“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”

Things that are happening in our life or things that are happening in the world right now, especially the ones covered by the media might seem like a really big deal, right? They seem very important to us, but why? We can say that’s because “they are important” or they are really “big deal”, but usually it’s the fact that we think about them that makes them important.

The very simple idea that by focusing on something, we elevate its importance is what’s being called “The Focusing Illusion”. This is one of the most interesting cognitive biases and the very powerful one. In his brief essay, Daniel Kahneman chose the focusing illusion as one of the most important scientific concepts ever. The essay also has a good example of the topic:

Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about other things than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, or a resident of California we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.

There are numerous instances when focusing illusion might present itself. Thinking that more money can make you happier, and thus making more money is essential? Well, to some degree. Thinking that buying a bigger house or a new car will make your life better? Feeling excited about a new shiny device, believing that new features are the utmost importance for you? Thinking that living in a better climate will make you happier? If you pause for a second and think about it, you can doubt whether anything that you feel is important, is actually important. Try to remember all of the things that you felt were a big deal. Were they?

It’s also one of the things that makes it really hard for us to evaluate our own happiness and well-being or that of other people. In one study the students were asked two questions, one about their overall life satisfaction and another about satisfaction in a specific component of life — dating. We could probably assume that the sequence of questions should not affect the answers, and indeed that’s was the case when the students were asked about overall life satisfaction first, but when being asked about their dating life first, the answers about overall life satisfaction were highly correlated with the answers about dating life. Which means that by focusing on their dating life, students elevated it’s importance and thus measured their overall happiness based on it. Other studies found that similar things happen when we ask questions about marriage, health, and pretty much any aspect of life.

One important thing to keep in mind, is that as human beings, we have a tendency to focus on the negative. Combine it with the focusing illusion and we have a time-ticking bomb. We start to assign a lot of importance to the negative aspects of our life, our partner, our job, our marriage, etc. And it’s a vicious circle because the more we think about that particular negative thing, the more important it becomes to us and so we think about it even more. That’s one of the clearest ways to depression.

The focusing illusion is a very powerful tool that we can master to some degree. We’ve all heard about the benefits of meditation, but we’ve rarely thought about it from this perspective. During the meditation, we focus on our breath and when any thought arises, we acknowledge it and let it go. So we can say that the meditation is an exercise in controlling our focus. With enough practice, we can acknowledge and let go any thought that arises in our head. And it means that we can choose what to focus on, we can choose what do we want to make important in our life. If we try to deliberately focus on the positive things, think about them more, then we can make them seem more important to us. We will start to value and appreciate them more. In the same regard, we can let go our negative thoughts without letting them hijack our attention and focus.

So anytime something feels like a big deal — ask yourself “Am I making it important by thinking about it?”