice that helps improve concentration and relieve stress. I will like to share with you some of the things I learned.
For those who are not familiar with Mindfulness, this is a practice, I would say that in some way similar to meditation, that helps us to be aware of the present moment and reach full attention to what we are doing.
I remember, in my first session of mindfulness, the instructor put us to eat a tangerine. We had to eat a slice of tangerine with our eyes closed. But before closing our eyes, we had to observe it and smell it. We had to feel the texture with our tongue before bite it. And focus our attention only on what we were doing. We had to focus on how we bite it, and how the juice made contact with our tongue while savoring and chewing. And then focus on how we swallowed it. Overall the experience is very different. I don't use to pay full attention to the experience of eating, whether it is a tangerine or anything else. I focus my attention on something else. But I can tell you that we enjoy the experience much more if we focus on it.
Another of the assignments from the training was to focus our attention on when taking a bath. And then writing about the experience. And I don't know about you, but that's one of the moments when my thoughts wander through a thousand things. So I remember it was a challenge to clear my mind and focus only on the bath at that time.
Inattentional blindness
Another thing that I remember and that I would like to share with you. It is that during that Mindfulness training, for the first time, I heard the term inattentional blindness. Although as you will see below, it's something that we experience very often. And to illustrate what the term refers to, I invite you to watch a short video before you continue reading. I encourage you to do the exercise. And count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball.
The video is a test called The Monkey Business Illusion. It's part of a quite famous study in the field of psychology which studies Inattentional Blindness. The authors of it are Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.
Inattentional Blindness is when we don't see what we have in front of our noses.
How many times has it happened to you when losing an object, and look for it, you cannot find it, but suddenly you realize that it was there in your sight. Or for example, when we are driving. And we are concentrated on the road, but suddenly, we see a pedestrian come out of nowhere, and we have to stop suddenly.
This happens because many times we are saturated with stimuli, and we aren't able to pay attention to all of them.
And you, do you often have Inattentional Blindness? When you watched the video, did you notice the gorilla and the other details like the color change of the curtain?
Have you ever practiced Mindfulness?
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Until next time! ;)
October 15, 2021
This was very interesting! I will definitely give it a try... especially with the food. Hhaha, I´m already looking forward to it!