Treating Pain With Flexible Attention

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." That statement, by someone whose name is lost to history, is true wisdom. Pain is something that happens to us, and then we have choices on how to relate to it. How much we suffer is one of those choices.
It is determined by how we attend to our pain.
By learning to pay attention to pain in more than one way, we can change the suffering part of the equation.
Some pain is inevitable. We bang a shin or strain a shoulder and it hurts. But pain that endures for no apparent reason, or even a pain that endures for a known reason, can be localized and dissolved as an experience of and in the body. But pain is actually generated by circuitry in the brain.
Take the case of phantom limb pain. People who have lost an arm for example, years later report pain, often severe pain, in the missing hand or elbow. Why? Because the circuitry of the brain that represents the missing arm become active.
But it’s not just that brain circuitry is active and the pain has a life of its own, beyond on our control. How we pay attention to pain, is something within our control.
We all tend to pay attention to pain in the high arousal mode of attention, we call narrow, objective focus, which is how the attention style we habitually use fights and avoids the pain. If we let pain in, we think, it will hurt more. But the opposite is true – it’s more painful over time to try to avoid it in a rigid narrow objective focus of attention.
The strategy then is to broaden our aperture of attention with Open Focus exercises by establishing a general awareness of space. With our awareness so much larger, the pain becomes a small part of one’s experience and is no big deal. It often dissolves on its own, or we can easily dissolve it.

Dissolving Finanical Fear

Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “All we have to fear is fear itself.” As the economy, heads into uncharted territory of the downward variety there’s a lot of fear. People are nervous, anxious, unsettled and restless. While Open Focus can’t do anything about the stock market, it can change how we react to these stomach-churning financial events. Most of us are far more reactive than we need to be, and reducing reactivity is one of the things Open Focus does best.
The best way to move out of narrow-objective focus, where reactivity is most extreme, to an Open Focus state, where our attention is more inclusive and immersed, is to listen to one of the recorded exercises available on our web site, www.openfocus.com. Even without the recorded exercises, though, you can sit down and let your attention become diffuse and immersed. Here's how.
Become aware of the space between your body and the walls of the room you are in. As you start to let yourself open and merge with space, you will naturally release stress and tension. To take this further, pay attention to where in your body any feelings of anxiety, fear and restlessness might be located. If you can feel pain, you can dissolve it. Simply move toward and immerse yourself in those feelings, bask in them, accept them and stop fighting. This is a skill we all can develop. The Open Focus™ approach is about attentional flexibility, which leads to release of tension, and not about trying to relax. For more information, check out our book The Open Focus Brain.

Peak Performance and the Yips

The Olympics just concluded and throughout it people commented that some athletes had the “yips.” Yips are well known to some golfers. Just as they are about to putt the ball, something they have done a thousand times, they have an involuntary jerking movement and can’t control their swing and hit the ball too hard and miss the shot.

Golfers are not alone. It happens in all sports. A baseball catcher who suddenly can’t reach second base with the ball. A quarterback whose passes fall short of his receivers. In the Olympics this year gymnasts, kayakers and archers – who also call it target panic – are among those who have had the yips, according to press reports.

No matter what the sport yips are caused by the same thing – narrow focus, objective attention. Paying attention in too narrow a focus – selecting out only the golf ball in your field of attention for example and not including anything else in the focus – causes muscles in the eyes, face and throughout the body to tense. This tension is the enemy of fluid movement required for successful execution of fundamentals in sports.

The way to keep muscle fluidity and enhance any sport is flexible attention. In the short term that means narrow focus when its needed, but less rigid ways of attending when its not. Over the long term it means practicing Open Focus often to keep the body relaxed and ready – not tense and over ready.

The Power of Attention

This is the first post on the Open Focus blog. It was created to begin a discussion about some of the ideas raised in our book, The Open Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body, published by an imprint of Shambhala Press. The premise is that we all hold on to emotional stress that we have carried with us since infancy and childhood. Because this stress -- which moves through our body as well as our mind -- is painful, we shut it down reflexively to keep from feeling it. To keep our stress from surfacing we stay in a type of attention called narrow objective. This fear lives on in our stomach, our chest, our heart and other organs and muscles and causes a host of problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic pain, ADD, ADHD and many other things. It also contributes to an overall phsyical and emotional numbness.

Stress and fear is held in place by the narrow focus objective style of attention. We can release this held fear, and reverse negative physiological and psychological symptoms, by moving into a less rigid, more flexible styles of attention. Taken far enough we can even move into transcendent states.

The book includes a CD with exercises that very quickly move us out of narrow objective focus, and into other forms of attention. In the clinic the Open Focus exercises are used with neurofeedback which makes them even more powerful.

We believe that used along with other tools, attention training has the power to transform modern psychology and psychotherapy, and will allow people to gain control over their nervous system. We want to encourage discussion here.

-- Jim Robbins