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 This is episode number 1178 on developing a peak mind with Dr. Amishi Jha.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 Welcome back, everyone.
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Today's guest is Dr. Amishi John.
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She is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and serves as the director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010.
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And she received her PhD from the University of California, Davis and postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University.
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 Mindfulness has become a massive buzzword in the last decade, but Dr. Jha spent the last 25 years researching the science of attention through extensive work with elite sports teams, the US military, medical professionals, and more to answer this question.
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She's written a new book called Peak Mind.
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 Find your focus, own your attention, and invest 12 minutes a day.
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In this episode, we break down the science of how being distracted is causing you to miss out on 50% of your life and so many of us are distracted all day long.
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How high performers focus their attention to achieve success.
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Practices to help you calm down and retrain your mind to be less distracted.
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 how your life could change if you change your attention, that and so much more.
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And if you're enjoying this at any moment, make sure to share this with someone that you think wants more inspiration, wants more attention, focus and wants to develop a peak mind in their life to create an optimal life.
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 And if this is your first time here, then welcome and click the subscribe button right now over on Apple podcast.
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And at any moment during this interview, please leave us a review of the moment that you enjoyed the most or the part that really stood out to you as the most insightful.
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And today's fan of the week is from Shan, who left a review over on Apple podcast, who said, I've listened to the podcast for years now, and it is one that keeps me
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 constantly coming back full of valuable information and insight.
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Thank you for taking the time to do the show each week.
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It is always top shelf.
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So big thank you Shan for leaving the review, sharing your thoughts and being the fan of the week.
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Again, welcome to this episode and in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Amishi Jha.
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 Welcome back everyone at the School of Greatness.
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Very excited about our guest, Dr. Amishi Jha, in the house.
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Good to see you.
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Good to see you.
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I'm pumped because I love psychology and I love neuroscience and those are two things that you focus on at the University of Miami.
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You've got a book out called Peak Mind.
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Find your focus, own your attention, and invest 12 minutes a day.
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And I saw on your website that it said, research is showing that we are missing out on 50% of our lives
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 because we are distracted.
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Where does that stat come from?
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And is that 100% true?
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I mean, we're 50% of the lives we're missing out on because we're distracted?
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We're not paying attention to 50% of our lives.
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And the way that it comes up, it's been studied in so many ways.
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And unfortunately, we keep triangulating on that same number.
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But the initial studies were done where people just volunteered to get pinged on their phone.
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 So any time of day or night, during normal wake hours, they'd get a text message that would say, what are you doing right now?
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You know, reading a book, having a conversation.
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Where is your attention?
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And essentially, is it on the thing you're doing or somewhere else?
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And half the time, people were not paying attention to the thing they were doing.
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 So this number 50% is really about off-task thoughts.
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So I'm reading, I wanna read a book for an hour, but then I'm constantly checking my phone, or I'm watching TV, or I'm having a conversation.
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Is that what you mean?
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No.
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Or is it, I wanna read a book, but I'm not even reading it.
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You probably have that feeling like all of us have, right?
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Get to the bottom of the page, you have no idea.
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No idea, I mean, that was my whole childhood.
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 Well, that's what I'm talking about.
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The new aspects that are probably even more problematic are the external distraction.
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But that number, 50%, happens even without any external distraction.
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Just, okay, I'm reading a book in nature, and there's nothing around me, but my thought is distracting me.
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 Not my phone and people and the TV.
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Yeah.
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And we think of this, we think of distractibility as like a modern problem.
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But what's so interesting, and I write about it a little bit in the book, monks, medieval monks complained about too much distraction in their lives.
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Like they had gone and become monastics.
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 Their job was to pray all day and they're like, the thought of lunch is making me really distracted.
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And then they would just stop talking to their family members, but they could not escape this real issue of internal distractibility.
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 What is causing that distraction?
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Is it a survival mechanism?
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Is it something to help us in creation mode?
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Why do our brains do that?
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Both, very good insights.
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So yeah, we think right now, of course we can't know, right?
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All we know is that this is the nature of the brain today.
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And we are essentially the evolutionary success story, so we're intuiting and inferring what pressures might have led us to have this.
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But it's 100% for sure that this is not
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 a design flaw, this is designed for.
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This is intentional.
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This is intentional.
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And so much of our metabolic energy is going toward this meandering of mind that it's on purpose.
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And we have some good clues about what we think it is.
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I mean, two you already mentioned, right?
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This notion of if you were
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 excessively focused, like in our old, old ancestors at a watering hole, like gotta get by.
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Yeah, you're gonna get eaten alive.
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Yeah, you're gonna get eaten alive, you're gonna get eaten alive.
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And then if we are needing to plan, if we are needing to reflect, we need to be able to move our attention around.
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There's more cutting edge views of what this might be that actually are beyond that, that it's actually potentially a way that we are able to code
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 what's called episodic memories, memories for events in our lives.
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Because oftentimes if you now, now that we've talked about this number, if you're just sitting there and a random thought pops into your head, you might notice it's a replaying of something that's occurred.
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And that's at the neural level, that's what we think might be happening is that essentially as we are experiencing things, we're encoding it, we're getting it into our memory.
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And then the way it turns from just experience to
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 a hardened neural representation is we have a replay mechanism.
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It just kind of goes over and over again.
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Anything that's the slop, the things that vary from replay over replay, those kind of go away and whatever it is that keeps consistently getting replayed is the thing that becomes the structural change that is long-term memory.
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Why do we have thoughts that replay in our mind over and over?
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You mean why specific thoughts might get like, you're ruminating?
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Yeah, why do memories keep popping up in our mind from,
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 A week ago, years ago, decades ago, why does it keep replaying?
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Well, the replaying is different than the fact, what I'm talking about, what I was just talking about.
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What are you talking about there?
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What I was talking about a moment ago is just, it's a way for memory to even exist in our mind.
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So if I just, you know, for example, I had this conversation with you.
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 and I'm on my, you know, Lyft ride home, and all of a sudden I'll just, a random phrase that you said might pop up, or remember when he was talking about this, like, no explanation necessarily, it's almost like the brain is creating the, it's a thought pump, it's just pumping it out.
