#350 | The Battle for Your Attention, Mindfulness, and Resilience - Whole Again: Mindfulness and Resilience Through Kintsugi Wisdom

Are you truly choosing what you focus on—or is something else choosing for you?

In a world filled with endless distractions, algorithms, and internal mental noise, it’s easy to lose control of your attention without even realizing it. This episode explores how your daily choices—especially in your downtime—are quietly shaping the direction of your life, mindfulness, resilience, and why reclaiming your focus is more important than ever.

Learn how intention and attention work together to shape a meaningful and fulfilling life

Recognize the hidden “scroll tax” and how it impacts your energy, focus, and well-being

Discover simple, repeatable ways to reset your attention and get back on track throughout the day

Hit play now to take back control of your attention and start creating a more intentional, meaningful life—one small shift at a time.

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Hey there, it's Michael. Welcome to Whole again. The show that can help you live a meaningful life and step into who you're becoming and my friends. There is so much going on in the world nowadays, and so much going on in each of our lives. It can feel overwhelming. It's hard to know what to focus on. At least I feel that way.

I'm sure. You do as well. I'm feeling so many different emotions, as they say, that is part of life, but with all that's going on, getting back to focus, it's hard to know what to focus on. And without focus, it's hard to pull anything across the finish line. It feels like we're spinning our wheels and not necessarily getting much done.

So I have a question for you today. In your downtime, if you have any downtime, what's your intention or how do you wish to show up for that downtime moment? Will you read something, watch something, listen to something? Perhaps it's another episode of Whole Again, which would be a wise choice. Will you scroll?

What will you do with that time? It's something we face every day. This decision, what's our intention and where should we place our attention? And these are not small decisions because the quality of your life. My life is shaped by our intention. And what we pay attention to Now, we love to think that we are the masters of our domain and we decide what we pay attention to, but we also know that there's something called the algorithm.

The algorithm is designed to grab our attention, to pull it away from. What we intended to pay attention to and onto what other people want us to pay attention to. That system is there to entice us, to keep watching, to keep scrolling, and to consume more, more, and more and more. But that doesn't lead to better, and we keep watching, not because it fulfills us.

No. It doesn't usually make us feel any better and probably doesn't make us feel any smarter, but the algorithm knows exactly how to grab our attention and keep us engaged on what it wants us to pay attention to. I know you felt the difference. One of the reasons I developed Pause, breathe, reflect with a feature called Microdose EQ is that I felt our phones were grabbing at our attention and so many people were spending countless hours on their phone and not feeling good about it.

And I know you know the difference between. Being really into something that can bring you happiness or joy and the feeling you get from minutes to hours of doom. Scrolling, as I like to say, there is a tax that we all pay. I call it the scroll tax. It's the tax we pay when our attention is being used to sell more stuff.

To keep us on those platforms longer than we really desire, longer than we intended to spend on them. And this is only part of the equation when it comes to attention, the algorithm and our scroll tax. Well, they're just external ways that we can lose our attention, but there's something going on within us all.

It's the conversation that we're having with ourselves. Our minds are so fascinating, and as soon as we think we have it all figured out, the mind says, hold my beer. I'm going to wander around and change directions faster than you can blink. We all have different thoughts We return to again and again, almost like it's on a loop.

Or memories that we revisit and stories that we continuously tell ourselves about ourselves. And most of the time when the outside world is so noisy, we don't even notice all the things that are happening in the mind. We only really start to understand them when we get quiet. As I mentioned in a previous episode about my experience with a silent retreat, it's when we get quiet, we can notice those internal factors that rob our attention, and a lot of what bubbles up in the mind either pushes us back to yesterday or pulls us forward to tomorrow.

So we're never truly present. So our attention. Now in the past or in the future, but not the now. So when you couple what's happening within ourselves and all the different ways our attention can be manipulated externally. So now you can appreciate why it's so difficult to be here in this moment. And when we're really going quickly as it is our pace nowadays, then holy cow, is this challenging?

So let's take a moment to slow it down just a bit. So let's take a generous breath in, breathing deeply down into the lungs, and release the breath slowly. Allow your body to relax, and I'll ask you to reflect on where your attention has been spending most of its time lately, not where you wish it to be, just where it's been and as this comes to mind.

I'll invite you to reflect on whether or not it's leading you to the person you wish to become. If the answer is no, there's no judgment, no shame, no blame. This is simply awareness. In a previous episode of Whole, again, back when the show was known as the Kintsugi podcast, I interviewed Dr. Casey Holmes from UCLA.

Her research was around happiness, and what she found is that intention, along with attention drives our happiness. I like to think about intention and attention contributing to a meaningful life, and helping us step into who we are, becoming What Dr. Holmes shared is that. This is a really cool thing, is that you don't have to overhaul your life to find this, to find that present moment, that moment where you can take action that's meaningful.

We can simply start the day and throughout the day, set our intention. And this is a practice I lead every Monday morning via Zoom, and then throughout the day. Check in with ourselves as to what we're paying attention to. And if we feel like we're off track, then we simply hit pause, take a few deep breaths, and then gently get back on track.

Think of them as small shifts that compound over time. The more you do them, like investing. The more wealth you'll have at the end. So as you do these small shifts routinely throughout the day, and if you're human, and I like to think you are wonderfully human, you'll make several of these small shifts over time.

But as you do them, you get better and better at making these small shifts. Which then leads to a greater ability to stay in the present moment, which leads to a more meaningful life, which leads to greater happiness and joy, and one heck of a ripple effect. Because ultimately we go where our eyes go, which is a title of a talk I deliver at many corporations, in essence, wherever we place our intention.

And what we pay attention to will dictate how our life will unfold. Because before there's action, before we do anything, there's intention and attention. Without these, then we are in the hands of the powerful algorithm and our wandering mind. So today, and as you travel through the rest of the week. When you have precious downtime, notice where your attention goes.

It could be a moment at home after work. It could be between meetings. It could be simply waiting in line for your coffee. And as you notice where your attention is going, you can ask another question of reflection in this moment, what kind of life? Am I creating? And if you're not happy with your answer, you can make a small shift and change what you give your focus to, because ultimately, the truest freedom and our greatest responsibility is deciding what we want to focus on.

And as always, thank you for being here. Thanks for giving whole again, a bit of your focus today. If this episode spoke to you and you think someone else might value it as well, I hope you'll share it with them. And until Friday's episode where I share another tip as I celebrate my 25th anniversary of my last bad day.

I hope you'll celebrate yours as golden symbols of your strength and resilience and our practice together. Benefit all living creatures.

And if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, Michael O'Brien schiff.com. And sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect, and join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You've got this. And. We've got you.