What Have You Stopped Noticing?

You cannot make an informed choice about something you’ve stopped noticing.

Imagine that you are making supper at the end of an ordinary day. Something is playing in the background, your phone is close enough that you notice when it lights up, and someone is talking to you while you prepare the meal and think about whatever still needs to be done before the evening is over. None of this seems remarkable because some version of it may happen almost every day, and if someone asked what you were doing, you would probably answer, “I’m making supper,” even though your mind and senses are actually doing considerably more than that. You are preparing food while deciding what deserves your attention, what can remain in the background, and what you need to respond to, and most of those decisions are happening without you consciously stopping to make them.

We have to be able to function this way because none of us could move through an ordinary day if every sound, smell, or visual change demanded the same amount of conscious attention. Our brains are continually sorting incoming information, bringing some things forward because they are new or important and allowing other things to become familiar enough that they fade into the background. This is why you may walk into a room and immediately notice its aroma but hardly recognize it ten minutes later, or why a continuous sound can disappear from your awareness until it suddenly stops. Familiarity is useful because it allows us to pay attention to what needs us most, but it also creates an interesting consequence that we rarely think about: something can become part of your normal environment long before you ever stop to ask whether you actually want it there.

That is where this conversation becomes much more important than simply talking about distractions. There are things we deliberately choose to take in, and there are other things that become part of our days because they are always present. After enough repetition, we may stop consciously recognizing either their presence or the effect they have on the way a particular part of the day feels. This does not mean that everything we have stopped noticing is harmful, nor does it mean that we should become suspicious of every part of our surroundings; it simply means that “I do not notice it anymore” and “it no longer matters to me” are not necessarily the same thing.

Our ability to ignore familiar information is valuable, but ignoring something does not always mean that absolutely nothing is being asked of our attention. Research into attention and cognitive load has shown that competing information can make some mental tasks more difficult even when we are trying to concentrate on something else, which may help explain why several hours of apparently ordinary activity can sometimes leave us feeling surprisingly mentally tired. We may have spent much of that time asking the brain to move repeatedly between the thing we intended to do, information arriving from the environment, and whatever else was trying to get our attention. And while we are certainly capable of doing this when we need to, there are parts of our days where we have far more choice over those inputs than we may realize.

And that brings us to what I think may be the most important question in this entire conversation:

How often are we trying to control ourselves instead of changing the environment we are asking ourselves to function in?

We tell ourselves, “I need to concentrate better. I need to relax before I go to bed. I need to slow down and take a proper break when I eat.” Then we turn almost immediately toward ourselves for the answer, assuming we need more discipline, a better routine, or stronger willpower, when sometimes the much more useful place to begin is to look at what we are continually asking ourselves to function within.

We can spend an enormous amount of energy trying to change how we feel and behave while leaving untouched the environment that is helping to create the experience in the first place.

Before you decide that you are the part that needs fixing, look around you.

Think first about your workday. If you spend several hours at a desk or computer, you probably already have an environment around that work, whether you intentionally created it or not, and maybe one part of it is having the radio or music playing because you enjoy the company of it and like having somewhere pleasant for your attention to go for a moment between tasks. There is absolutely no reason to assume that silence is always better, because for some people music makes a working environment considerably more enjoyable; the more interesting question is whether you have deliberately chosen what you want sharing the room with your thoughts.

A radio station is not only the songs it plays. It also brings a particular style of conversation and a general emotional tone into the room, and if you are spending several hours a day with it in the background, it becomes reasonable to ask whether that is actually the atmosphere you want accompanying your work. Some programming may leave you amused and energized, some may make you tense or irritated, and some may provide a familiar background that you enjoy without needing to pay much attention to it. The purpose is not to label one musical style as healthy and another unhealthy; the purpose is to recognize that you are choosing what receives repeated access to your workspace and, to some degree, to your attention.

You may discover that you love exactly what you already listen to, in which case nothing needs to change. You have brought an automatic choice back into awareness and decided that it still suits you. Or you may listen differently for a day and realize that something you have had playing for years no longer creates the type of environment you want while you work, and you would rather choose something else. Either answer is useful because the point is not change for the sake of change; it is recognizing that the environment does not always have to happen around you.

Now carry that same idea into your meals. Many people say that they need to slow down, eat more consciously, or take a proper break during the day, but when lunchtime comes, they stay exactly where they were working, leave the computer open, and continue thinking about the same things they were thinking about five minutes earlier. They technically stopped working long enough to eat, but the surroundings and mental demands never really changed, and twenty minutes later the food is gone, and the workday has continued without an actual interruption.

There is interesting research around distracted eating suggesting that distraction during a meal may influence eating later on, but even before we get into what it may do to appetite or food intake, there is a much simpler question worth asking:

If you ate lunch while continuing to work, where was your break?

Sometimes we believe we have given ourselves a pause because we stopped typing long enough to eat, yet we remained in the same chair, looking at the same screen and mentally participating in the same work. If what you genuinely want from lunch is nothing more than food while you keep going, then that is your choice, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. But if what you actually want is twenty or thirty minutes in which your mind is no longer working on the same problems, then changing where and how you eat may accomplish more than repeatedly telling yourself that you need to slow down.

That is what makes this way of thinking useful, because we are not necessarily adding another wellness task to an already busy day. We are asking what an existing part of the day is meant to give us and then deciding whether the environment around it makes that possible. If lunch is supposed to be a break, then perhaps moving away from the computer is enough to change the nature of that time; you do not need to turn it into a complicated ritual or practise perfect mindful eating, because you have already made the meaningful change by deliberately creating an interruption where there previously was none.

And then there is bedtime, where this idea becomes particularly easy to recognize because so many people say, “My brain just will not shut off.”