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So the explanation for that is that in order to have memory created, because it's pretty fresh, we just experienced this interaction,
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 in order for memory to actually be created so that tomorrow, the next day, even by this evening, I have a more hardened representation in my memory that I can call upon.
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That's all structural in some sense.
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The structures of the brain, the neural representations are hardening together in a specific way for me to have that memory representation.
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So I'm talking about the creation of memory.
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 That makes sense.
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That's the creation of memory.
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Yeah, what you're talking about I think is different.
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So we're here sitting here.
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Before we got down here, you took a drink of the water, you had your lipstick on there.
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Can you give me all my secrets?
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You wiped it off.
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It's a moment.
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So my thought is pumping the memory because I see a little bit of stain still on there.
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So my thought is pumping this, my brain is pumping this memory, this image, right?
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And I may do it a few times to help me hold on to the memory, is that right?
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 It will do it potentially many times.
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We don't even know exactly how.
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This is just a pretty new idea of why mind-wandering happens.
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But yes, it may be part of a memory creation or consolidation process.
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 But I think what you were talking about is almost like rumination, like a thought comes up and you kind of can't, we sometimes call this attentional rubbernecking.
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Attentional rubbernecking, what does that mean?
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Like you're driving down the road and you're like, you know, you can't kind of help see the whatever traffic accident that's happened.
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So it's that idea that our attention just gets yanked by certain mental content.
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Why is that?
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 well, there's a lot of reasons that we think that happens.
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It seems like the more tragic the event, the more we reflect that we either shut down and block it and forget memories.
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Like the brain seems to like protect yourself by not remembering or you're constantly ruminating on it.
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That's kind of what I hear.
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Yeah.
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If therapists will say like,
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 You know, there's some patients that they have that don't remember a time period in their life because there were such tragic events that the brain kind of shut down where other people They say think about it often and then they live in fear from that event.
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So I'm not sure where that is There's a whole bunch of what you just said, right?
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So let's just talk about the kind of replaying Yes, and I and I think that this is can be quite problematic for our experience of you know things like depression or even
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 anxiety and PTSD.
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So the reliving of past events can have many different forms.
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So why it happens, you know, in some sense,
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 I would say that there's a lot of debate regarding why it happens.
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One is that it's something that you think you're gonna actually try to resolve, right?
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You're actually thinking about it because it's gonna help you see it in a different way or you're gonna problem solve in some way.
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But for sure, rumination itself, which really is this kind of looping process, isn't getting you anywhere.
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It's just a replaying.
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So my work actually starts from that reality.
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I'm not a clinician, I'm a neuroscientist.
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So it's like there are certain states
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 certain ways that our attention functions where we are rubbernecking.
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We're like kind of can't go, can't pull ourselves away from it.
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And it doesn't have to be about the past.
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It could actually be worries about the future too.
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So, and this is a very powerful brain function, mental time travel.
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 Mental time travel, tell me what that is.
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So that is essentially, I mean, the way I like to think about it is it's like we can make our brains go and rewind or fast forward.
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There's actually something related, which is mind travel.
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Essentially, that would be like me taking your perspective.
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Oh, that must have seemed strange for him to see me wipe off lipstick.
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I mean, he probably never had to do that.
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I'm taking your perspective on an event.
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 So I've traveled into your mind and I'm looking back at myself through your mind.
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So all of these are displacing us in space or time in some sense.
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And it's so useful to be able to do this.
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In fact, our ability to reflect is how we learn, right?
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And our ability to think of the future is how we plan.
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 So both of these functions are so, so beneficial.
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But the reality is when that's happening, we are not in the present moment.
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Our attention is distracted.
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Well, not even if we're distracted, we may be doing it on purpose.
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So our present moment is in the past.
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Our present moment is in the future.
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So if there are any demands happening right now,
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 Like if somebody walked in the room and said we've got to make our way downstairs for some… it might take us an extra minute to kind of reacquaint ourselves to what's happening right now.
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Now in the context of being in a lovely studio space, no dire consequences.
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 But oftentimes, if you are time traveling to the past or the future and you're stuck there because you're ruminating or catastrophizing, that can be very problematic for in-the-moment action.
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And the consequences could be dire, either as an athlete for what's required next of you to get the right inputs or for the kinds of groups I work with, military service members,
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 and first responders, it could mean somebody else's life or death based on your attentional lapse.
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So my interest has been not so much on why rumination occurs, but given the reality that it often occurs and under high stress circumstances, it occurs more often.
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How do we solve this problem?
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Because it's definitely impacting our attention.
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Rumination.
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How do we solve rumination?
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How do we solve getting ourselves to be able to pick up what's happening right now
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 if the mind's tendency is to be in the past or the future or in somebody else's head.
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Right?
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Like, oh, I wonder what you thought of me.
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I wonder what he thinks of me.
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Interesting.
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So would you say a lot of our time is reflecting on the past memories, worrying about the future, or worrying about what someone else thinks about us?
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Yes.
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Why do we care so much what someone else thinks about us?
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 I mean, because we're social creatures, we need to, right?
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I mean, it's part of our survival to know that.
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Now, things tip into the dysfunctional pretty quickly.
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And things that tip into that dysfunctional space quickly for certain professions can be very problematic.
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So again, my starting point isn't
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 Does it occur?
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Why it occurs?
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It occurs, it occurs often.
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And when we take it to the lab and look at people and look at their performance on attention tasks, they're terrible at them.
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Terrible.
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So what's an example of something in the lab?
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It's like focus for 20 minutes on a task and then people just can't even do it?
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Well, they can do it, but they get worse and worse over time.
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So even over the course of- The longer it is.
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Well, yes.
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So if you did something, let's not even say 20 minutes.
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 10 minutes.
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So what would an example be?
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I want you to- Okay, an example of an experiment?
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Yes.
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Okay, so remember the goal of this experiment would be to test out your internal distractibility.
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Okay.
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So now if I'm trying to get you, and I'm trying to measure your internal distractibility, I can't tell you to be distracted, because then you're actually doing the task.
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Right.
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You're not doing the other thing you should be doing when you should be doing the task.
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So we did puzzle over this, like how do we design a task where people get distracted and they don't do what we tell them to do?
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 It was easy though.
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All we had to do was bore people.
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So if you bore them, they are so happy, they just go anywhere else.
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So we designed one of the world's most boring tasks, really.
