58 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
The Mindful Way of Paying Attention
One of the keys to fostering inner peace and outsmarting
your anxiety is to use your attention and observational skills
adaptively. As mentioned before, you can direct your atten-
tion to many features of your environment, both positive
and negative. More often than not, people who struggle with
stress and anxiety tend to focus on potential threats, which
can intensify their initial symptoms of anxiety.
W henever you realize that your attention is directed
toward negative aspects of your life or environment, you
have several options, and it’s important to distinguish which
techniques come from a mindfulness framework and which
ones don’t. One option is to focus on other aspects of your
life or environment, which are perhaps more positive. That
is, you can employ distraction as a strategy for reducing the
distress associated with attending to things that feel threat-
ening. Though this technique certainly has intuitive appeal,
research (for example, Nolen- Hoeksema, Wisco, and
Lyubomirsky 2008) has been somewhat inconsistent regard-
ing its effectiveness. It has been suggested that distraction
can be used in multiple ways, some more helpful than others.
For instance, you can attempt to avoid distress and negative
thoughts by preoccupying yourself with several superficial
tasks, quickly transitioning from one activity to another—
you might decide to watch TV for a few minutes, then read
part of a newspaper, then surf the web. Alternatively, you
might focus all of your attention on a single task or hobby—
for example, you might spend several hours gardening or
completing an engrossing puzzle. The former type of dis-
traction is thought to yield little advantage, whereas the
latter might promote reductions in stress. Irrespective of