Attention, please. You will find it rewarding

Wired:

We are what we attend to. What we pay attention to drives our behaviour and affects how we feel. We often pay attention to what we think will make us happy, such as new gadgets, rather than to those stimuli that actually do make us happy, such as old friends. This prevents us from having the happiest experiences in life that we can.

We’ve all heard about attention deficit disorder. But the modern world is making us all victims of attention distraction disorder. It is so easy to become addicted to checking emails, Twitter and the Facebook updates of your virtual friends. We just can’t seem to help ourselves. In a recent Psychological Science study, when a sample of 205 people was asked seven times a day if they had been able to resist using media when they wanted to, they were unsuccessful nearly half of the time — a higher failure rate than for all other activities, including drinking coffee, smoking and sex.

Read the whole story: Wired