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Read a thick textbook.
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Well, we did that too, but this is the way the experiment would go.
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You'd come in, we'd tell you, this is going to be a task of your attention.
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What we want you to do is sit in front of the computer screen and look at the screen.
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Sometimes we'll have a brain cap on them.
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 So we're looking at the ongoing electrical activity.
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We'll put them in a brain scanner and look at what's going on there.
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And we'll say every time you're going to see a series of digits on the screen.
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Every time you see a digit, press a button.
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So they're sitting there.
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One about every fourth of a second comes up.
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And then we say the only thing unusual here is if that digit happens to be three, just don't press the button.
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Withhold your response.
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Threes are only happening 5% of the time.
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So they're sitting there.
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 Press, press, and of course their mind is wandering.
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The three shows up, they press to the three.
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And it's usually- They're not focused.
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It's usually followed by some kind of expletive, like, oh, crap.
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When we were doing this with Marines, I remember one of the guys almost threw the keyboard.
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I was like, it's okay, it's all right.
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But the way we know that they're mind-wandering, in addition, and having this kind of mental meandering we were talking about, is that not only do they make mistakes, I mean, it's obvious there's a three on the screen.
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It wasn't even too fast for them to see it.
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We stop the experiment every now and then and we just ask them.
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 Right before this question appeared, where was your attention?
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Was it on task or off task?
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Just like that cell phone study I was telling you about.
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And they tell us.
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And they're not on task all that often.
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And when they've made a mistake, it's usually because they report that they were on task, off task.
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When they get the three and they withhold to the three correctly, usually they're reporting soon after that, yeah, I was on task.
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 It's interesting, I did a brain scan a few months ago and they had me do this test right before.
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It was like with an X, it was like letters and like don't press the X. Okay.
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And it was for 15 minutes.
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Boring?
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It's the most boring thing ever.
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You stare at a screen, it's a dark room so your eyes are tired already.
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 dark room screen and it's just a white background on the screen and then like just a letter pops up and It also had me use my my left hand.
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I'm right-handed.
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So I said once you use your left hand push the spacebar Every time it was either push the spacebar every time you see a letter, but don't push it when you see an X Okay, very similar what I'm saying and
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 For me, when there's a game, my brain goes, I wanna win this game.
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So I was like, okay, I'm focused.
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Even though it's boring, I'm like, I want to be the best I can be at this game.
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And I did it the whole time.
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They leave the room, then they came back in, or whatever, 15 minutes later, when it was about to finish.
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 And I finish it, and I go, he goes, how'd you do?
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And I go, I don't think I missed one.
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And he goes, that's not possible.
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He goes, it's not possible.
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I go, check the results, show me the results.
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I don't think I missed one.
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And he goes, I've done 1,000 of these.
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Not one person has been on, like, get it 100%.
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And I go, you put a game in front of me, I'm gonna focus.
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For me, it was like, turn me on.
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 And I didn't miss one.
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He was like, I've never seen this.
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He was like, I've never seen this.
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I don't know how you did it.
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I was like, I just paid attention and I was really intentional about everybody.
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Is that an X?
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Okay.
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Is that, you know, it was like intentional.
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Then I had to go back and do another one.
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And I missed like when the first three, like right away I missed it.
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And then I missed like 10 of them.
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 Because I was just like, okay, screw it.
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I was like, get me through this now.
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Yeah.
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So that's awesome that you did that.
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And it doesn't surprise me given your background and, you know, the kind of mental training you've done yourself.
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But as you experienced, this is a natural response to get fatigued.
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It was fatiguing in a way.
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Like it's exhausting.
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It's exhausting.
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So keep your attention for 15 minutes on anything and be intentional.
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It's an
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 Very exhausting, but it's not what you think.
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It's not like it's hard in a kind of immersive video game context.
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It's the mind that is doing its own thing.
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SPEAKER_01
So now think about being like a baggage screener, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
And they're doing that all day long, or an air traffic controller, or somebody that's in a medical context that they're looking at monitoring equipment.
0
SPEAKER_01
They can't mess up, but they're having the same challenges in their mind.
0
SPEAKER_00
Dentists, yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Where the chances of something going wrong are low, meaning the X is not that often, but you can't mess up and your mind will wander.
0
SPEAKER_01
So over the course of an experiment what we find, and this is something that's been known forever, it's something called like the vigilance decrement.
0
SPEAKER_01
Essentially if you have a 10 minute, 15 minute study, from the beginning to the end people are just worse.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And people used to think that it's attention just getting exhausted, just like you felt.
0
SPEAKER_01
But what we noticed is that as performance is going down, mind-wandering, this self-reported sense of, yeah, I was not on task, I was somewhere else, is actually increasing.
0
SPEAKER_00
So it's not attention.
0
SPEAKER_00
What is it then?
0
SPEAKER_00
So mind-wandering is going up.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's not like I'm getting tired, more tired.
0
SPEAKER_01
 It may feel like it's tired, but I think tiredness, fatigue, it's like a feedback system that says, go do something else.
0
SPEAKER_01
So tired may be the result of a set of processes, not the cause.
0
SPEAKER_01
And we always think of it as the cause, like, oh, I'm tired, I gotta stop this, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
But it may be that the whole system is designed, and if you think about it, again, evolutionarily, opportunity costs.
0
SPEAKER_01
If you spend so much time doing something,
0
SPEAKER_01
 you're missing out on other stuff.
0
SPEAKER_01
So like you wanna get in the search mode.
0
SPEAKER_01
What's gonna make you wanna search?
0
SPEAKER_01
The uncomfortable feeling of what you're doing right now.
0
SPEAKER_01
So the story is quite complicated, but what it tells us is that attention isn't getting, the brain's not getting tired per se, but it's on the lookout.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's always on the lookout for other things that it might do.
0
SPEAKER_01
So it's experienced as fatigue, but also this propensity, the way that it gets itself out of doing what it's doing is it's just,
0
SPEAKER_01
 Internally going other places.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's like oh, maybe I'll think about you know the vacation I want to take or what about that email that I sent?
0
SPEAKER_01
So it is constantly journeying.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's what its nature is So is there what it trained the mind to have more attention and focus?
0
SPEAKER_01
 I wouldn't be here if I didn't think there was.
