I once read a simple line that said, “The mind is wild. Mindfulness tames it.” It brought home for me the notion that the mind has tremendous power, but we often never fully harness that power. That word “harness”, btw, suggests the difference between a wild horse or ox and one which is used to plow the fields, through the use of a harness.

Author and professor Cal Newport wrote an excellent book titled “Deep Work”, in which he argues that if one is able to focus deeply, then one accelerates learning and greatly increases productivity. And deep work is really nothing but focused, undistracted work. This requires that the mind be “tamed” before its full power can be harnessed.

In my years of teaching meditation and mindfulness, I found the most prevalent challenge to new and intermediate learners was distraction. My goal today is to explore some of the reasons why this might be, and what to do about it.

As rather vulnerable creatures, for hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution, constantly scanning our environment for threats had huge survival value. If we could see or hear a predator in time for us to escape, we got to live another day. Our ability to quickly detect danger would get passed on to future generations.

We carry this ability with us today, though its survival value is much lower in today’s world. Still, our ability to detect threats remains as sharp as ever, as we constantly scan the world for flashes of light, loud noises, strange people, and other potential dangers.

When we sit down to meditate or practice mindfulness, these threat detection systems are fully active. They, not our intentions, direct the attention. This should come as no surprise. Our threat detectors are just doing their job.

And therein lies the key to successfully dealing with distractions as you try to master your attention: appreciate that these capacities exist, that they are evolutionarily much older than the modern structures of the brain, and that they are simply doing what they were designed to do.

As you work and play with your attention muscles, you will notice the tug-of-war between the older brain and the more modern cortical brain. The intentional brain wants to learn to control the attention, while the older structures have a job to perform of scanning for threats and hijacking the attention when any form of threat is detected.

Note that, since much of the thinking that we do concerns our place in the social world, we frequently imagine scenarios involving threats to our social standing. These also hijack the attention, and for the same reasons. A threat to our status is just as real to the limbic system as a threat to our physical survival.

My suggestion for those who wish to increase their mastery over their attention is to adopt a stance of curiosity about this tug-of-war, noticing with interest just how powerful these ancient threat detection systems are. We can set the intention to focus the attention on, say, the flow of air at the nostrils as we simply breathe, only to find that every few seconds, our attention is hijacked by the threat detectors.

When that happens, and this is something you might want to practice, try to really appreciate these ancient systems. Wonder at their amazing sensitivity. Thank them for having kept you alive and kept 12,000 generations of ancestors alive long enough to pass their genes down to you.

As you practice doing this for both physical threats and imagined social threats, you will find the tug-of-war starts to tone down. The intention brain, or the modern executive functions, make a certain peace with the much older and more powerful survival systems. In time, the intention to master the attention will prevail. The threat detectors will be integrated into a larger, more powerful way of being in the world.

In time, the threat detectors will start to relax in the relative safety of your mindfulness practice. They’ll stop hijacking your attention at every sound or thought that suggests a potential threat. The wild mind will have been tamed and its power harnessed.

That’s the practice for those who choose to try it. When you work at training your attention, notice when the threat detectors are activated, and say “Thank you. You’re doing an excellent job. But right now there isn’t any real threat, so you can relax.”