How to Practice Paying Attention in 3 Steps

Attention is integral to burnout because burnout is about connection. Attention is also a capacity we can train. Here's how I accidentally began practicing attention in a season of burnout.

Aug 05, 2025

Escape Rooms, or Why I Am Not a Detective

Each year, we take our team on a four-day retreat to begin the year. We use this time to plan and pray, to set priorities, and set things in motion for all the retreats, debriefings, and trainings we will host over the following months. We also use it as a time to play and reconnect, often going out to a meal or two and spending time doing a group activity together. This past year, our team elected to do an escape room together, and I was on board. You see, I thought I loved escape rooms.

I’m a pretty bright guy, and pretty observant too: I have always had an eagle eye for detail, and I have been able to find the nuance in just about everything ever since I was a kid. I was that kid who was correcting teachers about the proper names of dinosaurs and various kinds of tropical fish by second grade, and I was also the kid who loved debate and philosophy in high school. I was, in a word, challenging to engage with.

All that said, I thought I was exactly the kind of person who would thrive in an escape room, not remembering that I loathe puzzles. When my son wants me to help him build a new Lego set, my eyes glaze over after no more than three pages. While I am a bright guy and I am very observant, I tend not to pay sustained, detailed attention very well, particularly when I am also problem-solving. Noticing the details of a particular brick and how it fits on a diagram is basically the same as handing me a novel in Russian: I will know what the thing is, but I won’t have anything I can do with it. So too with puzzles: all the pieces look the same to me, which I suppose is the point, but I also don’t pay good enough attention to notice slight differences that can unlock the process.

You might be able to guess how it went at the escape room.

Attention is Everything

Attention is a big deal. In fact, for most of the world, attention is among the most critical economic factors: how someone can capture another’s attention, and for how long, is a vital concern for companies, ministries, friends, family members, and would-be romantic partners. As early as 1997, experts were anticipating a switch from a material economy, made up of the exchange of goods, to an economy that traded value for time.1

The late French mystic, philosopher, and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) penned these words that are, pound for pound, some of the most significant ever translated into English: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Likewise, Dallas Willard (1935-2013), an American philosopher who is most well known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation, is quoted as saying, “the first act of love is always the giving of attention.”

Attention is a concern for the Scriptures, too.

In Matthew 7, attention is the primary problem Jesus is actually addressing as he says, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3 NRSV). How we engage with our attention, it seems, can keep us blind – both to a true view of ourselves and to an accurate view of others.
Likewise, a lack of paying attention leads people into compromising positions. Zechariah is to warn the people to pay attention to the Lord, unlike their ancestors: “Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the former prophets proclaimed, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, Return from your evil ways and from your evil deeds.’ But they did not hear or heed me, says the Lord” (Zechariah 1:4 NRSV).
The Psalmist declares a cry that I think all of us, at one time or another, have made to God: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord . Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” (Psalms 130:1-2 NRSV).

Attention is everything. In many ways, it seems, attention is both the foundational human desire and the foundational human gift. We long to be attended to and, like the God whose image we bear, we are invited and equipped to give away attention.

But what is attention?

What is Attention?

At the base, attention is about what I do with my mind. A bit like a spotlight that is used to highlight a specific moment during a play, attention helps us move other things out of the way in order to focus on something else. A good definition for attention that I like a lot is this one from Kendra Cherry’s article “What Attention Means in Psychology”:

Attention is the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details.2

Simple, elegant, and incredibly difficult to master. Because of the world we live in today, with constant streams of notifications, updates, and technologically facilitated interruptions, we are in an attention crisis. I find that it is incredibly hard for me to maintain attention on anything for too long without having the craving, the automatic desire to seek out something more novel or interesting. This dopamine-driven quest for the interesting and seemingly important zaps me out of the present moment – and I have been trained for years in the art of paying close attention!

But the recovery of attention is everything. In fact, I believe (along with Dallas Willard) that attention is really the first act of love.

Attention is the First Act of Love

One of my favorite passages to mine when it comes to attention is 1 Corinthians 13. Hailed as the pre-eminent “love chapter” and read at every wedding ever (probably), this passage has long held a central place for believers and non-believers throughout the ages and across cultural differences. It’s a profound meditation on the character of loving – how love actually works itself out.

