Your mind has a fitness level.
Most people have never trained it.

The four capacities

Four things a fit mind does without you having to ask.

Stamina. There's a job in front of you that's going to take half a day. A fit mind can face it, because it knows it can stay in there until it's done. An unfit one looks at the same job and can't even start.

Nimbleness. Putting a thought down and picking up a different one. Some people can't let go of an idea, or a worry, or an emotional pattern. They try to move their attention somewhere else and it takes an age to follow.

Clear thinking. Making a decision means wading through the information the decision needs. If that wade feels overwhelming, you don't decide. You loop. You get stuck in the swamp that the emotional stuff brings in, and you stay there.

Attention. Being able to send it where you want it, and having it stay there once it arrives.

That's mental fitness. Your mental acuity and your mental capacity, and being able to use them the way you'd use your body.

The diagnostic

Distraction is how you measure it.

Picture walking down the street and somebody bumps into you. Some people carry on walking and barely register it. Others end up on the floor, or stumbling into the road. Same bump. What differs is the core strength holding you up.

A notification is a bump. Whether it takes you off what you were doing depends on your core strength, not on the notification.

Mental fitness is being able to decide to ignore something, and then actually ignore it. I'm not going to be available for that right now, and meaning it. Plenty of people are effectively being run by their phones, and it isn't for lack of willpower or good intentions.

So when somebody tells me they get distracted constantly, I don't hear a productivity problem. I hear low mental fitness, and low mental fitness is something you can do something about.

Where it comes from

Attention runs on energy. Yours might be going somewhere else.

I think of attention as a resource. It has to be funded, the same way walking across the room has to be funded, or a ten mile hike, or your body fighting off a bug. It all comes out of the same supply.

When that supply is low, attention is one of the first things to go unfunded. You haven't got the energy to pay for it.

Which makes the interesting question not why can't you focus, but where is your energy going. Anxiety takes a great deal of it. So do your wounds. They run quietly in the background and they are not cheap to run.

It's why people who clear tend to report their attention coming back to them. Not from training their focus. From no longer spending the energy elsewhere. I've watched it in clients and I've watched it in myself, and my own capacity for deep thinking and clean decisions has changed enormously the more healing I've done.

One of the traits people describe with ADHD sits right about here. Difficulty staying on task, getting pulled off it easily. The name itself points straight at attention. Follow that thread and you end up asking how much attention somebody has available to allocate in the first place. I'm working on that question with proper data behind it, and I'll say more when I can back it.

A distinction worth having

Being mindful, and practising mindfulness.

These get treated as the same thing and they aren't.

Being mindful is what turns up on its own once you've cleared. Say somebody's rude to you. Before, you'd have been rude back, or gone quiet and chewed on it for two days. Now there's a moment. You look at it, you think is this worth me getting into, you decide it isn't, and you let them get on with being rude.

The mindfulness crowd would call that mindfulness, and they're pointing at the right thing. The difficulty is arriving there by practice while the charge is still running underneath. Mindfulness is working on something else.

Head Trash Clearance goes straight at the charge, and being mindful is what's left once the charge has gone.

We don't practise mindfulness when we do Head Trash Clearance. We just are mindful. That's just who we are.