0
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, so most of my career and I started studying attention when I was an undergrad at your favorite place, University of Michigan.
0
SPEAKER_00
That school up north?
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I started very early on and for most of my early career, I was just interested in how it works.
0
SPEAKER_01
How do you make it work?
0
SPEAKER_01
How does it work in the brain?
0
SPEAKER_01
What are the various neural components of it?
0
SPEAKER_01
 Then what I started noticing early on when I had my own lab is, ooh, we know a lot about what makes it fail.
0
SPEAKER_01
So we know it's quite powerful, but it's also vulnerable.
0
SPEAKER_01
And the kinds of things that it's vulnerable to, the top three that we kept seeing are stress, threat, and poor mood.
0
SPEAKER_00
Stress, threat, and poor mood.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
0
SPEAKER_01
And if you think about where your mind goes often, it's that kind of terrain.
0
SPEAKER_01
When it's not intentional, like you're not trying
0
SPEAKER_01
 plan for some big event.
0
SPEAKER_01
It defaults to these states, like you were saying before, rumination, catastrophizing.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And knowing that, knowing that attention is powerful but vulnerable, I became extremely interested in figuring out how do we train it?
0
SPEAKER_01
Like there must be a way we can train it.
0
SPEAKER_01
Neuroplasticity and the growth of new neurons even in the adult brain when something was coming out, you know, we've known about neuroplasticity for a very long time.
0
SPEAKER_01
The notion that you could train the brain to be better.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Was new right?
0
SPEAKER_01
And so that's kind of where I like kind of took it upon myself as a mission to like figure out How can we do this?
0
SPEAKER_01
So we tried lots of things we tried positive psychology we tried these high-tech light and sound devices like you were talking about before this brain gym like Some ways we could play computer games that might none of it was reliably working.
0
SPEAKER_01
We're still getting this kind of consistent
0
SPEAKER_01
 vulnerability to distraction that would occur.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then I did something that I never thought I would do.
0
SPEAKER_01
I was actually probably the world's biggest skeptic regarding this.
0
SPEAKER_00
Meditation.
0
SPEAKER_01
We tried mindfulness meditation.
0
SPEAKER_00
Why do all roads lead back to meditation?
0
SPEAKER_00
Isn't that funny?
0
SPEAKER_01
But at this time, remember this is like the early 2000s.
0
SPEAKER_01
It was not a thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
I never would think in a million years at that moment, like I'd be talking to somebody on a very popular platform that knows about this term.
0
SPEAKER_01
Like it was this very odd thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
I remember the first time one of my senior colleagues
0
SPEAKER_01
 mentioned it, it was like in the context of this big lecture, and he basically showed this brain image of like a brain that he had induced in his lab to be in a positive mood.
0
SPEAKER_00
And then one that was- Like positive psychology?
0
SPEAKER_01
You mean- No, like, yeah, but really- Think positive thoughts or- He did that, but it was really basically get in a scanner and listen to, think about happy memories, listen to happy music, like just in the state of positivity.
0
SPEAKER_00
An environment of positivity.
0
SPEAKER_01
 for just the period of time that they were getting the brain image.
0
SPEAKER_01
Then he did the same thing for the negative brain.
0
SPEAKER_01
And at the end of his lecture, I said, how do I get that negative brain to look like that positive brain?
0
SPEAKER_01
Just sort of because I was frankly having my own life circumstances around that.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I'm at the back of the room and it's the end of the lecture and he's like,
0
SPEAKER_01
 And I was like what?
0
SPEAKER_01
To me it was like… What year is this?
0
SPEAKER_01
This was 2003.
0
SPEAKER_01
To me it was like as offensive as somebody saying…talking to a group of like astrophysicists and talking about astrology as if it was a serious topic.
0
SPEAKER_01
 It's just like, I'm sorry, we're at the University of Pennsylvania here, we don't use those terms.
0
SPEAKER_00
We're not some woo woo university.
0
SPEAKER_01
But of course I respected him dearly and had a chance to talk to him afterwards.
0
SPEAKER_01
And he was telling me about the work that we're doing with adept monks.
0
SPEAKER_01
This was Richie Davidson, who now of course leads a very enterprising center in Wisconsin to study meditation.
0
SPEAKER_01
But back then it was not known at all, but it got me super curious, like what, what?
0
SPEAKER_01
 And I'm an Indian woman, so meditation's not something really new to me.
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I'd known about it, but I always thought it's a great thing for my parents to do.
0
SPEAKER_01
I'm not interested.
0
SPEAKER_01
I'm a serious scientist.
0
SPEAKER_01
I'll wait to see what the science has to say about any of that.
0
SPEAKER_01
 But his use of that term made me at least want to explore it personally to begin with because I happened to be having my own…the reason I asked about how to get the negative thing to the positive brain because at that moment in my life I felt like I was probably more like that brain.
0
SPEAKER_00
The negative brain.
0
SPEAKER_00
You were stressed, you were overwhelmed.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Stressed, overwhelmed, new baby.
0
SPEAKER_00
Personal stuff, yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
Well, it was actually, I'd lost feeling in my teeth from grinding.
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it was not like minor anymore.
0
SPEAKER_00
You were a lot of stress.
0
SPEAKER_00
You were like grinding all night, all day.
0
SPEAKER_01
You were like... It was bad.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I'm like, you got to shake this.
0
SPEAKER_01
And the worst part wasn't so much the physical pain.
0
SPEAKER_01
I had no idea what was going on physically.
0
SPEAKER_01
But I was really like feeling that I wasn't paying attention to my life.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it
0
SPEAKER_01
 I mean, I was literally developing expertise.
0
SPEAKER_01
My lab was devoted to attention and I could not.
0
SPEAKER_00
You couldn't focus.
0
SPEAKER_00
That's all you did though and you couldn't focus.
0
SPEAKER_01
I couldn't keep my head in the game.
0
SPEAKER_01
And so when he said that, I was like, well, I'm going to check it out.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I go literally to the pen bookstore and buy a book.
0
SPEAKER_01
 I lucked out because I could have picked any random book.
0
SPEAKER_01
I picked a book called Mindfulness.
0
SPEAKER_01
It was called Meditation for Beginners by now a very dear teacher of mine, Jack Kornfield.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it was a tiny little book.
