Focused Attention Exercise

Background

• Taught in Mindful Eating activity as part of Summer Dreamers in 2015.
• Vital to the Digital Badges from Mindful Pittsburgh.
  • 1-minute,
  • Digital_Badges/Mindfulness/5 minutes,
  • Digital_Badges/Mindfulness/10_minutes, and
  • Digital_Badges/Mindfulness/15_minutes.

Insights

• A Focused Attention Exercise engages your ability to pay attention, decrease stress and increase your resilience. The focus attention exercise is much like playing catch with your attention. Just like playing catch with a ball, the more you practices, the better you get.

With the mindfulness badges, students get the training to understand and describe the relaxation response and demonstrate its effect with a decrease in heart rate, breathing rate and blood pressure. For this badge campers describe two conditions for the relaxation response to occur:

1. A mental device such as a sound, word or phrase repeated silently or aloud, or a fixed gaze at an object.
2. A passive attitude. The passive attitude gets one to worry about how well one is performing the technique and puts aside distracting thougths to return to one's focus.

Campers post their reflections on their wiki page on at least four of the seven benefits of focused attention exercises. The seven benefits are:

1. Easier and better relaxation;
2. Preventing and removing stress chemicals from the body;
3. Enhancing resilience;
4. Improved attention;
5. Improved emotion regulation;
6. Improved parasympathetic tone; and
7. Improved health.

Badge earners learn the mental stages of focused attention exercises:

1. Mind wandering;
2. Recognizing, kindly accepting and labeling that the mind has wandered;
3. Gently refocusing attention to the sensations of breathing; and
4. Maintaining the stability of attention on the sensations of breathing.

At home, after choosing a place to practice their focused attention exercise, campers invest one minute (60-seconds) for seven consecutive days and then write about these experiences. Something needs to be written every day. The daily writing can go onto a paper journal and then posted to the student's wiki page.

Students are encouraged to invite their guardians to join them in both the mindfulness practice and the following journal writing activities.

Exercise Instruction:

Mindful breathing is just the ability to sit quietly, with eyes closed or slightly open, resting, not moving, keeping your attention on your breathing. It sounds easy. But if you try, you will soon find that your mind may wander. When it does, calmly and without judgment, acceptingly recognize and label where your attention went, and gently bring it back to being aware of the sensations of breathing. Every time your mind wanders, gently bring your attention back to your breath. Each time you gently bring awareness back on task, your attention skill gets stronger.

Count each breath starting with each in-breath up to 10 breaths.

Sit comfortably balanced & upright in a quiet place w/o distractions, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor.

Attend to the sensations of breathing, (through your nose while belly breathing).

There are four phases in this mindfulness practice of focusing attention on breathing:

1) Mind wandering

2) Recognizing that the mind has wandered, notice and label where it went:

e.g., “planning,” “recalling,” “rehearsing dialogue,” “judging,” “puzzling,” “ itching,” etc.

Gently notice and accept where your attention went, without judging.

3) Gently return your awareness to the sensation of your breathing. 4) Sustain attention on breathing.

All this happens with the intention to sit quietly, not thinking about moving other than breathing.