There’s so much going on in the world that it’s impossible to pay attention to everything. How do we select our focus of attention?
Because much of our lives have to do with other people, we naturally turn much of our attention to social interactions. However, even within the realm of our social lives, there is too much information for our capacity of attention to handle at once.
Unfortunately, many of us become overly stressed by selectively focusing on negative social interactions, such as indifference, criticism, or rejection. In fact, some people tend to misperceive neutral or ambiguous interactions as rejection. This negative bias in attention is not an accurate representation of the world, and causes tremendous stress.
Recently, researchers published studies in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that showed that people can significantly reduce their stress levels by playing an attention-training game for five minutes per day for one week. The game can help people cope in a world in which it is impossible to please everyone.
Researchers showed that the game even works for people who work in one of the most rejection-filled occupations, telemarketing. Those randomly assigned to play the game instead of a similar game had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. You can play the game here.
