When wrapping your mind around the marvel of human attention, it can help to zoom in on its smaller subsystems. An essential subsystem is our alertness system, more easily imagined as our attentional “floodlight.”

You can think of this as the part of our attention system that we use to stay alert and take in new information from the dynamic world around us.

The power of our floodlight

Our floodlight helps us stay aware of whatever situation we are in. We can remain alert and notice as new ideas, information and perspectives emerge. This enables us to respond to the dynamic conditions we’re in, helping us to stay safe, physically and emotionally. This new information may also be especially useful in addressing our needs or helping us work towards our goals. It’s our floodlight that also enables us to notice how other people are feeling, communicating and responding in a given moment so that we can better understand and respond in the service of our relationships.

How our floodlight is vulnerable

Like all parts of our attention, our floodlight has vulnerabilities. On one end, our floodlight can get overridden when our flashlight is working too hard, and we are deep in focus on something. When I am writing and have gotten lost in the ideas, my kids know my floodlight is quite dim. It’s a great time to ask me for things. I may just nod “yes” without fully processing an ask like, “I can stay up all night to watch the Stranger Things finale, right?”

On the flipside, our floodlight can switch into overdrive. When we feel particularly excited by the environment or threatened, whether or not we are in actual danger, it can become hard to call on the other subsystems of attention. We just remain alert. We struggle to focus, make a plan, organize our thinking or make good decisions. For adolescents, it’s much easier to feel in danger of social isolation. I often wonder how often that perceived danger impedes kids from learning or showing all they can do in school, clubs, friend groups and even family settings.

Helping kids become aware of their floodlight

Chat about it. Make sure kids have a basic understanding about attention, then ask things like:

• Do you ever notice that you get so focused on something that you don’t even notice when someone is trying to talk to you?

• Can you think of a time when it was hard to settle down because you were in a space or a moment that just seemed overwhelming?

Easy (and fun) ways to strengthen your floodlight

Shift the environment, and see who notices. If you come to our house with your floodlight blazing, you’ll find “Fools-bug,” a paper bug taped into our dining room light one April Fools, long ago. We are always delighted when someone (often with a bit of horror) notices him. I’ve built on this by periodically taping similar “critters” in random spots around the house, always noticeable if your floodlight is firing. Every once in a while, my husband or one of the kids will do it, too. When someone finds one, I remind them that’s their floodlight at work.

Play games. One of my favorite ways to sense the interplay between our flashlight and floodlight is playing the card game Spoons. Players must both focus on their own hand to see if they’ve got four of a kind to grab the first spoon (flashlight) AND stay alert to avoid missing the chance to snatch a spoon (floodlight). Haven’t played? Scroll all the way down for basic directions. Played a lot? Our favorite new twist: hide spoons around the room, then watch everyone scurry!

Purpose vs. Goal. Play board games, sports or really any contest with kids (especially siblings), and you’ll likely see things deteriorate as one player gets demoralized by another player’s success. All too often, someone leaves the table, field, or court dismayed.

In many ways, this is natural. Kids are different ages, have different talents, and often have yet to hone the social muscles required to gracefully win and/or lose. It can also be an indication that kids could strengthen their floodlights.

Learning to keep your eye on the goal of a game (winning) while also paying attention to the purpose of playing (having fun with friends or family) is, in many ways, practice with balancing your flashlight and floodlight. Kids tend to focus better on the former than the latter. Though it hasn’t eliminated all gaming woes in our house, two tactics have helped:

• State and agree on both the goal and the purpose before we start to play.

• Pause periodically to check in on how we’re each tracking toward the game’s purpose and how we notice one another tracking toward it, too. Cue those floodlights!

Basking outdoors

Nature is an ideal place to open up and let your floodlight shine. The container is big, the landscape is always shifting, and yet the scene is rarely stressful. Being outdoors is actually known to reduce stress and benefit us in so many ways. You don’t need to go deep into the forest. Nature is anywhere there’s earth, sky and other species. A few starting places:

Look up. Looking up gives us a novel perspective, inspiring our floodlight to illuminate new things. See how a tall tree looks from below. Lay down and watch as clouds slowly morph and move overhead. Or just peer up and take the whole of the big, blue sky.

Behold the night sky. Surprise kids by suggesting a night walk, or just slow down on the way to the car one evening. Lean back and scan the sky slowly, noticing specific clusters of stars, satellites or other features. A sky-gazing app can reveal the hidden stories of constellations, planets and satellites (examples: iPhone | Android). Take the next full moon for a walk or a drive to a spot where you can see the moon big in the sky, ideally around sunset. Notice how viewing the moon makes you feel, and how the moonlight illuminates everything around you.

Close your eyes. Our lived experience, especially in the age of screens, has narrowed so much that we rely almost entirely on sight. Scientists have estimated that ~50% of our brains are already dedicated to processing visual information, and ongoing discoveries continue to elaborate on how oriented we are around sight. The more we use screens, that emphasis on sight, at the exclusion of our other senses, gets only more pronounced. If we want to awaken and strengthen our alert system, it can help to close our eyes and give some air time to the other senses.

Mindfulness

In addition to these day-to-day ways of becoming more attuned to our floodlights, practicing mindfulness, specifically the practice of cultivating present-moment awareness, is proven to support attention. Keep your floodlight on for upcoming articles that dive deeper into particular practices that boost our attention system and overall ability to be present. As always, we’ll include ways to give tweens and teens the agency and inspiration to weave these practices into their own lives.

Let us know

Try these and let us know how they go. Share other ways you discover to let your floodlight shine with kids. We’re alert and ready for them :).

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How to play Spoons

Setup: Deal 4 cards to each player. Place spoons in the center — one fewer than the number of players (4 players = 3 spoons). Give the rest of the deck back to the dealer (that becomes the draw pile).

Initial Goal: Get four of a kind in your hand. That enables you to pick up the first spoon.

Ultimate Goal (to win): Don’t be the last one to grab for a spoon!

How to play:

1. The dealer picks up a card from the draw pile. They can either keep it or pass it. If they keep it, they must discard another card from their hand. They pass the discarded card face-down, to the left.

2. One at a time, each player picks up cards as they are passed to them, then either passes it on or keeps it and discards, always passing one to their left — this happens fast and continuously.

3. The moment someone gets four of a kind in their hand, they quietly grab a spoon.

4. As soon as one spoon is grabbed, everyone else scrambles to grab one too.

5. The player left without a spoon loses that round and gets a letter (S, then P, then O, etc.).

6. Spell out S-P-O-O-N-S, and you’re eliminated.

Last player standing wins.

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