But What About Your Mental Wealth?

Your Attention Is Your Brains Currency

Our attention is our brain's currency. The sooner we see it that way, the sooner we can stop fixating on the things that no longer serve us and put our attention on the things that actually matter.

As humans, we don’t have an unlimited supply of attention. Sure, some of us are more focused than others and also have longer attention spans but at the end of the day, all of our attention is limited. When we concentrate heavily on one thing it takes our focus away from other areas. That is just how we are wired.

Take our physical selves for instance. We cannot physically play football and cut our own hair at the same time (I mean you could try but I can't imagine the results would be too fantastic). Similarly, we can’t put our pure undivided mental energy on multiple things either.

This is why it is so helpful to think of our attention as currency. If you were saving up for a car, would you then go and spend all of your money on an expensive holiday? If you did, not only will you not be in a position to buy that car now, you will have set yourself back and it will take you even longer to be able to afford that car.

Our attention works in a similar way. When we have spent our concentration and focus on something that depletes our energy, it takes us longer to recover from that and to shift focus to the things that we wanted to give our attention to.

For example, if we got stuck in traffic on the way to work and had an argument with an aggressive driver, of course, that will play on our minds. But let's say we get to work and continue to dwell on this, our attention is not 100% focused on our job, but it is still stuck on the past situation. As a result of this, we tend to make more errors in our work and this will then feed the negative mood we have put ourselves in.

A personal example was when I used to be obsessive with my eating habits. The only thing that ever used to be on my mind was what I’d eaten and whether it was healthy or not, what I was going to eat next and how much I would need to work out to counter what I ate. It was exhausting and my mind was on nothing else. It stopped me from being present, I couldn't even focus on conversations and it took all of my attention to the point that if I look back on journal entries from that period, it was all about food and exercise. I gave every cell of my brainpower to this and it took over leaving me unable to focus on my creativity or much else for that matter.

Shifting our attention from one thing to another is no easy feat, especially when emotion is involved. But it's in these times we have to ask ourselves. Do we want to spend our time and attention on this one thing that is clearly depleting our energy, or do we want to get past it and put our attention on something that is more important and worthy?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be something negative that can take our attention away. Smaller tasks and decisions can always spend our brain currency too.

If we are trying to learn something new, it is impossible to do so if our focus is not 100% on it. For example, mundane tasks don’t need 100% of our attention and the less we give attention to them the more we are able to focus on learning new things. We can’t focus on learning a new language when we are so focused on the fact that we need to vacuum the house. These things require minimum attention and in turn, you use the rest of your concentration to learn new things, which uses our brain wealth positively.

Snap decision-making also allows us to make a decision without overthinking it and spending too much of our attention on these things. When it comes to the smaller decisions like what to wear sometimes it's best just to make that choice quickly so our focus can be better spent elsewhere, like planning article ideas. Mel Robbins talks about using the 5-second rule to make decisions and take action. This is an amazing habit to adopt especially with the smaller decisions. Doing this will allow you to focus on the bigger goals and choices in your life.

When we start to see our attention in this way, that it is something of limited and precious value, then we are able to prioritize our thoughts and what we give our attention to. When our focus goes onto something we want it to be something worthwhile because the more we give our focus to one thing, the less we are able to give to other areas, so it is important to make it count.

When we are dealt with a situation that is less than ideal, just think to yourself, is this worth my brain wealth? If not switch gears and pull your attention to something more worthy. You wouldn’t pour your money down the drain, so why do the same with your brain wealth?