A friend of mine once told me his wife never complained until suddenly something would happen and out would flow months of grievances. This delayed excessive reaction illustrates the disproportionate reliance on focus.
The act of focusing one anything specific and detailed is the same act as tuning out everything else. As illustrated on the right, if you are intensely focused on a book you might not notice a siren going by or even pain. The better you are at focusing the better you are at tuning out for better or worse.
Focusing is a critical skill because instead of having some vague feeling like you want to help people or build a house, you have to actually break it down into small steps and understand the details. You might want to befriend the neighbor, but to actually bake a cake for him means you need to focus.
Focus is the second most intense gear, and can best be achieved about two hours a day, depending on the degree of focus. It takes effort, and when the body’s ability to focus is compromised due largely to fatigue, all those things that were being tuned out are no longer tuned out. They then flood the brain, which is when the list of the all the things bothering his wife flood out.
This also explains much of the delayed pain responses. If you are chronically tuning out pain, usually without knowing it, you might be successful a lot of the time. What happens if something gets aggravated is that it becomes the last straw just like in the example of the wife. The brain gets flooded, and the pain will escalate for minutes to hours to days.
The fact that all these things are being tuned out in the first place is the issue. Each of those things should have been resolved, and in order to resolve them they have to be processed. In order for them to be processed, focus is one step in a recipe that involves excitability, focus, endurance, and posture.