When that happens, our first thought is often to look for something that will make us sleep. We think about a supplement, an essential oil, or another technique we can add, and all of those things may certainly have a place, but before deciding what else should be added at bedtime, I think it is worth moving the question back half an hour and asking something simpler:

What have I been asking my brain to take in immediately before I expect it to sleep?

If the last half-hour of the evening is spent watching something highly stimulating, scrolling quickly through information, or continuing to make work-related decisions, and then we climb into bed expecting the brain to immediately move into a completely different state, we may be asking a great deal of ourselves. The first solution does not necessarily have to be finding something strong enough to override that experience; the first solution may simply be changing what we deliberately feed into that final portion of the evening.

This is where sound and scent can be chosen with intention rather than added randomly. Maybe the television finishes half an hour earlier and is replaced with music that you personally connect with, slowing down—whether that is classical, instrumental, or meditative music—and perhaps the aromatic environment changes at the same time. You may decide to put lavender and marjoram into a diffuser for a period before you go to bed because those aromas suit what you want the room to become at that time of night, and now the scent has a purpose rather than simply being something pleasant floating in the background.

Aromatherapy is particularly interesting here because scent is not only decoration for a room. When aromatic molecules are inhaled, they interact with the olfactory system, and the information associated with the aroma is processed through areas of the brain involved in recognition, memory, and emotional response. Tisserand Institute has written extensively about this relationship between olfaction, emotion, and learned association, which is one reason an aroma can become strongly connected with a particular experience over time. Lavender has long been valued within aromatherapy for its calming versatility and has also been investigated for sleep and relaxation, while marjoram has traditionally been used in evening aromatherapy when the intention is to create a more settling aromatic environment.

The important point is not that everyone must diffuse lavender and marjoram before bed, because individual responses to scent differ and someone else may prefer something entirely different. The important point is that if you are trying to create a transition between the demands of the day and the beginning of sleep, you can deliberately choose what your senses are receiving during that transition instead of waiting until you are already lying awake to decide that you need to do something about it.

Think about what has changed when you do that. You have not forced yourself to relax.

You have changed what you are asking yourself to respond to.

That distinction is much bigger than it first appears. We often believe that changing ourselves should happen entirely through conscious effort, yet the environments surrounding repeated activities can become part of those activities themselves. Habit research has repeatedly demonstrated the importance of context, because when the same behaviour happens within the same circumstances over and over again, those circumstances begin to become cues for what happens next. We usually think about that only when a habit is working against us, but there is no reason we cannot use the same principle intentionally.

If the room, the music, and the aroma repeatedly begin changing before bed, over time those things can become part of the familiar transition toward the end of the day. If lunch regularly happens away from the work screen, leaving the desk begins to become part of taking a break rather than something you have to negotiate with yourself every afternoon. If you have deliberately created a work environment that helps you stay with what you are doing rather than continually pulling you away from it, you are no longer relying entirely on yourself to resist everything that competes for your attention.

This is the difference between trying to control yourself and arranging some of your environment so that you do not have to fight yourself quite so hard.

We cannot control everything that comes toward us during a day, nor should that become the goal. Other people will speak, responsibilities will interrupt us, and some days will not unfold in the way we planned, but there are recurring parts of our lives over which we have considerably more influence than we sometimes recognize. The empowerment comes from identifying those parts and realizing that they belong to us enough that we can decide what we want them to contain.

• Before asking yourself to concentrate harder, look at what you are surrounding your concentration with.

• Before telling yourself that you should slow down and take a break, look at whether the environment you have created actually allows the break to happen.

• Before looking for another answer for sleep, look at what you are asking yourself to receive before sleep begins.

Those are our three examples, but the idea underneath them can travel into almost any repeating part of your life.

Perhaps that is the real value of asking, “What am I taking in?” It is not an invitation to spend the day analyzing every sound, scent, or piece of information that reaches you, because being constantly vigilant about your surroundings could become exhausting in its own right. It is an invitation to wake up for a few minutes inside the routines you have stopped seeing, particularly the routines where you keep telling yourself that something needs to change.

Choose one of them this week. Your work time, your mealtime, or the period before sleep, and rather than immediately deciding what you need to fix, sit in that situation for a few minutes and ask yourself two questions:

What do I want from this time?

And:

Does what I am taking in support that, or compete with it?

If you want concentration, perhaps the answer is changing what shares your workspace. If you want a real pause in the middle of the day, perhaps the answer is actually leaving your work while you eat. If you want to move toward sleep, perhaps the answer is beginning that transition before your head reaches the pillow.

Then change one thing, or maybe two.

That is enough.

The purpose is not to create the perfect environment or to control every influence that reaches us. It is to recognize that our surroundings are not always neutral background scenery and that, when repeated day after day, they can become woven into the way we work, eat, rest, and experience our lives.

• You may be spending a great deal of energy trying to change how you feel while never changing what you repeatedly surround yourself with.

• You may be asking yourself for more concentration while continually feeding distraction into the space where you work.

• You may be asking yourself to take a real break without ever leaving the environment that tells you to keep working.

• You may be asking yourself to settle for sleep while continuing to feed stimulation into the very time that is supposed to lead you there.

Once you notice that, the question changes.

Instead of continually asking, “What is wrong with me that I cannot seem to do this better?”, you can begin asking, “What could I change around me that would make what I want easier to do?”

That is not avoiding personal responsibility. It is using the choices available to you more intelligently.

It is recognizing that you do not always have to fight against the environment you have created.

You can create one that works with you.

And sometimes the first step toward changing a part of your life is not adding anything new at all.

Sometimes it is noticing what you are already taking in.

You cannot make an informed choice about something you’ve stopped noticing.