Quotes About Mindfulness

She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: "If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.

I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.

If you picture of a perfect After-life, it's being with the people you love all the time. He asked me: Why wouldn't you choose today: when you're still alive, to be truely present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions!?

the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.

It's the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake." Let them be present.

It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

When we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth,' and when we turn off the spotlight, 'we still have the same bandwidth - it's just we can allocate more of those resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down - it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.

She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

There's a Buddhist saying—be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others.

Flow can only come when you are monotasking

Now I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections. I found that, precisely because I give my

It's when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from.

But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. "That's why those disciplines make you smarter.

better techniques being discovered every week. One day, when we were walking in San Francisco, Tristan said to me: "Things look pretty bad from the outside, but when you're on the inside, things can look even worse." Tristan was starting to realize: It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.

If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, he asked me, why wouldn't you choose today—while you're still alive—to be truly present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions?

But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don't replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.

Focus, damn you. I thought back to this moment when, over a year later, I interviewed Professor Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying the science of interruptions. She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions.