Are you a headspace thief?

You’ve just settled into your favourite café with a good friend. Your brew of choice is on its way and you’re catching up on each other’s life.

Attention is a form of love, and you’re giving yours willingly, enjoying the warm feeling of connection – one of the key elements of human flourishing.

All of a sudden, your attention is hijacked. A woman has walked over to your table with her phone and placed it in front of your face, forcing you to look at her Facebook feed on the screen.

What the??!!!

Your connection with your friend is broken and your attention is forced onto the phone. You don’t know this woman and have no interest in her Facebook feed. You’re a bit shocked by her behaviour. It comes across as, well, pretty darned rude!

How do you respond?

My guess - in one way or another you let her know you don’t want to look at her Facebook feed and ask her to stop interrupting your conversation.

Can you imagine yourself ever doing this? No way, right?

That scenario might sound ridiculous. But it happens all the time. Not with the sense of sight, but with that of sound. I’m talking about playing conversations or videos on loudspeaker (mostly commonly on mobile phones) in public places.

I don’t know the science of it, but phone loudspeakers seem to be especially audible – more so than normal conversations.

I’ve also noticed that the person physically present talks more loudly than usual themselves, perhaps because the phone is held away from their mouth and they think they need to raise the volume for their voice to be picked up.

The problem is, our human brains find it extremely difficult to not listen to an audible conversation in our native tongue. This means that our attention is stolen away if there is language nearby that’s more audible than our own.

This is different from being in a crowd. I remember learning about the cocktail party effect in my psychology studies – where there’s a group of people talking, so we can’t hear any one conversation - it all blurs together. But a single voice or soundtrack is audible and very hard to ignore.

I’ve become quite atuned to this lately because I’m renting a room in an apartment where someone did it on a regular basis. The apartment is all tiles and glass, so sound from the shared living room booms through it.

That someone was my landlord, so I was reluctant to ask him to change his behaviour. His wife did it too at first, but I think she noticed I would leave the room every time it happened – sometimes having to pack up my computer in order to do so. She now either puts it to her ear, uses her headphones, or takes calls in her room (as I do when I’m taking calls or watching anything).

Usually I have no problem speaking up and asking for things if they’re important to me, but I found myself reluctant to do that in this case. One reason is that it’s their home, so I’m a little hesitant to ask him to change what he does in that setting.

The other is that, because I see it as so obviously rude, it seems almost insulting to ask a grown adult to desist. I wasn’t sure I could do it without incredulity and exasperation coming through. So I would leave the room or shut my door. I tried (with mixed success) to use it as grist to the mill for dealing with my own reactivity.

I don’t think he was consciously being rude, he was just in the habit of doing it, and because it’s usually just him and his wife in the house, and they seem to like sharing their phone conversations, they think nothing of it. I don’t think it occurred to him that I might not want to spend my headspace, my attentional resources, on his phone conversations.

One of the Buddha’s guidelines for living is to only take what’s freely given. Stated in the negative, it’s to not take what’s not freely given. I try to live by this, and it’s a pearler!

With physical things – stuff – and money that’s obvious. Most of us don’t take other people’s stuff or money. We call that theft!

But what about others’ attention? Do we use the same principle there? We have a limited attentional bandwidth, so if we force others to attend to our stimuli of choice, they are less able to direct their attention in the way they’d like to. We are literally taking their attention.

I’ve noticed a few common forms of this headspace theft. The first is the one I’ve already mentioned – dominating the shared airwaves without thought for whether those around us want to listen to our conversation/ Youtube video/ music/ Zoom call etc, essentially forcing them to listen to our sound of choice.

Here are a few others:

Talking incessantly – in conversation we listen only long enough to think of what we want to say next; we’re at-the-ready to get talking as soon as the other person draws breath. We ignore the non-verbal signs that the other person has had enough (e.g. they’re trying to speak, looking away, sighing, looking blankly or at their watch) and just keep on talking.

Talking over the top – we don’t even wait for the other person to finish their sentence before we get talking again, we just speak louder so that they stop and listen.

Ignoring low attentional resources –we’d like someone’s attention for a conversation or question or some information, but we know it’s overloaded right now, and this mightn’t be a good time. We press ahead anyway without checking if it’s ok or offering to have the conversation later.

Impulsive greetings at group gatherings – we arrive at a group gathering and are excited see someone we know. That person is talking to someone else, but rather than wait for a lull in their conversation to greet them, we just walk straight up and interrupt them. Hey! How are you? So good to see you! …rolling into an immediate conversation and unilaterally ending the one they were having.

Some of these behaviours are quite common, and they’re not universally recognised as theft. Indeed, in some cultures loud talking over-the-top is the norm (I’m thinking of my Italian friends here). However any time I’ve discussed this, I’ve found that most people experience it as irritating but feel shy about addressing it.

I remember (with a slight cringe) doing some of these things myself when I was younger. I wasn’t deliberately being rude, I just thought it was normal and acceptable. Conversation was often a war-zone in my family of origin. And even though I always appreciated others behaving more considerately, I didn’t stop and think about doing the same. I suspect this might be common.

Luckily my landlords have responded (thanks to the wife) and now take their conversations into their room or outside if they want to have them on loudspeaker. I had the opportunity to say I noticed and appreciated it the other day.

As for the wider world, I’m thinking of stocking up on cheap headphones and starting to offer them to anyone thieving my headspace in cafes with their loudspeakers.

Have you noticed any headspace theft in your world? Have you perhaps been thieving it yourself without stopping to think about it? Have you noticed any other ways we might take others’ attention when it’s not freely given?

And…is there anyone you know who might benefit from reading this post? 😊