How Present Are You, Really?
Not whether you meditate. Whether you were there for your own day.
Most of an ordinary day happens on automatic - the drive you do not remember, the meal eaten while reading, the conversation you were in and also not in. The scale psychologists use to measure presence does not ask about meditation at all; it asks how often you are somewhere else while your life goes on. And it found that the people who are more often here, in the plain sense, report better mood and less stress - which makes attention one of the few things that is both measurable and free.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about the last couple of weeks, honestly. Nearly everyone scores lower than they expect, because the autopilot is precisely the part you do not notice.
What it measures
Presence as the original scale defines it - attention to what is actually happening - looked at from three angles: whether you are here rather than on autopilot, whether you notice what your body and senses are doing, and how much of your attention is already on the next thing. The original is one dimension; the three angles are explained at the end.
Based on: Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (Brown & Ryan, 2003)
Possible results
Being here
Attending to what is happening rather than running on autopilot.
Noticing
What your body and senses are doing.
Racing ahead
How much of you is already on the next thing.
Common questions
Do I have to meditate to be more present?
No. The scale this test is built on does not mention meditation, and the researchers were measuring an everyday capacity that some people have without any practice at all. Meditation is one way of training it, with modest evidence behind it, and it suits some people and not others. What the research points at more generally is attention brought to ordinary things - one meal, one walk, one conversation done with the whole of you - which works on the same capacity without requiring a cushion.
Why does my life feel like it is going by so fast?
Partly because of the third bar. Time that is attended to at half strength leaves half a memory, and a year made of automatic days feels short in retrospect because there is little in it to look back on. This is why a week somewhere new seems long and a month of routine seems to vanish - novelty forces attention, and attention is what makes time thick. The practical corollary is that you do not need more time, you need more of you in the time you have.
Sources
- Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note A note on structure first: the scale this is adapted from measures presence as a single dimension, and it does so by asking about its absence - how often you are on autopilot. The three bars here are three angles on that one thing, separated because they suggest different starting points, not because the research found three factors. On the science: the scale is well validated and the links between presence and wellbeing are consistent, but they are correlational and modest, and the popular claims for mindfulness have run far ahead of the evidence - the effects of formal practice in careful trials are real and small, and not larger than those of exercise or a good night's sleep. Nothing here requires you to meditate. And if you are on autopilot because you are exhausted, that is information about the load, not about attention.
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