I once had a patient in my office, an elderly, widowed lady, who pretty quickly turned out to be one of those clients who “just needed to talk,” needing not medical but human attention. She was venting with such intensity; I barely had the chance to say anything so I just let her “go with it, keeping eye contact, nodding, affirming her with my presence; at the end of the session, she looked visibly relieved, was able to cheer up and concluded: “Doctor, I haven’t had such a nice conversation in a long time.”
Yes, people these days are willing to pay someone to just listen to them, and for many, this is the only way to get quality attention. We live in a superficial world where our attention is distracted every second. The abundance of stimulation and irrelevant information (that we get exposed to, even unintentionally) make our brain “over-saturated,” making it more difficult to clear it out for new information. Just think about how frequently you get notifications on your phone. According to Internet trend reports, we unlock our phones an average of 150 times a day — the days when we were able to immerse in a deep conversation and create real presence with someone seem long gone. We delude ourselves into the idea of being able to multitask. However, neuroscience shows that we would just keep switching our attention really fast in between tasks, preventing us from doing any of them well. Our brain deals with the abundance of information in three pivotal ways: deleting, distorting and generalizing. Anything you do not prioritize will more likely be victim of one of these processes.