Resist the urge to name the color
As soon as I say it, it makes it harder to resist. But try, because giving a color a name substitutes a concept for an experience. Flags and jerseys don’t have colors, they have chromatic signifiers. Distinguishing THE red from THE white from THE blue is primarily a linguistic exercise. Our brains prefer linguistic exercises, because real-time processing of lived experience is resource intensive, and substituting a label, an indexed version of something similar from the prior experience catalog, is more efficient and usually good enough.
Think about how commonly during a daily commute we realize that we have no specific memory of the last several minutes. That’s our brain saying, “been there, done that,” and humming steadily along in energy conserving maintenance mode. Two years of lockdown now feels like it barely happened because the duplicate days all collapsed into each other, resulting in our remembered lives feeling significantly shorter than our experienced lives felt at the time. Partially from trauma, yes, but substantially from having no variance in location or routine. Deliberate attention might not make you live longer in absolute terms, but in other ways that also matter, it does.