For context, Paul has been writing on gifts from the Spirit of God for the people of God: that God’s very presence is within them (individually and collectively), empowering them with the skills and capacities that will serve and build up others. Just as “the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12 NRSV). Each gift, though different, is vital for building up this one body of Christ, and it takes each one giving their Spirit-gift for the whole body to function rightly (1 Corinthians 12:14-20). Likewise, we can’t compete with or diminish one another’s gifts, or the whole thing falls apart (1 Corinthians 12:21-27). Out of this context, Paul erupts into one of the most significant texts in world history, a profound meditation on what really matters most:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NRSV).

No matter the gift I bring, and no matter how powerful or spectacular or helpful or miraculous it might be, without “love,” that gift amounts to nothing. And what is love?

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NRSV).

Love, for Paul, is a multifaceted gemstone that, for better and for worse, sticks around. It endures. He goes on to write that all the other gifts will fade away at the Resurrection, but that love, trust, and hope stick around and, among these, love is the most significant (1 Corinthians 13.13).

How does love work? Said differently, how are we think about loving? Is it a sentiment or an affection, or is it something else? I would say that it’s at least these things, but that love requires something of us. It’s a synthetic, beautiful, challenging, life-demanding thing, love. It requires a high price.

Love requires, first and foremost, my attention.

How am I to be patient and kind if I first do not pay attention to something in need of patience and kindness? How am I to avoid envy, boasting, arrogance, or rudeness if I first don’t pay attention to others, seeing them rightly? How can I not insist on my own way without seeing the needs of others first?

You get the point.

At each and every instance, attention is assumed as a mode of loving. It is a precondition for love to exist. Period. Without paying attention, love is impossible.

Attention and Burnout

As we established last week, burnout is not a work problem even if it presents most acutely at work. Hartmut Rosa helps us see that, primarily, burnout is a problem of connection: where we reach out to the world (which, for him, means our surroundings and our interior world - people, places, things, ourselves), hoping for a response, we are met with silence. A muteness that leads us to disconnection – alienation.3

The road out of burnout, in this framework, is not working better or smarter or trying to do more, harder – that’s what landed us here anyway! Instead, we need to reconnect, to find ways to experience resonance in our relationships. We need to reestablish connection, opening ourselves up to responsiveness with God, ourselves, others, and the world.4 Where cold control got us here, openness to love is the way out.

Resonance, or the capacity for responsive experience in relationship to reality, is something that doesn’t just happen, at least not all the time. While we can certainly be surprised and overwhelmed by an experience that speaks to us, our capacity for resonance demands something from us. “We might also say that in moments of resonance, ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ tend to coincide.”5 It’s in this beautiful, generative moment that a high price is levied, and something is demanded of us: our attention. However, if we have atrophied attention, diluted with numb binge-watching and doom scrolling, then our capacity to experience these moments will be diminished. Similarly, if our attention has been stretched thin by disconnection, we might find ourselves in positions where we aren’t really able to be present for resonant moments.

Here’s the good news, though: we have a capacity for resonance, and capacities can be increased or decreased with practice over time.6

This is, by and large, precisely what exercise is: it is intentional practice that trains the body to operate a specific way with increasing ease and precision. As I lift weights now, I can observe that my capacity has increased as the weight on the bar increases and the movements become more precise. Similarly, since I just picked up swimming, I can tell that I have not built my capacity for swimming – I can barely make it a full length without having to pause and catch my breath.

Resonant connection works the same way, but the trick is figuring out what muscles help me grow in my capacity for resonant experiences and resonant relationships.

Attention is one of the things we can exercise to grow our capacity for resonant connection.

Attention, by definition, is an adjustment of my focus. How I use my attention, then, determines what I am capable of experiencing – to experience something, like loving something, assumes that I have paid enough attention to see that something. Attention, as an act of love, opens me up to experience something other than just myself. Attention, in the words of Simone Weil, is an act of “generosity” whereby I open myself up to that other, hoping to give myself to it.

Whether I am paying attention to God in prayer, a sunrise, a car crash, a sick child, or the embrace of a friend’s hug, I am at once giving and receiving. I am gaining an experience that would otherwise be lost on me, and I am affected by it. At the same time, by paying attention, I am giving away my most valuable commodity, the thing that determines, in some ways, the totality of my experience as a person.

