From the Introduction

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."—Mohandas K. Gandhi

If you are like most people these days, Gandhi's warning has probably gone unheeded and the speed of life seems to be increasing exponentially. Many clients tell me they rush through the day—dropping the kids off at school, zipping off to work on jam-packed freeways, frantically playing out in their heads the things they need to do, obsessing over the details of work or school, juggling cell-phone calls as they drive—anxious to cram so much as they can into their lives lest they miss something.

But many people also tell me that even when they stop rushing about, they can't wind down. They complain of not being able to fall asleep or feeling edgy, irritable, anxious, depressed, restless, impatient, dissatisfied, or bored—or all of the above. They can't relax unless they have a drink or two. During the day they have trouble mustering the energy to focus and pay attention, and they power up with double espressos. They have headaches, backaches, and a long list of other chronic physical problems. Thoughts race through their heads. And many people say they feel they are merely skimming the surface of what goes on around them, missing out on the deeper feelings of life's experiences.

These kinds of problems are epidemic. But in most cases there is nothing wrong with the people who suffer them; nor is anything necessarily wrong with their lives. Instead it is a matter of "operator error." Everyone has the ability to rebalance and heal their nervous systems to end these problems, to dissolve their pain, to slow down and yet accomplish more, to experience life more deeply, to optimize the function of their bodies and minds, to dramatically change their lives for the better. They just don't know how.

The answer is simple and well within their grasp—it is accomplished by changing the way they pay attention.

When I ask someone how they pay attention, they usually scratch their heads and wonder what I mean. Most people assume they are paying attention or not, end of story. There exists little vocabulary to describe, and scant physiology to understand, how we pay attention. At first glance the subject, quite honestly, seems dull.

For more than forty years, however, I have been a student of how human beings attend both to the world around them and to their internal world of emotions and thoughts. Pry beneath the surface of the subject of attention, and there is a fascinating and fundamental phenomenon that has intrigued holy men, psychologists, military researchers, and advertising executives for many years. And for good reason: attention is the central mechanism through which we guide our awareness and experience the world.

The term "paying attention" is an apt one, for too often it is more costly than we realize. Failing to deploy our attention appropriately can cost us dearly by contributing to a host of physiological and emotional problems and keeping us from reaching our full potential. The truth is that most of us go through life paying attention the wrong way.

For the past thirty years people have come to our workshops and to our clinic, the Princeton Biofeedback Center, in Princeton, New Jersey, to learn one thing: how to change the way they pay attention. Without drugs or other medical interventions, people from all walks of life learn to reduce stress; dissolve chronic pain; stop anxiety; alleviate depression; ease fears, shame, envy, anger, and loneliness; and overcome attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and other cognitive problems. The world-class executives, athletes, artists, and performers I've worked with have learned to dramatically improve their performance. And other health professionals have come to learn to apply the lessons of attention to everything from psychotherapy to massage.

The changes that come from learning to pay attention in different ways aren't subtle—they have robust effects on the entire nervous system, from our eyes to our muscles to our mind, body, and spirit. Here are some examples:

• Mary had a twenty-year history of chronic physical problems, the worst of which were severe migraine headaches that occurred almost daily and sometimes lasted three days. After several months of Open-Focus training, Mary reported that the headaches had been reduced to fewer than one per month. She was able to take a new job and took up long-distance running. "I feel like the world is my place again," she says happily.

• For most of his adult life Aaron suffered ulcerative colitis, a condition that causes extreme pain in the large intestine, accompanied by fatigue and loss of appetite. He was in constant discomfort, seldom traveled, and could only eat certain foods. After Open-Focus training his illness vanished completely, and he started traveling and eating in restaurants again.

• Thomas was a trumpet player who suffered extreme performance anxiety before his auditions for Broadway musicals and in jazz clubs. It was taking a toll on his ability to make a living and ruined the enjoyment he got from playing. Through attention training he learned to let go, relax, and yet be centered in the creative presentation of his talent. His playing became more spontaneous and smooth. "I found I could be more present in the moment, which is what good music is all about," he said.

• Tristan, a New Jersey mother, was so gripped by panic attacks and agoraphobia (fear of public spaces) that she was unable to leave her home. These attacks came on suddenly and out of nowhere, causing her heart to race, stealing her breath, and making her feel faint. She started Open-Focus training, and her fears and panic attacks diminished and were eventually eliminated.

My interest in the power of attention began during a research fellowship in 1969 at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, when I developed a kidney stone. One afternoon a sudden, shuddering pain, unlike anything I had ever felt, rippled through my body and almost dropped me to the floor. Pain medications didn’t help. Distracting myself didn’t help; nor did creating a competing pain—bending back my finger or pinching myself. The pain bored through everything. Several hours later it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived.

When the pain returned a few days later, I tried a new tack and did something that seemed counterintuitive: I searched out the precise location of the core of pain in my body and gave it my full attention. Then, instead of fighting it, which I had been doing consciously and unconsciously, I surrendered to it. I allowed myself not only to fully feel it but also to bathe in it and completely dive into and accept it. Immediately the pain ceased, and a wonderful feeling of lightness took its place. The world around me grew brighter, and I felt more present and centered. To my astonishment the pain was gone for a full day.

The next day, when the kidney-stone pain returned, the brightness dimmed. Again I stopped fighting it and dove into the pain. And again the same bright, clear feeling appeared. I formed my first hypothesis about what was going on: A major factor in how much pain I experienced was related to how I paid attention to it. Instead of focusing intently on the pain and fighting it, or focusing away and distracting myself, the trick was to pay attention in a way that put the pain squarely at the center of attention while I remained relaxed and broadly immersed in it with other senses present in the periphery of attention. Then the pain became a small part of my total awareness, rather than most or all of it, which allowed me to immerse this awareness—which is me—in the pain and let it diffuse and dissolve.

I was astonished that even pain this physical, this searing, could be brought under control—without medication, without surgery—simply by changing the way I paid attention to it. This discovery began a lifelong quest to understand the relationship between how people attend to the world and the profound effect that different forms of attention have on our minds and bodies. Decades later I have learned one overriding lesson: When we change the way we pay attention, we gain the power to profoundly change the way we relate to our world on every level—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

The power of attention is no secret to the world of Eastern spiritual disciplines and martial arts; they understood long ago that bringing attention under conscious control is a powerful way of mastering our internal and external realities. But our culture does not appreciate the role of attention in healing everything from depression to anxiety to ADD and ADHD, to myriad kinds of chronic pain and distress, sleep problems, fatigue, sadness, isolation, and irritability. We don’t understand the role of attention in allowing us to experience true union. The most critical element of human experience is relationship, ranging from deep, loving connections with other people to feelings of oneness and union with the world. Learning to bring our attention under conscious control is how we optimize those relationships.