At a glance
Being absent from your own life is rarely a failure of attention. Your mind leaves when something in the room asks more of you than you can hold, and it leaves before you notice. This article looks at what it goes towards, why effort makes it worse, and what brings you back.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- Absence has a direction. When clients slow down enough to notice where their attention went, it has usually gone somewhere specific rather than nowhere.
- The closest people lose them first. Clients can hold their attention through a long meeting and then go missing at their own kitchen table.
- Effort is often part of the problem. Clients who try hardest to stay in the moment are frequently holding something down at the same time.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does my attention leave when I want to stay?
Attention moves towards whatever feels most manageable, and it moves before you have decided anything.
You are at the table. Someone you love is telling you about their day and you are nodding in the right places, and part of you is already composing a reply to a message you have not opened. You come back 40 seconds later and the sentence you missed has gone. Nobody notices, which is the part that bothers you most.
Two things are true here at once, and they do not cancel each other out. You want to be in that conversation. Something in you removes itself from it anyway, quickly and without asking permission. Most people read the second fact as evidence against the first and conclude that they care less than they thought. In my experience that is the wrong conclusion more often than it is the right one.
Is this a concentration problem, or something else?
The attention itself is usually intact. Where it goes under pressure is the real question.
The same person who cannot stay present through 10 minutes at dinner can read a difficult document for an hour without drifting once. That is worth noticing, because it rules out a simple shortage. Attention is not a tank that empties by the evening. It gets pulled, and what pulls it tells you something.
There is some evidence that where the mind goes matters as much as the fact that it went. In a week of sampling the thoughts of 105 people at random moments, episodes of mind-wandering were reported with lower mood on average than moments spent on task, with one exception: when the off-task thought was rated as highly interesting, mood was better than when on task.1 The design was correlational and the sample came from one university community, so the mood may be shaping the thoughts rather than following them. It fits something I hear often. Clients describe drifting as though it were one state, and it is at least two.
Where does my mind actually go?
Somewhere with a job to do, usually.
Finding out matters, because “I zone out” explains nothing and gives nobody anything to work with. When clients slow the moment down, the destination turns out to be one of a small number of places.
- Rehearsal. You are running a conversation that has not happened yet, so that it cannot go badly when it does.
- Review. You are back inside something that already went wrong, looking for the point where you could have prevented it.
- Monitoring. You are watching how you are coming across, which puts you in the audience rather than in the room.
- Somewhere easier. A plan, a screen, a tidy problem with an answer in it. Anything carrying less feeling than the thing in front of you.
Each of these is doing something for you. Rehearsal buys the sensation of control. Review offers a version of the past you could have managed. Monitoring keeps you safe from being seen badly. Leaving is a strategy. It worked at some point, and nobody has reviewed it since.
Why does trying harder to be present make it worse?
Because effort puts a watcher in the room, and the watcher takes up space.
The instruction to be present is almost always followed by a second, quieter instruction to check whether you are managing it. That check is itself a departure. You end up with a conversation, a participant and an inspector, and the inspector talks the most.
In psychosynthesis, which is where I trained, the useful move is not to force the attention back but to ask what took it. A part of you left the table. It left for a reason it could state if anyone asked it. Most people have never asked. They have only ever told it to come back.
There is a physical version of this worth knowing. Before the mind goes, something in the body usually tightens first: the jaw, the chest, a breath that stops halfway. If you can catch the tightening you have caught the moment before the exit, which is a far easier place to work than 40 minutes later when you are wondering why you feel flat.
What helps, and when is this more than a habit?
Work on what you are leaving rather than on how long you can stay.
- Name the destination, not the lapse. “I went to tomorrow’s meeting” gives you something to work with. “I drifted again” gives you a reason to be irritated with yourself.
- Follow the body first. The tightening arrives before the departure, and catching it is more useful than catching yourself afterwards.
- Let one conversation go unmanaged. Presence is expensive when you are also steering. Put the steering down for 10 minutes and see what arrives.
- Say out loud that you went. “I lost you for a second, say that again” repairs more than a perfectly concealed absence, and it lands better than people expect.
These are not enough in every case. If the absence has become more or less constant, if hours disappear with no account of where they went, if the flatness has run for months, or if the leaving began after something frightening or overwhelming happened, then this is heavier than a habit of attention and working on it alone is the harder road. The same is true when the absence shows up mainly with one particular person, which is usually about what is happening between you rather than about attention at all.
Most of what I see in individual psychotherapy on this is not training in concentration. It is finding out what the leaving has been protecting, and what would have to become bearable for you to stay.
Questions people ask
Is this something therapy can change?
Yes, when the work goes to what the absence is for rather than to willpower. Attention tends to come back on its own once the thing it was avoiding becomes possible to feel.
Do I need to know what is wrong before I come?
No, and not knowing is a normal place to start. Much of the early work is finding out what the drifting is made of.
Would a mindfulness course do the same job?
It can help with noticing, and for some people that is enough. Where the absence is protecting something painful, seeing it more clearly without anywhere to take it can make the week harder rather than easier.
What happens in the first few sessions?
Mostly slow description of ordinary moments, including the ones that seem too small to mention. The useful material is usually in the small ones.
Can the sessions be in English?
Yes. All my work is in English, in Copenhagen or online. Many of the people I see live between two languages, and that can be part of why staying present takes effort.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
