A year or two ago, I learned about a new word. The word is interoceptor. It's not really new. It's just new to me. It means to pay attention to your internal state in common parlance. Basically, it just means that you are aware of internal sensations like being hungry or hot, your heartbeat, the blood rushing through your veins, or your breathing. I was watching YouTube and I saw an interesting video where he said if you do a 17-minute session where you focus on all those internal sensations or even semi-external ones, like the feeling of your clothing on your skin, then you can strengthen your attention and your focus.
In the video, he talked about attention or blinks. I understand this to be a lapse of attention when your attention moves away from its target. Usually, we're not aware of these attentional blinks. They are what catch our attention. By doing a 17-minute session focusing on all your internal sensations, you can dramatically reduce the number of attentional blinks. This is the same as increasing your attention, or increasing the power of your focus for your attention.
I tried it more than once. The immediate effect that I noticed was a rather interesting sensation, and I wasn't thinking in words anymore. In other words, my internal dialogue became quiet. My attention was not on my dialogue but rather on my internal sensations. But the more interesting result was over the next several days. I have bad posture. I noticed my bad posture quite particularly after making several videos for YouTube and watching myself. Now I really want to fix my posture. The problem is that I'm not aware of my bad posture when I'm in bad posture. After doing this attention training, I have found myself becoming aware of my posture many times throughout the day. When I become aware of my posture, I can naturally correct it. By doing this intentional training, I am better able to start fixing my posture.
Fixing a bad point is relatively easy if you're aware of it at the moment. Posture is one of those really hard ones to fix because, most of the time, we do it unconsciously. We're not aware that we're in bad posture. I'm starting to become aware of my bad posture. No, it's not a miracle cure. I haven't miraculously cured my bad posture. But I have changed my attention in such a way that I can start to fix my posture. I have been keeping my posture good for a longer period of time now because I'm aware of it.
The guy in the video talks about mindfulness in the video a little bit. I'm not an expert on mindfulness. I don't know much about it. What I have heard is that mindfulness means paying attention to your thoughts and emotional feelings. To that end, this seems different from mindfulness. You're not paying attention to your thoughts and feelings; rather, you're paying attention to your physical feelings. But it gets a bit sticky here because it's difficult to separate physical feelings from emotional feelings, and the emotional feelings seem to have their source or their root in physical feelings.
Well, whether this is mindfulness meditation or not is really just semantic. The important point for me is twofold: number one, I'm doing the meditation, and number two, I'm finding a benefit from it in my daily life.