Remember the point about noticing the importance of perception? Here’s where the story gets even more interesting. When stressed, our attention focuses on the stressor and our perceptual/mental field narrows. The stressor or stressful event tends to fill up our entire head space, leaving little room to notice other aspects of our experience. It’s a little like seeing the world with blinders on. Selective attention restricts our capacity to notice other surroundings or to see things from another point of view. This can leaves us in a state where we become lost in the challenging or unpleasant circumstance, impairing concentration, focus, and the ability to gain perspective. Perhaps most significantly, this mental trajectory is stressful in itself, compounding our negative thoughts to create a ruminative downward spiral and amplifying our bad mood.

We can end up being internally focused and quite self-absorbed, all mental tendencies that depend upon a specific network in the brain. Let’s take a look at this, next.