0
SPEAKER_01
It came with its own guided CD.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, I'll check it out.
0
SPEAKER_01
Fine.
0
SPEAKER_01
My respected colleague says this is something.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I start doing this.
0
SPEAKER_00
Jack Kornfield or Jack Canfield?
0
SPEAKER_01
 Jack Kornfield.
0
SPEAKER_00
Kornfield, okay, because there's a Jack Canfield as well.
0
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, no, this is Jack Kornfield, a longtime meditation teacher, really one of the people responsible for bringing mindfulness to the West.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I lucked out that I picked that book.
0
SPEAKER_00
It had a DVD or CDs, you were listening to it.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I listened to it and I'm like, oh my goodness, all the instruction in this meditation thing, it's just all about attention.
0
SPEAKER_01
Pay attention to your breath.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Notice you're mind wandering, return it.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it was such a simple yet elegant instruction.
0
SPEAKER_01
And what struck me is he is providing instruction of something that's been around for 2,500 years, but it's tapping into the exact brain system I happen to study in my lab.
0
SPEAKER_01
And after a few weeks, probably about a month or month and a half or so of doing this, I was like feeling completely transformed.
0
SPEAKER_01
Which was so bizarre to me.
0
SPEAKER_01
Like I almost didn't believe that this was happening, but I could look at my spouse,
0
SPEAKER_01
 be with my child, I could be more engaged in the lab.
0
SPEAKER_01
And the pressures and the strain hadn't changed at all externally, but I was a different person.
0
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
0
SPEAKER_00
Well, your response to the pressure had shifted.
0
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
0
SPEAKER_00
You were just showing up differently to the stress.
0
SPEAKER_01
Correct.
0
SPEAKER_00
To the emotional or psychological threats and the poor mood.
0
SPEAKER_01
That's right.
0
SPEAKER_00
The stress, the threats, and the poor mood.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
0
SPEAKER_00
Because you had all three of them, it sounds like.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it was hard for you to shake it.
0
SPEAKER_00
You were trying to do what before?
0
SPEAKER_00
What were you trying to do to shift those three things?
0
SPEAKER_01
 I mean, anything I could think of, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, look on the bright side, that failed epically.
0
SPEAKER_01
We even brought that to the lab and for people that were in high stress, it doesn't seem to work if you're experiencing high stress.
0
SPEAKER_00
Look on the bright side, meaning like have perspective?
0
SPEAKER_00
No.
0
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
0
SPEAKER_01
Induce a positive mood into your life by manufacturing that.
0
SPEAKER_00
How do you do that?
0
SPEAKER_01
Name three happy memories you've had.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And there are different levels of this, for example, gratitude or compassion.
0
SPEAKER_01
These are positive types of orientations where you affiliate toward the experience in that way.
0
SPEAKER_01
But this was more basic than that.
0
SPEAKER_01
This was like, listen to a happy song.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it works maybe temporarily, at least if you're under a lot of stress, but it doesn't transform your
0
SPEAKER_01
 Essentially your ability to be focused you're just your attention.
0
SPEAKER_00
What is having let's say You're just having a breakdown in your day something happens.
0
SPEAKER_00
You have a breakdown What does the principle of perspective
1
SPEAKER_02
 with that breakdown?
1
SPEAKER_02
I don't know.
1
SPEAKER_02
I got a cold today.
1
SPEAKER_02
But at least I don't have, you know, I still have a blessed life.
1
SPEAKER_02
I still live in Los Angeles and, you know, there's a lot worse sick people off than me and I'm a healthy human being and this is just a week of a cold or something.
1
SPEAKER_02
What does perspective coupled with gratitude do for a peak peace mind?
1
SPEAKER_01
 I mean, I think that for a cold in a healthy, stable environment where you feel basically taken care of, it can be very helpful.
1
SPEAKER_01
But now you're in the middle of a war zone and one of your best buds just lost his arm.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's very hard to see the silver lining there.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And unfortunately when people start trying to do that they are depleting their attentional resources.
1
SPEAKER_01
We cannot reframe a situation.
1
SPEAKER_01
We cannot even garner that kind of perspective when attentional resources are limited.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because this thing called attention, I mean I'm kind of shorthanding it and all I'm telling you is the term.
1
SPEAKER_01
 It ends up being the fuel for our success and the fuel in particular for our ability to think, feel, and connect.
1
SPEAKER_01
So if you don't have this, you're basically depleted because of the demands in your life.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Basically press the gas pedal because you're like I gotta create a positive reality here.
1
SPEAKER_01
I gotta look on the bright side I got a gratitude for everything good in my life Nothing's gonna come up and you're gonna end up spending out more fuel than and it's useful to you interesting So what we need is a solution especially in those kind of moments so in a chaotic moment a very not just chaotic but demanding and long-term
1
SPEAKER_02
 Give me a few examples.
1
SPEAKER_02
You're going through a divorce.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're going through a divorce.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're a lawyer and you're preparing for a big case.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're an accountant in tax season.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're a mom that just had a baby.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the list of things in our lives which are protracted and demanding and somewhat stressful, there's many.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Your next six to 12 months is gonna be a journey.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's gonna be potentially stressful.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and you know, frankly, I never expected this, but we've been studying this for many, many years, and then COVID hit, and the whole world is in this.
1
SPEAKER_02
Now everyone's experiencing it, yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
Everyone is in this experience, and the description, and a lot of my war colleagues use this.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was actually a term developed at the US Army War College.
1
SPEAKER_01
VUCA, maybe it's a term you're familiar with.
1
SPEAKER_00
VUCA.
1
SPEAKER_01
V for volatile.
1
SPEAKER_01
U, uncertain.
1
SPEAKER_01
 C, complex, and A, ambiguous.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So when the circumstances have those qualities, you're gonna be very, your attention's gonna be fully engaged and required, and it's gonna actually probably get depleted more quickly.
1
SPEAKER_02
Your attention will be depleted if it has those things.
1
SPEAKER_02
And if you're under stress and threat and poor mood.
1
SPEAKER_02
You're like, you can't focus on anything.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's right, but the worst part is that if now that system of attention, those are the factors that make it depleted.
1
SPEAKER_02
Those four factors make it depleted, or the three?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, the same thing, those are the circumstances.
