What you Focus on Grows

Andrew
Sep 30
3 min read

You may have heard the saying: “What you focus on grows.”

And as you read this, you probably weren’t aware of how your hands feel.

But as your awareness now moves to your hands, and you begin to notice how your hands feel, what happens?

Perhaps you notice that all of a sudden— there is sensation in your hands.

What happened?

Salience

There is a concept in neurology called salience. This refers to the focus on what’s important, relevant, or stands out from the environment.

Salience is essentially a filtering mechanism. Because we have limited cognitive resources, our brain/nervous system filters out information (that our senses take in) that is deemed irrelevant or unnecessary while focusing on what is deemed most important (or, important enough to notice).

This means that a tremendous amount of information that is taken in by our senses is simply discarded, not “let in” to our conscious awareness due to this filtering mechanism (> 99.9% by some estimations!).

Steering Salience

Salience is interesting because it can be influenced based on a multitude of factors, including our environment, our mood, and our intentions.

And while we may not have a lot of control over our environment and mood, something that we do have control over is our intentions. And intentions can directly influence salience—what the brain & nervous system deem as important and worth paying attention to—steering it in the direction of our choosing.

So the question really is: What do you want your brain to let in?

The Natural Change

When we really understand salience, as well as our power to influence it, we naturally begin to understand the significance of knowing what we want and staying focused on what we want, especially when what we want has to do with our internal experience.

Know what you want

What’s the difference between wanting to be pain-free and wanting to be comfortable?

It’s the difference between not wanting to feel something and wanting to feel something.

It’s the same difference between getting in your car and driving away from someplace, but having no direction in mind, other than leaving the place. At first, it can be helpful, especially if this place is undesirable. But it quickly becomes aimless if we don’t have a destination in mind.

So if your goal is to be pain-free, you can simply ask yourself (or use this worksheet to write it down):

When I am pain-free, what will I be feeling then?

And more, what will I be doing? How much? With whom?

Stay focused on what you want

Of course, in order to deal with problems in our lives wisely, sometimes we need to focus on them, pay attention to them, and learn from them so that we know how to work with them.

But this doesn’t need to take away from our higher goal(s) of comfort, healing, peace, joy, etc.

It’s as if we are on a road trip and the car gets a flat tire. This is a problem that needs to be dealt with and requires our attention and focus. Yet at the same moment, as we work with this problem, we are still aware of where we want to go and retain focus on our final destination.

A Beautiful Byproduct

And when we know what we want and stay focused on what we want, there is a beautiful byproduct that comes along: we get more of what we want.

As you steer your salience toward comfort, you can feel more comfortable.

As you steer your salience toward relaxation, you can feel more relaxed.

As you steer your salience toward peace, you can feel more peace.

The effects of this may be subtle at first, or they can be dramatic, but however small or large the initial effects may be, it’s important to remember an important principle: if you can have a piece of an experience, you can have it all.

So as your intentions pervade more and more of your everyday life, steering your brain naturally toward that which you do want, the effects can bloom over time like a beautiful flower.

So all this to say…

What you focus on grows—stay focused on the goal.

Stay focused,

Andrew