Attention is the one thing I can train that will affect my capacity for resonant connection. It is this beautiful, reciprocal thing that determines so much about my experience, and it is something that is simple to train, even if it isn’t exactly easy to train.

Taking the Good and the Bad: Avoidance vs Attention

You and I can’t just pay attention to the things that make us come to life and help us feel connected. To do so, paradoxically, sets us up for failure: in an attempt to only take in the good, I am exerting control over my life in a way that makes it all feel hollow or lacking responsiveness. I am making my whole life fall mute in an attempt to only capture the resonant.

This is part of the problem with some wellness interventions on the market today that seek to address burnout. If you and I curate lives that are comfortable and free from responsibility, where we are open to choose whatever course we might fancy, we are actually eliminating part of what makes resonant experiences possible. In order to experience connection, I have to acknowledge disconnection.

It’s kind of like how you come to appreciate your favorite foods. I love a good, home-cooked spaghetti with red sauce, especially if the tomatoes and onions are left chunked. Something about the texture, the smell, and the flavors all together makes it deeply meaningful to me. However, what if spaghetti is all I ever had? Would it still be my favorite, and would it feel special when I get to eat it?

I don’t think it would.

It would be normal, everyday, ordinary. I might, in fact, be sick of it. It is only my favorite food because I have a frame of reference with which to compare it to other meals. Whether that’s other great meals I have had or some other, more unfortunate foods I have eaten, all these experiences give me a way of making a value judgment about this thing. Each experience, and particularly my less-than-stellar spaghetti experiences (here’s looking at you, Olive Garden), strangely, builds my capacity to know a resonant, connective experience when I see it.

Now, I know what you must be thinking: “Isn’t burnout a problem of a bad connection? Isn’t that the whole thing? This seems counterintuitive and painful.”

In the immortal words of every improv comedian ever: Yes…and…

Yes, burnout is a connection problem…and these connection failures are perpetuated by my habitual distraction and the coping mechanisms I use to numb. Like it or not, whenever I “doomscroll” on Facebook or X, or I refresh AP News reflexively, or I lose myself in YouTube shorts, I am not doing myself any favors. While I may be amused, I am also diluting my attention such that I am less able to pay attention to things that aren’t media. I also become more numb to both the good and the bad in my real life: as my dopamine-desire circuit is overwhelmed over time by the constant novelty of 15-second, algorithmically dictated videos, I become less able to detect things that matter because they aren’t built to addict.

A friend of mine named Scott once wrote that, “In Western societies, suffering is not an acceptable life experience. Pain is not to be endured well; it is to be remedied or otherwise numbed.”7 When the only valid response to pain is to alleviate or to numb – to escape – then I will, eventually, lose my capacity for the good, too.

The hard things, the things that lead us into spaces that feel like alienation, are called Dampening Experiences. We want to take note of dampening experiences because to do so keeps us from numbing out. By acknowledging and naming the challenging experiences, which are integral to the human experience anyway, we tune into reality as it is. By paying attention to things that are dampening, we avoid making the world in our image, a sort of designer idolatry. I can’t outrun them no matter how hard I might try, and neither can you. Avoiding them isn’t helping us, so let’s just pay attention to them.

The beautiful things, the things that lead us to a sense of deep connection and responsiveness, are called Deepening Experiences. We love to take note of these things as long as we are actually paying enough attention to notice them at all. These are also integral to the human experience. However, as I mentioned above, our capacity to notice deepening things is a practice in noticing difference: by paying attention to both the life-taking and life-giving, we grow in our capacity to notice when things are resonant.

Avoidance can’t help us build our capacity for connection; only attention can do that.

How to Practice Paying Attention

So, how does someone train their attention? How do you and I practice giving ourselves away while receiving and being affected by something else? It all, honestly, seems to be too much: “I have to pay attention to the hard things, the things that are killing me, while I am supposed to practice looking at sunsets? Come on!”

It sounds absurd, but I must confess that this practice has been something that has, over time, healed me.

When I was burned out, I felt like a shell. I looked like I was home, but the lights weren’t on. I was incapable of doing much, and my executive function basically disappeared. I was, broadly speaking, incapable of experiencing the good or the hard. Yet, I was sad, angry, and exhausted all the time. I was cynical and felt like I was ready to throw in the towel.

