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How we pay attention shapes the whole world we experience. This lecture from Academy of Ideas shows how anxiety and depression shrink that world. A healthy mind moves its focus freely, while an anxious or depressed one locks into a rigid stare at whatever is wrong, ignoring everything good. Drawing on Iain McGilchrist and Alexander Lowen, it traces how rigid thoughts, a collapsed posture, and avoidant behavior feed one another in a downward spiral. The way out begins with reclaiming the flexible attention and open body that these conditions constrict.
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Become a supporting member and access our growing library of membership courses and videos.
Learn more at academyofideas.com members Attention is not just another cognitive
function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention
can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space and eviscerate emotion.
It is a profoundly moral act. The world we experience is shaped by how we direct our
attention for reality is too complex and we are too limited to attend to but a sliver of all that
exists attend to one sliver of reality and we experience one type of world alter our attentional
capacities change what we attend to and we change the very world we experience it is undisputed by
neuropsychologists and philosophers writes the psychiatrist ian mcgilchrist that the type and
extent of attention we pay changes the nature of the world that we experience.
This simple assertion has profound implications for it means that there are many possible worlds
for each of us to experience. Some of these worlds are conducive to a life well lived,
others are not. In this video we are going to explore the role that attention plays in the
creation of the experiential world of anxiety disorders and depression, as this knowledge
can help us overcome these diseases of despair chronic anxiety and depression can be caused by
a myriad of factors from biological predispositions to elements of our environment to the influence of
depressed or anxious parents or simply a cruel twist of fate the triggers are many and varied
but whatever the cause once these forms of distress take root they are perpetuated and
exacerbated by a maladaptive way of attending to the world to understand the attentional stance
that drives anxiety and depression. We will begin with the analogy of the look versus the stare.
For these two ways of visually attending to the world mirror the overall difference between a
healthy way of deploying our attention and the way that perpetuates anxiety and depression.
Consider the difference between looking and staring, writes Susan Sontag.
A look is voluntary. It is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its
foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a
compulsion. It is steady, lacking in variation, and fixed. Or as the psychiatrist Louis Sass
explains, the look is closer to the natural attitude of everyday life. Emanating from a
secure base and rooted in the lived body, it travels within a stable horizon. It is natural,
– capturing reality as conventionally and pragmatically conceived.
The stare, by contrast, is rigid and fixed.
The stare is rigid, fixed, compulsive, and lacks variation, and so too is the attentional
stance of depressed and anxious individuals.
This is most obvious at the level of the psyche.
For a healthy mind, it displays a variation in thought patterns.
Sometimes the focus is on the good, sometimes the bad, sometimes the neutral.
The depressed or anxious mind, however, lacks this variation and instead is rigidly and
compulsively attuned to negative patterns of thought.
The anxiety-ridden individual, for example, obsesses over potential threats and ruminates
on all that could go wrong in life.
Depression, on the other hand, is characterized by a selective attention and exaggeration
of negative experiences of what is going wrong in one’s life rather than what is going
right.
impulsive focus on the bad creates a narrowed experiential world, as the good in life is
ignored and the potential for good is denied. But this maladaptive attentional stance is
not limited to the realm of the psyche, for as Alexander Lowen wrote,
Since psyche and soma are like the two sides of a coin, head and tail, what goes on in
one realm also occurs in the other. A healthy individual will attend to the world with their
body in a graceful and spontaneous manner. Depressed and anxious individuals do so in
a rigid manner. A stooped posture, a caved-in chest, tightened fists, a clenched jaw, all
are reflections of the embodiment of anxiety and depression. And these ways of attending
to the world with the body not only reflect the state of the psyche but also magnify feelings
of tension, anxiety, sadness, or depression. If a person has a strong and secure sense
of himself, writes Lowen, he will naturally stand erect. If he is frightened, he will tend to cower.
If he is sad or depressed, his body will droop. If he is trying to deny or compensate for inner
feelings of insecurity, he will stand like a martinet, and his posture will be unnaturally
rigid. In addition to attending to the outer world with a rigid body and to the inner world
with a rigid focus on negative thoughts, the behavior of depressed and anxious individuals
is also rigid. Why move forward in life if each step is accompanied by catastrophizing thoughts
in a body that generates feelings of tension, anxiety, and depression? Why take the risks that
produce a fulfilling life if you believe you are destined to fail? Depressed and anxious individuals
lack a healthy variation in patterns of behavior, preferring passivity and avoidance to novelty in
the facing up to challenges. This rigidity in mind, body, and behavior creates a self-perpetuating
feedback loop. Negative thoughts rigidify the body. A rigid body leads to increased
negative feelings and this acts as a barrier to constructive action, or to phrase it in a
different manner. Avoiding normal modes of action promotes the negative thought patterns of anxiety
and depression. These negative thought patterns rigidify the body, and these forms of thought
and embodiment then further undermine healthy modes of action. Retreat from life leads to
regression. And regression heightens resistance to life. To escape the downward spiral of depression
and anxiety necessitates a broadening of attentional faculties to counteract the
shrinking of our experiential world and the rigidification of our body. For the alternative
is to descend into a stagnant and constricting existence, and to lose contact with a healthy
flow of life. Whenever an individual’s sense of the flow of life has come to a stop or been frozen,
that person can no longer realize himself, no longer mature, and will lose the capacity to
make emotional contact with others. But how can we achieve this task when stuck in patterns of
thought, embodiment, and behavior that all feed upon each other and pull us further down into
despair? In the final video of this series, we will explore this question.
To find the richest view of the world, writes McGilchrist, the one that seems truest to the
world as a whole, in the sense that it resonates with our experience in the richest way, the
imaginative exercise of inhabiting a number of points of view is required.
Source: Academy of Ideas