1
SPEAKER_01
Those are the circumstances.
1
SPEAKER_02
Stress, threat, poor mood.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Those circumstances, VUCA, creates a lot of stress, threat, and poor mood.
1
SPEAKER_01
So those are the circumstances and the qualities of mind that appear are stress, threat, poor mood.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're such a good student.
1
SPEAKER_02
I'm trying to learn this stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, the result ends up being that attention is depleted.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And, you know, you might say, well, that's not great.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I probably won't be able to read a book or something.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's not great.
1
SPEAKER_01
But attention is way more than focusing for cognitive functioning.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like I said, we need our attention not only to think, we need it to actually feel and regulate our mood.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Attention because if we can't have attention, we don't have the energy to have focused attention Then our mood will just continue to be stressful and we'll continue to react in negative ways is what I'm hearing you say in life situations Well, let's maybe maybe it would be helpful if you're up for it to like break down what I even mean by the term attention Give it to me.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
What is attention?
1
SPEAKER_01
 So attention, like I said, it's complex, multifaceted.
1
SPEAKER_01
It literally is fuel for everything else we do.
1
SPEAKER_01
And from the brain science point of view, we've basically parsed it into three main subsystems.
1
SPEAKER_01
So one, we've already been talking about it.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's focus.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's this ability.
1
SPEAKER_01
Formally, it's called the orienting system of attention.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the metaphor I like to use, which is essentially focus, is a flashlight.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So if you're in a darkened room, wherever you direct that flashlight, you're going to get privileged access to that information, crisp and clear of wherever it's pointing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Everything else is dark.
1
SPEAKER_01
Attention in terms of this focusing aspect is just the same.
1
SPEAKER_01
So right now, even as I'm like looking at you and paying attention to what you're saying to me, everything else is a little bit fudged out.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So the cool thing about that is that it can be, well, there's basically a couple of things.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it can be directed, that's awesome.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can decide what to pay attention to.
1
SPEAKER_01
I'm now looking at you instead of over there, which would be annoying.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it's not just to the external environment.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can pay attention internally.
1
SPEAKER_01
So if I say right now, what are the sensations on the bottoms of your feet right now?
1
SPEAKER_02
 I mean, I just feel a sock and a little bit of pressure from my shoe.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I bet you, before I said that, that was not on your mind at all, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So you could internally take that flashlight, direct it toward bodily sensations, and you can get access.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it goes back to that broader view of what attention does.
1
SPEAKER_01
 It solves a big problem that the brain has which is it can't take in everything in every moment, all of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it's sub-sampling.
1
SPEAKER_01
But it's not just bodily sensations, it's emotions, it's trains of thought, it's our connection to other people.
1
SPEAKER_01
All of that we can direct the flashlight to.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can direct it toward other people like I am right now and you are.
1
SPEAKER_01
 We can direct it toward an idea we have and we wanna pursue it.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can actually direct it toward a sensory, or sorry, an emotional experience to deepen our sense of it and kind of bathe in that.
1
SPEAKER_01
It could be something tender or anger.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we can regulate.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can say, you know what?
1
SPEAKER_01
Right now it's probably not a good idea for me to break down crying.
1
SPEAKER_01
So anyway, that's just one system.
1
SPEAKER_01
Focus.
1
SPEAKER_01
Focusing, right.
1
SPEAKER_02
That too is.
1
SPEAKER_01
 The second system is the exact opposite.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's not about focusing.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's about being broad and receptive.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this I call the floodlight.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's called the alerting system.
1
SPEAKER_01
So its job is to essentially keep our resources, our mind's attentional resources ready for whatever may occur next so we can act.
1
SPEAKER_01
So whereas the first system was about selecting based on what, this floodlight is about
1
SPEAKER_01
 We want to pay attention to now.
1
SPEAKER_01
What's going on right now?
1
SPEAKER_01
And you know, like if you're driving down the street and you see a flashing yellow light, like near a construction site or something, you're more vigilant.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're just alert.
1
SPEAKER_01
You don't know what it's going to be.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is somebody going to walk into the street?
1
SPEAKER_01
But it's available to you in a broad and receptive manner.
1
SPEAKER_02
You're not focused on one point, you're scanning.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're scanning, you're broad, and you're not going to...
1
SPEAKER_01
 assume you know what's going to happen, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That's why we're going to be alert to whatever occurs.
1
SPEAKER_01
So does that make sense of how it's literally the polar opposite?
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then the third system
1
SPEAKER_01
 is called executive control.
1
SPEAKER_01
The term executive is pretty much like the executive of a company.
1
SPEAKER_01
The executive's job is to ensure that our goals, the organization's goals for example, and behavior align.
1
SPEAKER_01
Goals and action need to align.
1
SPEAKER_01
 moment by moment and the metaphor I use for this is a juggler.
1
SPEAKER_01
So a juggler's job is to make sure all the balls are in the air.
1
SPEAKER_01
The executive of a company doesn't go in and do every individual task, that would be a bad executive, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
But it is to oversee, to make sure we're supposed to be doing this, we're not, get back on track, that kind of an orientation.
1
SPEAKER_01
So very different, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That's not really about focusing or even being broad, it's about the management.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So now you see why when we think about attention in this kind of three system point of view, it does feed into almost every single thing we do, thinking, feeling, connecting.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Thinking, feeling and connecting, okay.
1
SPEAKER_02
So the narrow focus, this is kind of like what an athlete would call being in the zone.
1
SPEAKER_02
It's like having your attention focused in the moment.
1
SPEAKER_02
So you can be a peak performer and you're not distracted scanning everything but you're mastering your craft to the moment of your sport, your skill.
1
SPEAKER_02
You know, maybe an archer is focused in that one line site, not scanning everything.
1
SPEAKER_02
The second part of attention is the broad and receptive.
1
SPEAKER_02
 being ready for what may occur in life.
1
SPEAKER_02
And the third is the executive control, ensuring that goals plus action are aligned.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I would actually, very good.
1
SPEAKER_01
You got it.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I would say all three probably you need in the context of successful athletic performance and competition, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
So, like as a football player, you need to scan the field as well and be focused.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's the exact same phrase.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's the phrase we use, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It's like eye on the ball, but scan the field.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's like you need to have both.
