Dr. Zelana Montminy

So I think that's why so many people describe feeling really numb right now and unappreciated too because our sense of what's even real has just eroded.

And that requires attention and it's something that we've lost touch with.

It matters because...

we have to start becoming emotionally granular to our experience.

And when I say that, and what I actually mean is our vocabulary and the narrative that we tell ourselves matters.

And so when we go through our day without really paying much attention to any one thing, and we're saying, oh, I'm so mad at him, I'm so this, and we're just using words without understanding really like the depth of the experience,

we lose being able to confront the things that we need to confront to move through it.

So we might not actually be mad.

We might be just really jealous or maybe feeling hurt or insignificant, like you said.

So I think it's important to differentiate attention versus focus and concentration so that we understand that those are actually very different things, although people use them interchangeably all the time.

So

I think that we have to understand that attention is the brain's like spotlight on one thing.

And I talk about this in the book.

It's the capacity to notice something in your environment.

And I think that's really, it's more passive and it's broad.

It's almost like an umbrella.

Attention is always happening, but it's what kind of orients you to what you're doing, right?

Focus is more of a directional, directed state.

So it's a little more active and focus is attention, right?

It's a form of attention, but it's with intention.