While most of the time we intentionally choose what to focus our spotlight of attention on, it’s not always under voluntary control, and it doesn’t treat everything in the environment equally. The spotlight allows your mind to focus only on what's important while ignoring the irrelevant. We have a localized spotlight of attention because taking in all the visual information from the environment at once would overwhelm the brain, which is a system with limited resources, much like a computer. While the word we are focusing our attention on is sharp and clear to our perception, words on the page that lie outside our attentional spotlight appear blurry and are largely indecipherable. Our eyes move across the page from left to right, line-by-line, dragging our attentional spotlight from word to word. We can appreciate what this means by considering what our attention is doing when we read a book on a crowded train. In fact, in-depth processing of an object, a string of text, or a location can’t be carried out unless it is first brought inside the spotlight of attention. By moving our eyes around a visual scene, we can shine our spotlight on any area of the environment we want to inspect in detail. What falls inside the spotlight is consciously processed while that which is outside is not. This ‘attentional spotlight’ represents the finite region of space that is occupied by our focus of attention at any given moment. To use the metaphor inspired by the brilliantly forward-thinking 19th Century American psychologist, William James, our visual attention system works a lot like a spotlight that scans the world around us. To protect against the reality-distorting effects of anxiety, we must first understand how attention works and the ways in which it can be influenced. It can even affect our politics without us knowing. Anxiety’s effects on attention may shape worldviews and belief systems in specific and predictable ways. By biasing attention, anxiety alters what we are conscious of, and in turn, the way we experience reality.

We all know that anxiety affects our emotional state and makes interacting with the world difficult, but what may be less obvious is how it changes what we focus our attention on throughout the day.

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