How The B-Roll Method Can Help Support Your Mental Well-Being
In a world full of financial struggles and economic uncertainty, which keep us focused on all that’s going wrong, I offer a way to help redirect our focus to the overlooked and common wonders in our everyday surroundings. Welcome to the B-Roll Method.
I like to describe the B-Roll Method as a practice to enhance our quality-of-life. It helps interrupt our inclination to habituate to our surroundings. When a sensory stimulus remains constant or changes gradually without meaningful consequences, the brain reduces the amount of attention it gives to that stimulus.
Add chronic stress, financial struggles, and future uncertainties, and the human brain will continually exist in survival mode that ultimately restricts our ability to notice the more ordinary and routine beauty in our surroundings.
When we experience financial scarcity our thoughts and focus become consumed by working, earning, paying bills, handling debt, and figuring out the money to ensure that our financial obligations are met. Having too little of something (time, money, relationships, opportunities or resources) strongly shapes how we think and behave.
A scarcity mindset leads to tunnel vision. You become so focused on needs, on the threats, and the immediate financial or life crisis that you filter out everything else, especially the quiet moments of overlooked beauty and unnoticed background details.
We are all temporary tenants of Earth. Find beauty in the ordinary, fleeting present moments.
In a previous post titled, Building Intentionality Into Your Day, I wrote about practicing intentionality and why that’s important. I discussed how to build meaningful time into your day to become more aware of your feelings, so you can make decisions that align with your values and long-term goals. It’s more of an internal practice, that focuses on how you are feeling.
The B-Roll Method is the opposite. It is an external experience, a noticing of what makes up your outer world. It is the practice of noticing the apparently but not really mundane or ordinary to give you an opportunity to remember how beautiful and interesting the world around you can be, and that we often take for granted.
In the critically acclaimed 2025 film drama Train Dreams, which takes place in the early-to-mid 20th century, there’s a scene in which logger Robert and explosives expert Arn are resting among the forest that they have been clearing and working in for years. In a moment of existential awareness, Arn exemplifies how noticing an environment, one seen day in and day out that has simply become background to the routine, can be experienced as special.
Watch the 30 second YouTube scene below:
Arn: “Beautiful ain’t it? Just beautiful.”
Robert: “What is, Arn?”
Arn: “All of it. Every bit of it.”
That is what the B-Roll Method is meant to embody. Deliberately directing your attention towards ordinary, low-salience stimuli, moments, or objects in your immediate environment that aren’t emotionally significant or novel and then realizing that they have favorable and pleasing value or meaning.
How The B-Roll Method Differs from Practicing Mindfulness, Gratitude, Awe, and Presence
Highly recognized and evidence-based practices in the counseling profession that enhance mental health and shift one’s cognitive perspective include mindfulness, gratitude, awe, and presence. They are all interrelated but work in importantly different ways.
Mindfulness is a non-judgmental observing of the internal and external environment in which you presently find yourself. You notice whatever arises which could include your current thoughts and feelings, the room you are in, or even the way your clothes feel against your skin.
Like mindfulness, the B-Roll Method encourages observation. Unlike mindfulness, the B-Roll Method doesn’t suspend judgement. It encourages judgement about the ordinary and too often overlooked as worthwhile.
Gratitude is a focused feeling of appreciation for specific things like people, objects, health, or opportunities. Practicing gratitude evaluates benefit to you. Gratitude doesn’t have to be but is often retrospective, encouraging you to think back to maybe what was good in your day or the past week.
Like gratitude, the B-Roll Method encourages appreciation. Unlike gratitude, the B-Roll Method doesn’t tune into thankfulness, but instead emphasizes interest and delight. It encourages those thoughts and feelings in the moment as you encounter the ordinary thing itself, not retrospectively. The B-Roll Method also doesn’t evaluate if whether the thing you are noticing is of any benefit to you. In the B-Roll Method, the act of noticing is the benefit.
Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast or greater than yourself. It focuses on vastness (which doesn’t always mean physical size); it can involve something perceptually expansive like beauty, power, or complexity. It can also induce the “small-self phenomenon,” when a person experiences a reduced sense of self-focus in the grand scheme of things, while still feeling significant. It’s a mixture of feeling small while being captivated by wonder. Awe can be experienced by looking at a vast landscape like the Grand Canyon, a nighttime sky full of countless stars, witnessing a birth, or listening to powerful music, a piece of performative mastery (Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” gets me every time).
Unlike awe, the B-Roll Method shrinks your scale by encouraging you to bring your attention to the unremarkable, the thing so ordinary and small that it usually fails to register. The B-Roll Method doesn’t require planning or rarity; there’s no need to curate or seek out big vast experiences. It also doesn’t diminish the self; it keeps you attuned to and elevates your surroundings.
