146 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
If you struggle with anxiety, learning to modify your
cognitive biases may help you change your responses to
emotion- eliciting events and, therefore, better regulate your
emotions. You can learn to monitor, catch, and modify your
thought habits when they occur; not only does modifying
your biases help you better interpret your day- to- day experi-
ences, the changes in your interpretations of your environ-
ment may improve your memory by giving you more data to
work with. One way to modify your cognitive biases is
through a strategy known as attentional deployment, which
we will examine below. We will discuss other strategies,
such as cognitive bias modification, in later chapters.
How Mindfulness and Attentional Training
Can Reduce Threatening Emotions
Attention, much like a microscope, helps you selectively
bring into focus and magnify various aspects of your world.
As previously mentioned in this book, attention involves
both cognition and behavior, which work together to allow
you to filter essential information from the superf luous.
W hen your attention becomes overfocused on detecting
threats, increasing your use of attentional processes can help
you effectively and more appropriately shape your emotional
experiences.
Attention helps you remain alert, focused, and better
able to manage the mental processes involved in planning,
problem solving, organizing, and making important deci-
sions. As an emotion regulation strategy, attention, or more
specifically attentional deployment, inf luences how you
respond to emotions by redirecting your attention within a