1
SPEAKER_02
 I heard that Floyd Mayweather, the boxer,
1
SPEAKER_02
 He, I heard this, I don't know if this is true, but I heard that he actually looks to the side of someone's eye, he doesn't look at the face when he's punching, he actually looks to the side, because he's more receptive, he's quicker to react with the peripheral.
1
SPEAKER_02
I don't know if that's true or not, and maybe it's focus and then off a little bit, and back and forth, but.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, it's true that peripheral vision has better motion detection.
1
SPEAKER_02
Really?
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SPEAKER_02
So what does that mean?
1
SPEAKER_02
You can see it faster or something?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, your motion detection will be better.
1
SPEAKER_02
Really?
1
SPEAKER_01
 So if I'm looking here and you're over here, if you move... And I'm like, yeah, it's going to be better than if, even if I like do a slight movement while I'm in the center of your eyes.
1
SPEAKER_01
Just motion detection is, I mean, as you think about it evolutionarily, that makes sense, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
You might, you want to see if something's scurrying toward you.
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On the side, because you see it and you're like, well, what is that?
1
SPEAKER_02
Interesting.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, so that might be a different thing.
1
SPEAKER_02
Okay, gotcha.
1
SPEAKER_02
What have you learned then from your study with those in the military and executives and high-performing athletes?
1
SPEAKER_02
What have you learned by testing their attention on how they can improve?
1
SPEAKER_02
Is it through meditation alone?
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Is it through other factors?
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SPEAKER_01
You know, it's funny.
1
SPEAKER_01
There's so many reasons, so many ways in which
1
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 We can try to advantage our performance.
1
SPEAKER_01
My interest is going to be narrow because I study a particular thing.
1
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I study attention and my interest is in seeing how we can preserve it.
1
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Oftentimes people talk about resilience, this capacity to bounce back.
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I'm not even interested in resilience.
1
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I'm interested in pre-zillions.
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 Preserving it.
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Preserving it.
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Preventing.
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Preventing the need for resilience.
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It's like prior to being resilient, just keep everything steady.
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Just don't decline.
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Don't get to a place where you're exhausted and you're trying to push through something.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, don't decline and bounce back.
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Just don't degrade.
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SPEAKER_01
So what does that mean?
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SPEAKER_01
Well, what I told you before was that essentially we know that attention is vulnerable to degradation over demanding circumstances.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this project we did with even the University of Miami football team, pre-season training,
1
SPEAKER_02
 Tell me about it.
1
SPEAKER_01
The pre-season period, their attention was worse at the end of a four-week pre-season interval than after.
1
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And now they've got to go to camp to determine what their playing season is going to look like.
1
SPEAKER_02
So pre-season before training camp?
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SPEAKER_01
Before training camp, pre-season training, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So they're practicing every day.
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Many of them were taking classes as well this summer.
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Their attention was worse at the end of four weeks than before.
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SPEAKER_02
Why?
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SPEAKER_01
 We just went over that.
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SPEAKER_01
Stress, threat, poor mood, volatile, uncertain, complex, exhaustion, physical exhaustion, all of the factors that resulted in a protracted period of high demand.
1
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, it's not just elite athletes.
1
SPEAKER_01
We found this in undergrads as well.
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SPEAKER_01
We know this, right?
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SPEAKER_01
If you remember being an undergrad, you feel worse when you're about to end the semester than at the beginning.
1
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And then what?
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SPEAKER_02
You haven't slept for a semester.
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You're pulling all-nighters.
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But then what do you have to do at the end of the semester?
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 You've got a big test.
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SPEAKER_01
So you're not advantaging yourself.
1
SPEAKER_01
Same thing with, by the way, pre-deployment soldiers.
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SPEAKER_01
It's like, yeah, you're going to be getting ready to train.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're trying to, it's not even called- Trying to break people down.
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SPEAKER_01
You're not trying to break people down.
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SPEAKER_01
In fact, it's called readiness training, but it's not actually readying them in the intentional sense.
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They're depleted.
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SPEAKER_02
 Interesting.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that's the state of what things look like.
1
SPEAKER_01
So for us, our interest was in how can we provide training just like a mental workout, mental conditioning, reps they can do every day on their own to keep their own attention in this buoyant, stable state instead of declining.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So when you say, oh, is it just meditation?
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SPEAKER_01
Well, meditation itself, especially mindfulness meditation is a kind of a world of its own.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I'd love to say a little bit more about that because how you might define the term meditation may be quite different than the way I'm thinking about it.
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SPEAKER_01
So just to kind of orient us.
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SPEAKER_01
So first of all, like even the term meditation, I mean, I'm still like,
1
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 I don't know if I even want to say that word.
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All it means to me as a cognitive neuroscientist, as somebody who's interested in brain training, is engaging in certain kinds of practices with regularity to cultivate certain mental qualities.
1
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So it's from the world's wisdom traditions.
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SPEAKER_01
People have been doing this for eons because there's an interest in having a certain way of making yourself, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So whether that's being more compassionate or more loving or being more transcendent
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 or in the case of mindfulness training, more present-centered.
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So in my mind, and this is sort of the broad way that we think about mindfulness, it's mindfulness meditation.
1
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Well, mindfulness itself is a mental mode.
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It's a way of making the mind.
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Even before we talk about the meditation piece, just the state of being mindful, it's an orientation where you're paying attention to your present moment experience, the here and the now,
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 without editorializing or reacting to it.
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So you're getting that raw data without a story on top of it.
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And we all want that.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, who doesn't want that?
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Who doesn't want to go into an experience, a lot of stuff may go down, but you're like, this is the facts.
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This is what occurred.
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This is the data of the experience.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it doesn't have to be just objective.
1
SPEAKER_01
It could be subjective as well, but it's what transpired.
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SPEAKER_01
 Instead of, you know, the reason he walked down the hall and didn't look at me is because I'm just a terrible person and he doesn't even think I'm worthy of looking at, right?
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SPEAKER_01
I'm putting a story on instead of, oh, his eyes were just not toward me.
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That's the fact.
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He wasn't paying attention or whatever.
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SPEAKER_01
He was thinking about something else.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he was lost in thought.
1
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, what I'm saying is with mindfulness, you'd say none of the stories matter, just the data.
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The data was he and I were walking in opposite directions.
