Throughout any given day, hundreds of things vie for our attention. Whether it's socializing in person, making a phone call, planning a big work project, commuting around town, listening to a podcast, exercising, checking texts or cooking a meal, anything we do requires some degree of concentration.
Yet not all forms of attention are the same.
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, the husband-and-wife research team who pioneered the concept of attention restoration theory, or ART, in the 1980s, drew an influential distinction between "directed" and "effortless" attention. If you imagine your mind's total capacity for attention in terms of a battery, directed attention is a high-drain activity that depletes the charge over the course of the day.
Effortless attention, by contrast, is like a power bank that helps recharge your mental battery.
One of the most significant claims of ART is that natural environments amplify those restorative powers. They do so by engaging what environmental psychologist Avik Basu, who studied under the Kaplans at the University of Michigan, calls "the fascination system." Much like the two types of attention, fascinations can be split into two groups: hard and soft.
"If you're on your social media feed and you keep scrolling to the next thing and the next thing, there's a sort of addictive quality to that. You can't quite turn it off. And that is a pretty good example of hard fascination. There's not a lot of room in the head to think about anything else except for the content that you're viewing at that moment," he explains.
"As for the soft fascination, think about being on a forest walk. You can look up at the trees for a moment and be engaged, and then you can look away. You might hear some birds, and that'll capture your attention for a bit, and then you'll move on to something else."
Possibly as a response to the growing feeling that our capacity for attention — our "mental bandwidth," in Basu's words — isn't able to keep pace with all the things that are competing for it, there's been renewed interest in the power of soft fascinations in recent years.
“One study looked at walking in nature with and without a phone. And you can imagine what the results were.”
"I think people are starting to sense that something feels different, particularly those in the generation that have experienced living with and without phones," he says.
"There have been studies that look at people who walk in nature, and you can see that their attentional capacity goes up. But one study looked at walking in nature with and without a phone. And you can imagine what the results were."
Soft fascinations aren't limited to isolated locations enveloped by nature. Any activity that allows our minds to wander and quietly process things in the background can fall under that category, including folding laundry, washing dishes, walking the dog, taking a shower or just sitting on a bench in the park.
"When I was very young and learning ballet, we were taught something called a soft focus," says Diane Barth, a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst based in New York City.
"Rather than focusing hard on something or paying attention to something in front of you, you sort of let your eyes gently focus or not focus, and then your body could relax. It was easier to actually dance more fluidly. To me, the soft fascination is an extension of that idea."
Barth has written about the problem-solving power of soft fascinations. In her practice, she's found them to be a useful tool when helping clients cope with stress. For one of those clients, a busy mother, soft fascination took the form of sweeping the entire house with a broom. As she settled into a kind of rhythmic autopilot, the knotty challenges that she might be facing at work or at home would slowly untangle themselves.
You can even bring a little splash of nature indoors as a kind of soft fascination. Barth has seen her clients benefit from the low-barrier gardening she dubbed "houseplant therapy."
"Planting them or working with them, like watering or spritzing them, gives you an opportunity to have that same kind of experience of interacting with something that's living but in a way that's not particularly demanding. You're engaged with it, but you don't have to put all your focus or energy into it," she says.
The tough part, says Basu, is creating space for soft fascinations, especially natural ones, when so many things in modern life — social media feeds, video games, binge-watch streaming series — are literally engineered to capture and consume our attention.
"There's a draw that we have as humans toward that. We've evolved to pay attention to hard-fascination-oriented information. It's important to have the habits or routines to put on your shoes and get outside. Once you're out the door, things already feel better."
