Be Here Now
This topic could have gone first in my advice for making yourself a happier person, ahead of gratitude and self compassion. Many people—particularly people who have experience with mindfulness meditation—would say that the ability to be present in this moment and learning to free yourself (as much as possible) of your anxieties about the past and future is the real key to improving your happiness. And as I say in Self Compassion, being in the moment and paying attention to your thoughts is an essential skill for learning to be kind and fair with yourself. Perhaps I chose to put this topic third in my happiness advice because there is already a fair bit of material out there encouraging the idea of and teaching the skills for being in the moment, while teaching gratitude and self compassion as important skills for happiness is very much underdone.
The first thing to understand is that you spend the majority of your time thinking about the past or future. When I say thinking, I don’t actually mean doing a constructive process of analysis, I mean getting absorbed in images, emotions, and narratives. You’ll think about an argument this morning, an embarrassing moment from childhood, or a friendship you had when you were a teenager. You’ll think about your dinner tonight, a stressful task you have to do at work tomorrow, or a trip you’re going to take in three months. Sometimes you’ll sit still and engage in these thoughts, but more often you’ll go through them while you’re driving, brushing your teeth, doing tasks at work, and even while you’re talking to other people. And sometimes you’ll get distracted not by the past or future, but by thoughts about things that are happening now and elsewhere: what someone you know is doing right now, what’s happening in the political world, why your favorite sports team is doing so badly this season, etc. Thus we have “here” in the phrase “Be here now”, which is taken from the title of a book by a very influential mindfulness teacher named Ram Dass.
If you think that what I’m saying isn’t true of you, you may be right—you may be unique among humans—but almost surely you’re just unaware of this constant assault on your attention from thoughts that aren’t about what’s happening here and now. I’m not in your head, but I’ve spent a fair bit of time watching my own thoughts, and I trust the observations of others who have spent much more time doing the same. Eckhart Tolle wrote the hit book The Power of Now and says that we live almost entirely in memory and anticipation. Though many of his followers believe that Tolle originated his ideas, they have been taught by Buddhists for more than 2,000 years, which means that there are many people out there able to describe with a great deal of familiarity how easy the human mind gets carried off.
Many people try mindfulness meditation at some point in their lives, but give up because they feel that they’re just no good at it. They think their minds are too distracted to find the peacefulness they expect. But in fact they misunderstand what mindfulness meditation is about, which is seeing just how distracted our minds always are because we’re human, finding acceptance of that truth, and learning how to bring our attention back to this moment. This idea is what we want to learn here: how important it is to bring our attention to what’s happening now.
What is the downside of having our attention wander off the present moment? Why is it better to pay attention to washing the dishes or doing our job that we don’t like very much? There are three reasons I’ll discuss. First, our spinning thoughts tend to wander off on topics that produce anxiety, anger, regret, envy, shame, etc.—strongly negative emotions. That’s how we’re built: the negative voices tend to overpower the positive ones. As I talked about in What Is Happiness, our main strategy for improving our happiness lies in spending less and less time in the grip of these negative emotions. If we can learn to see our thoughts going off on a negative tangent, it’s then relatively easy to bring them back. So if you’re driving to work and your thoughts turn to an argument with your partner you had last night, it’s very easy for that train of thought to carry along for twenty minutes, generating frustration, anger, and guilt. If you can notice after five minutes what’s happening in your head, you can bring your attention to your hands on the steering wheel, the view from the freeway, the music playing on the radio. It may be that none of those things are in themselves particularly enjoyable—your view may only be of some old apartment buildings—but they don’t have to be in order to free you from continuing your negative experience. Now if you want to think about the argument so that you can learn how to interact better with your partner, that’s excellent. You will still need to be able to pay attention and stop the ongoing narrative of “I can’t believe she said that when she said the exact opposite thing yesterday! And why did I say that? I’m not going to be able to take it back and I really hurt her feelings when I didn’t mean to. But she’s the one who made me so mad…” As I say in What Is Happiness, if you can learn to reduce by 25%, then by 50%, and then by 75% all of the time you spend held by such negative thoughts and narratives, you will become a remarkably happy person. You never have to reach 100%, which is great because you never will. You just have to learn to catch those negative streams of consciousness in the act of kidnapping you so that you can make a lot of progress.
