Re-finding Your Sense of Agency

Agency or having a sense of agency, is an interesting idea, and has been discussed in western psychology since Freud. So what is it to have a sense of agency? What do we mean when we say we are doing something with agency? And, why might it be a useful aspect of mental life to cultivate?

To have agency, is to say that when you do something - you do it because you choose to do it and you bring your efforts or resources to meeting the demands of the task at hand…there’s an intention behind your behaviour, theres a sense of purpose. Having a sense of agency corresponds of a sense of purpose: even if its simply to wash the dishes.

To contemplate why this might be an important capacity to develop - lets see what its like to not act with agency…and we need not look any further than our own habits. To act without agency, might be to act in a way that contradicts a goal or value you hold dear. To eat that second sugar bun, when the first actually satisfied; to pick the phone up and gaze without focus at the screen; to drift out of conversation with a loved one; to lose track of a major project or interest that days or weeks before held real clarity. Without agency, each action we take becomes a reaction equivalent to a twitch, rather than an engagement.

Mindfulness presents us with a very direct practice of cultivating agency. It involves the practice of placing one’s attention on something because you both choose to, and the commitment to return that attention each time it wanders. We learn that no matter how well we start a journey of even a few small steps - life can intervene in ways that can lead us in a very different direction. Yet the practice of mindfulness assists us to make the return trip to our intentions - the more we practice, the more we act with agency. And, there is nothing more simple and more reassuring than the act of returning our care attention to the next breath we have.

Each breath is a new beginning - a new start. When we commit to mindfully breathing, and return our attention to the breath each time we see we have become distracted - we strengthen agency just a little. It’s like a muscle. Breathing in…gather awareness and senses around the experience of an expanding chest, the rushing air over the soft palate, the feeling of stretching. Breathing out…the sense of release, the falling away of muscle tension, the sinking chest and warm air rushing back out the nose.

And somewhere in that rhythm of rising and falling - a thought about dinner; a half-remembered raised eye brow by a loved one (did they really agree with me?); an itch at the end of the nose. All distraction. Like a sheep leaving the flock - distracted and blindly following something. We are all a bit like sheep…Even writing these last two sentences, I’ve thought about stifling a burp and itching my ear! And like a sheep, I can go out following and expanding on these senses and experiences until the sentences I am composing fall away and lose focus.

The practice of mindfully returning attention to our breath, each time we are taken by distractions is a discipline that is beguiling in its simplicity, yet offers unexpected rewards. The willingness to return attention to our breath each time we catch ourselves wandering in focus. Mindfulness practitioner and researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn encourages us to just practice this one activity - even if we have to repeat it 20 times a minute. In repeating this practice, we are also building a sense of agency moment by moment. This slow-building sense of presence in our daily lives, is one such effect. This ‘being-hereness’ allows us to bring our full attention to something - this is at the heart of agency.