Mental disorders can be described in different ways. You can talk about them in the context of feelings, childhood traumas, characteristics of thinking, behavior and much more. However, in this text I would like to talk about another way. Any psychological disorder can be considered as a way of special distribution of attention. To understand how this happens, let's give a few examples. Imagine that you put a kettle on the stove to boil water and then went to watch a movie. You allocated 20% of your attention to remembering the kettle and turning it off on time to prevent a fire. This approach is adequate and allows you to enjoy the movie without worrying about the kettle. Now let's imagine that you are eating on a bus and have been thinking for 20 minutes about whether you turned off the gas or not. You look around to make sure the firefighters aren't heading in the direction of your house, trying to remember if the stove was okay and what you did before leaving. You find yourself in a loop where you repeat the same thoughts a huge number of times. You spend the rest of the day in the same state and at some point return home in a hurry. Then you exhale and go about your business again, while thinking about whether everything is okay with the sockets. This is approximately how obsessive-compulsive disorder can be described. A disorder in which attention is constantly drawn, as if magnetized, to the same fears and thoughts. It can be assumed that approximately 80% of attention is reserved for obsessive thinking, and the other 20% is needed to be in the present. Many people, faced with psychological problems, say that they no longer have a “now” - they are not able to live in the present, relax , trust the world and what is happening to them at the moment. Let's try to figure out why this happens and how attention is distributed in other disorders. Anxiety - attention is focused on the future, mainly on the most terrible and catastrophic scenarios. Depressive states - attention is grouped around one's own weaknesses, negative experiences, those qualities of the world that associated with pain and suffering. Excessive irritability and anger - attention is directed to the slightest signals about attempts by other people to hurt, belittle or insult. Social phobia - attention is focused on the reactions of the interlocutor, how comfortable, good and fun he is in communication, whether he has formed a positive opinion about the person with whom he communicated. Fear of death - attention tries to cling to something in the emptiness imagined after death. Hypochondria - attention always warily hovers around any unpleasant, unusual and suspicious sensations in the body. It is clear that with each disorder, attention has its own trajectory, movement pattern, centers of gravity. It is in this situation that a person has few resources left to notice what is happening to him now, at the moment. On the other hand, this method of distributing attention can be important for the psyche. So, for example, attention to one’s own shortcomings in depression allows one to refuse to participate in activities that are too complex and require strength. Constantly replaying scary scenarios during anxiety allows a person to be prepared for any outcome. And so on. There are many psychological, philosophical and religious concepts where the theme of attention is key. A special view on this issue can be found in Eastern practices, Gestalt therapy, as well as mindfulness therapy, where the topic of awareness, meditation, and living one’s feelings is given great importance. We can say that one of the goals of meditation is to constantly return attention to yourself, to your body. Meditation allows you to de-energize all anxious, everyday, evaluative thoughts by disconnecting them from the main source of energy - human attention. The same thing happens in many types of therapy - when in the process a person stops constantly calculating his future, getting hung up on trying to read.