But I slowed down. Burnout created space for me, and what was a curse was also a blessing: I was cooked, and much like any cooked food, I wasn’t moving all that much. Once I slowed down, though, something miraculous happened: I began to notice the ways I had let myself down. I began to notice how I had been running and abandoning core relationships for the sake of “doing more, better.” I noticed how hollow and flat prayer had been for some time, and how I didn’t even like my job, let alone love it. I noticed that I didn’t really understand why I was working in that place at all. I reflected on these things, noticing for the first time in a long time what I didn’t want.

At this point, I was also able to notice all the little things that had annoyed the heck out of me: clutter in my office and my bedroom, the way my body felt from a lack of engagement, and the fact that I hadn’t been outside in what felt like forever. I saw clearly how my habits at home and work, the things I did privately and socially, were all accumulating a weight that my life could no longer bear.

I was able to write down and preserve some of these things, noting how both deepening and dampening things gave shape to my life in this season.

I cried for the first time in months. I was aching…But I was feeling something. That was new. For months, I had been running on fumes, totally emotionally numb. Now, though, I was experiencing the bad feelings. I was experiencing grief and loss and failure in a way that was really, well…real.

A funny thing happened next: I remember noticing my daughter laughing, probably at something very silly and not actually all that funny. I noticed her laughing, and I noticed that I noticed. I couldn’t remember at that point how long it had been, but I couldn’t recall her laugh. I hadn’t been paying attention. But I was able to pause and reflect, pondering on the beauty and simplicity of her laughter. It was beautiful, and I felt connected at a deep level. I linger in that memory and memories like it often, now, because I was able to preserve them.

As I inadvertently stumbled into the practice of paying attention, I also stumbled into the beginning of my journey out of burnout.

Practicing paying attention can feel daunting, but it’s actually as simple as remembering three P’s: Pause, Ponder, and Preserve.

First, you and I need to pause. We need to be able to slow down long enough to actually notice anything. One of the strange paradoxes of burnout is that I actually keep moving faster in an attempt not to let anything fall through the cracks, even as my capacity to do much of anything diminishes. I can’t recover from burnout until I slow down – whether that is from my body telling me “no” or my willful choice to slow down. If I can practice slowing down, even just a little bit, I can begin to notice things that stand out. For this step, if you notice something that stands out (good or bad), jot it down. This is about capturing what happened, not your feelings about it.
Second, you and I need to ponder what we have captured. Pondering looks like answering the question “how did this experience make me feel?” If we are noticing things, part of training our attention is to sustain that noticing long enough for it to set in. Similarly, taking the next step to ask “what might be behind this feeling?” can help you and me really live in the experience instead of brushing past it.
That leads us to the third and final “p”: preserve. This is all about being able to revisit the experience and see it anew. For most of us, this looks like writing it down. Writing down our thoughts and feelings, on top of noting the specific experience, can help it set in. Neurologically, this works even better if you write by hand.8

So, you and I need to practice paying attention, and we do that by pausing, pondering, and preserving our insights in such a way that we grow in our capacity to attend to dampening and, as importantly, deepening experiences. This is a little indirect, but attention is our most foundational gift and the thing that, at the bottom, is basically our foundational desire, too. Attention is, in a word, everything.

Conclusion

As we waited in line at a noir-themed mystery escape room, I found myself welling up with profound confidence. I knew that I was detail-oriented and able to pick up patterns, and I knew I would excel.

Then we walked in.

The darkly lit room full of purposeful knick-knacks immediately overloaded my brain. This was a giant puzzle, and I knew a few things immediately. First, I knew that I would be almost no help. Second, I knew that if I just sat there, I would send the wrong impression. Third, I knew that I only had to last an hour, or something like that. So, with all the resolve I could muster, I tried my hardest to pay attention and notice details.

No matter how much I noticed, though, I didn’t notice the right things. In essence, I only picked up on the red herrings in the room, totally flubbing up any progress our team was making. Luckily, thanks to some tenacious puzzlers, we made it out in time to make our reservation at an Indian restaurant, which is exactly the kind of resonant experience I was ready to attend to.