Developing Open-Focus Attention for Nervous System Regulation
Our lives are shaped by how and where we pay attention. Are you focused on your to-do list? Your anxiety? Your friend’s behavior? The weather today? What you’re grateful for? What to have for lunch? The day’s landscape holds thousands of thoughts, emotions, events, and sensory information that we have the option of attending to, especially in our fast-paced American culture. Because of this fast-paced society we live in, most American adults spend the majority of their lives paying attention in a narrow-focus way.
Narrow-focus attention is associated with our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight), used to focus our attention on a singular object while dismissing peripheral stimuli. This type of attention evolved to be helpful for survival, such as zeroing in on a buffalo to hunt for dinner or noticing a dangerous animal in the bushes. This attention style, considered the “emergency mode” of attention, has disadvantages when regularly employed. Prolonged narrow-focus results in increased physiological arousal (higher heart rate, respiratory rate) and an accumulation of stress in the body. We can learn, however, to train our brain to pay attention in a less physiologically and psychologically “costly” way, which was the focus for Dr. Les Fehmi and his research team at the Princeton Biofeedback Center, who developed open-focus attention strategies.
An open-focus style of attention is defined by attention that is immersive and diffuse. You may have had experience with open-focus attention while at a concert, feeling connected to the crowd and music (immersive) and noticing the performers on stage, people next to you, and emotions inside of you all at once (diffuse). When in open-focus the body relaxes, releasing accumulated stress and tension and promoting the feelings of ease, peace, interconnectedness, and love. Through monitoring electrical activity in the brain, Fehmi found that imagining space is the most direct way to guide someone into an open-focus attention style. If you want to give it a try yourself, read through the prompts below inspired by Fehmi’s work.
Open-focus moves you out of left brain and into right brain, so try not to focus on “understanding” the prompts or getting it “right” just allow yourself to imagine the prompt as effortlessly as possible. Just like anything else, employing an open-focus attention style often takes practice, especially since many of us have spent so much of our lives in a narrow-focus dominant attention style (1).
Pause 15 seconds between prompts:
Imagine the space between your eyes
Imagine the space between the top of your head to the ceiling
Imagine the space between your body and the ground
Imagine the space from the right side of your body to the nearest object
Imagine the space from the left side of your body to the nearest object
Imagine the space within the atoms that make up your body
Imagine the space within your lungs
Imagine the space between your thoughts
Imagine the space within your body and the space outside of your body
Imagine how the space within your body is continuous with the space outside your body
Imagine the silence, stillness, and spaciousness that holds all sounds, movements, and matter
Notice the sounds, smells, feelings around you
Notice the sounds, smells, and feelings around you while noticing the feelings inside your body
For more open focus practice and information, visit: https://openfocus.com/home/
References:
Fehmi, L. & Robbins, J. (2008). The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the power of attention to heal mind and body.