Presence is the grounded, be-here-now practice of being fully in the moment undistracted by the past or future. Your attention is directed toward whatever is happening in the moment, not because it is awesome or beneficial, but just because it is your now. There are two main categories of practicing presence: solitary presence and relational presence (being completely emotionally available and attuned to another person with whom you are interacting).
Like presence, the B-Roll Method encourages awareness of your now, Unlike presence, the B-Roll Method encourages discovery of the mundane of which you typically are not aware, not deepening your engagement with what you already noticed. The B-Roll Method also differs from relational presence as it doesn’t require you to anchor your awareness to another person or even to yourself. You can share in moments of noticing with someone else, but your primary attunement is more toward the overlooked aspects of your environment. Humans are biologically driven to focus on other humans. When we intentionally lessen our focus on people, we can create more space for positive mind-wandering. The B-Roll Method isn’t necessarily asking you to be more present as much as it is encouraging you to change what you are present to.
How I Practice The B-Roll Method
We often don’t think about how this is our first time here on Earth and what a unique experience that is. We lose much of our sense of curiosity, interest, or delight with the things we see over and over again. We get caught up in our endless to-dos and the inescapable pain and disappointments that come with life. Slowing down to stop, notice, and find joy in the ordinarily overlooked can be supportive for your mental well-being by actively rewiring your brain’s evolutionary negativity bias over time.
I didn’t realize until lately that I was already intuitively practicing the B-Roll Method. I recently scrolled through my phone’s photo gallery to make a TikTok post when I noticed that nearly every photo or video was of a random plant or flower, a bug, plenty of deer and hummingbirds, or water views from my paddleboard.
And then it just clicked in my mind that this is what the film and television production industry call b-roll. It’s the background or visual filler of the entire visual environment going beyond the main action or focus. B-roll captures the ordinary and routine everyday processes. My photo gallery didn’t include much highlight reel material that is so often displayed on social media, but instead just everyday moments or images of things that are ordinary (at least in the context of my life).
And that distinction is important because we all have different ordinaries. Ordinary is not universal. Living in a coastal town, my life’s b-roll is going to look very different than the b-roll of someone living in a desert town. What someone might notice immediately if they came to the beach is often background noise to me. My nervous system has also become calibrated to expect lots of bugs outside because I live near the woods.
Through my intentional noticing of my own yard in particular, I have been taking so much joy in discovering what I have routinely overlooked: a praying mantis that has decided to become a permanent backyard resident and the ongoing drama between three hummingbirds and only two feeders.
And when you start to notice one little thing and then another and another it starts to become a habit. I feel it’s almost like a fun little game to play with myself to see how much of the ordinary I can notice that brings a little more joy into my day.
It makes me feel engaged in life, centered in curiosity, and interested in the world around me. And in a very unexpected way it has even increased my knowledge of topics I would have normally never bothered to investigate. I now know that some species of hummingbirds are extremely territorial when it comes to their food supply and that the Carolina Mantis has a lifespan of about 6-12 months in the wild.
Experiencing moments of being connected to your subjective ordinary can expand your awareness and reduce stress. As you move through your day, don’t forget to stop and enjoy life’s b-roll and find beauty in the mundane, the interesting in the everyday. Aspire to experience the joy of looking at something common with newness and curiosity.
Allow yourself to notice something so small that it doesn’t usually register.
Experience it in a way that’s worth appreciating.
On that note I’ll end with this excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem “Messenger,” that highlights love for the world by paying attention to the ordinary details within it.
“Messenger” —Mary Oliver (1935–2019) acclaimed American poet
Which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading!!!
I hope today you’re met with kindness, especially from yourself.
💚💚💚
References
Cook, G. (2024, February 20). Why we are wired to connect. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-are-wired-to-connect/
Costa, R. M. (2024). Silence between words: Is solitude important for relatedness? In Progress in brain research (Vol. 287, pp. 153–190). https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2024.05.013
Jacobson, K. (2026, May 3). Abundance, growth, and scarcity mindsets. Your Money Counselor. https://yourmoneycounselor.substack.com/p/abundance-growth-and-scarcity-mindsets
Jacobson, K. (2026, July 8). Building intentionality into your day. Your Money Counselor. https://yourmoneycounselor.substack.com/p/building-intentionality-into-your
Jacobson, K. (2026, July 29). Part 3 of 5: From Emotionality to Intentionality: Calm in a Costly world. Your Money Counselor. https://yourmoneycounselor.substack.com/p/part-3-of-5-from-emotionality-to
Oliver, M. (2007). Thirst: Poems. National Geographic Books.
Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018
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