The next downside of not being in the present moment is that you don’t enjoy this moment as much as you can. The loss here is most obvious when you’re doing an activity that you’re supposed to enjoy. So you’re spending time with your kids, you’re hanging out with friends, you’re eating one of your favorite foods, or you’re traveling to a place you’ve never been before. So often we’re in these moments and hardly paying attention to them. We’re on our phone when we’re with our kids or thinking about all of the things we have to do when we’re done here at the park so we should really wrap up asap. We’re out with our friends, but are thinking about an argument we had with our partner before leaving, or whether or not someone else is going to text us, or maybe even anxious that we didn’t dress well enough (which is sort of a thought about the present moment, but not one that makes us pay attention to our friends). We get our favorite meal served up to us, but the moment a bite touches our tongue we’re scooping up the next bite and trying to shove it in our mouths while looking at our phone and thinking about what we’ll be doing in an hour. And we finally get to go to Japan or Hawaii or Vancouver and we spend much of our time thinking about the traffic, problems at the hotel, and whether or not we brought the right clothes instead of how we can spend as many moments as possible appreciating the things we can only see or do in this place. These kinds of experiences are opportunities for us to gain a great deal of joy, but most of us are terrible at drawing out that joy.
And life has opportunities to bring us pleasure and enjoyment even when we’re not doing things that we look forward to. You can actually find pleasure in doing your dishes or sweeping your floor, going on errands, and doing your job if you pay attention. You can get unexpected pleasure from the feeling of hot water on your hands, or from seeing the floor become cleaner as you work. While driving your car or walking to the store, you might see a beautiful sky or tree or family. While at your job, you might notice that your coworkers are more interesting than you thought or that the work brings you a number of problems that actually give you some pleasure as you solve them. But you will only gain these pleasures if you pay attention. Believe me, I’m not saying that every activity or experience is enjoyable if you just look at it more closely. Certainly not, though negative experiences are often not nearly as bad as we predict. What I’m saying is that there is a lot of pleasure to be had from being in the moment if you open yourself to it. To slightly change a line from Jim Rohn: you’re not going to enjoy every experience that you find, but you want to find all that you can enjoy in your experiences.
And the third downside of not being present is that you aren’t as good at whatever you’re doing as you could be. We do things better when we pay attention to them. This may be particularly important for certain tasks in our lives, like ones we do at work, but really there are many tasks that are better to do well. And our mind will naturally wander off at all times, even during important tasks. Practicing the skill of focusing and bringing our attention back to the present moment will only help our performance whether we’re doing dishes or performing surgery.
So how do we do it? How do we get good at being here now if our minds naturally want to take us elsewhere? Practice, of course, and first understand that you’re starting off worse than you think. Understand it and don’t judge yourself for it. If you’ve never done any mindfulness work, you just don’t realize how much your mind goes off places. I recently heard Dr Peter Attia say on his podcast The Drive that on average we think forty-seven thoughts per minute. (I haven’t read the studies, so I’m curious how they determined that number, but Attia is a source who provides information supported by evidence.) My first piece of advice would be to do some daily mindfulness meditation sessions—maybe starting at five minutes (certainly go for longer if you like)—that focus on awareness. You can use one of the apps that are out there (as I’ve said, I use Waking Up) or find videos on Youtube that will give guidance. It’s important to be consistent—doing the practice a minimum of once a day, five days a week—and to at least think about your thoughts when you’re not doing an actual mindfulness session.
If you’re still reluctant to doing any formal meditation session, you need to at least stop a few times a day and ask yourself, “What am I thinking about right now? What was I thinking about right before my alarm went off?” So set your alarm for morning, afternoon, and night time reminders. Or if you’re more serious set an alarm for every two hours. When you start this practice, you’ll just think, “I don’t know—I guess I’m thinking about how I’m supposed to be thinking about my thoughts.” But with a little effort you can start to recall what was going through your head right before the alarm went off. “I was thinking about that stupid thing I said yesterday, and that’s at least the tenth time I’ve thought about it today.” It’s not your job to follow those discovered thoughts and explore their roots or meaning. That can be useful for therapy, but the goal here is to see the thought, then let it go and pay attention to what you’re actually doing right now. So just notice the thought that was running your mind, then let it go and get back to being here now.
As I said in the article on self compassion about that skill, you’re not going to get good at this work in a weekend. You can make progress right away, but it takes years of practice to make you more easily catch your attention as it wanders and guide it back to this moment. But five to thirty minutes a day (depending on how much effort you want to put in) for years is not really too much to demand of yourself if it makes you happier for the rest of your life. And it will.
Let’s finish, as always, with a quick review of the mantra: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You have value exactly as you are. Because you have value, your happiness matters and so you improving your happiness is worthwhile. And you’re capable of noticing the thoughts that have spun away from the present moment and of bringing them back. It’s not easy, especially at first, but you are capable of learning.
Great job focusing enough to make it through the article. See you next time.