1
SPEAKER_01
His eyes were not toward me as we passed each other.
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SPEAKER_01
That's it.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So if you could take experiences and actually hold them in that level without spinning on the story about it, that could be very useful.
1
SPEAKER_02
My training has been all about making every event neutral.
1
SPEAKER_02
And we give the events meaning, you know, whether it could be a positive or negative meaning, I guess, or, you know, it's like an event occurred.
1
SPEAKER_02
How do you want to respond to the event?
1
SPEAKER_02
Do you want to be stressed and overwhelmed and moody from it?
1
SPEAKER_02
Or do you want to,
1
SPEAKER_02
 See the data as it is, like you said, and then make a decision on how is this going to best serve the rest of my day or the rest of my life by the story I tie to this event.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, at least you're seeing the story as something that's constructed actively.
1
SPEAKER_01
So we're totally in agreement.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like what you just described, I would say, is you're taking a mindful orientation toward your experience.
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The problem is just having that mindset won't be enough because there's such a strong tendency, this 50% we started talking about.
1
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The default is simulate reality, make assumptions, conceptually elaborate, emotionally react, and mentally time travel.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So we're up against a lot, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
We wanna be in the here and the now, we wanna get the raw data, but everything about our, almost like our evolutionary pre-programming makes that really hard to do, which is why, just like every good athlete, you train for it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what's the workout we could do to actually get ourselves to be more present, centered in this non-reactive, non-elaborative way?
1
SPEAKER_01
That's where mindfulness meditation comes in.
1
SPEAKER_01
 That's where it was really like a, it's like kind of a, I don't know, a chocolate peanut butter moment, like, oh, I need this, and this has it.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's like, what is the opposite of a wandering and reactive mind?
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, a mindful one.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, how do you train for that?
1
SPEAKER_01
There's 2,500 years of practice that you can look at.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what we've essentially done is taken the ancient, a lot of these wisdom tradition practices, primarily from the Buddhist traditions, and people have brought them into
1
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 hospital settings, business settings, etc.
1
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My interest, which was the first time it had ever been done, is let's learn from all of that and now let's bring it into the military context.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so when I started this work, like I said, it was new to me, but the notion of mindfulness-based stress reduction had been around by
1
SPEAKER_01
 a dear friend and teacher, Jon Kabat-Zinn, he had already established using these Buddhist practices an eight-week, 24-hour or so program, which had a suite of practices.
1
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So it wasn't any one thing.
1
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It was like four to six main exercises.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so we looked at that and said, how do we use that in a way that can be useful?
1
SPEAKER_01
And just to give you an example of one of the practices.
1
SPEAKER_01
So one of the very simple practices, which when people say the term meditation, they probably think of this, but I want to connect the dots between
1
SPEAKER_01
 how it relates to attention and why I thought it was an interesting thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Can I do that?
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, please.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the practice is essentially what's called a focused attention practice, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So what do you do in this practice?
1
SPEAKER_01
And it probably is going to resonate with some of the things that you already do, but you pick a period of time, let's say right now, like 30 seconds, we're going to do this.
1
SPEAKER_01
In my book, I say work up to 12 minutes and that'll be the sort of sweet spot for real brain changes.
1
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 For the period of time you're gonna do this practice, you're going to sit in a comfortable, upright, alert posture, kind of upright, not uptight, kind of seriousness, but not stiff.
1
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And notice yourself breathing, just floodlight is on, breath-related sensations happening in the body.
1
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Then you're going to pick, kind of identify something in your breath landscape that is prominent.
1
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 It could be the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils or maybe some part of your back that you notice moving, something that really stands out, it's salient.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then you're going to take that flashlight of attention and just shine it there for the period of time that you do the practice.
1
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So the first instruction is focus, focus on breath related sensations.
1
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 And then the next part of the practice as you're doing this, if it hasn't happened already, it's going to happen.
1
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When you notice your mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations, redirect the flashlight back.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you're just breathing, noticing, focusing.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And when your mind wanders, nothing big to do.
1
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Just bring it back and begin again.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And that's it.
1
SPEAKER_02
So that's the first step of that practice, just to notice how much it wanders.
1
SPEAKER_01
No, you're not even noticing how much it wanders.
1
SPEAKER_01
You did three things.
1
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You focused, you notice, you redirect it.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's what a lot of my military friends would call the pushup.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's the pushup.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, it ended up that that simple practice tapped into all three of those brain systems.
1
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You had the flashlight that was directed, you exercise that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Floodlight that's noticing what's going on, what's going on.
1
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And then that executive that says, get back.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Interesting, get back on track.
1
SPEAKER_01
Get back on track.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that practice is really foundational to everything that people do.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then the other practices that I do go into detail on in the book are doing other things.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like this one really exercises both the focusing and noticing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Then we can do another one that really exercises the broadening.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like how do you actually allow, it gets into what you were talking about, the story making mind, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
How do you actually just watch the nature of the mind?
1
SPEAKER_01
So essentially there is nothing privileged
1
SPEAKER_01
 It's just thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations passing through.
1
SPEAKER_01
We don't orient our experience that way.
1
SPEAKER_01
Usually if something happens, it's like, you know, we're latching onto content and we're making something out of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So how do you take that observational stance?
1
SPEAKER_01
And then we go on to other practices that kind of build on those.
1
SPEAKER_02
Gotcha.
1
SPEAKER_02
But you talk about a 12-minute mindfulness approach?
1
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So we do, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the whole program is essentially based on these
1
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 early mindfulness-based stress reduction context.
1
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Mindfulness-based stress reduction, very powerful, 55 years of research now that have studied it.
1
SPEAKER_01
Too much time for pre-deployment soldiers, for example.
1
SPEAKER_01
People aren't going to give me, in fact, I tried it for a year.
1
SPEAKER_01
I had $2 million of Department of Defense funding and nobody would take my project.
1
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They're like, nope, nope.
1
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 Too much time.
1
SPEAKER_01
So one of the things I had to do was write a grant that basically said, how can we figure out what the minimum effective dose is?
1
SPEAKER_01
Do they need to do 24 hours of training over eight weeks and practice 45 minutes every day?
1
SPEAKER_01
Is that necessary?
1
SPEAKER_01
Because nobody was going to do it.
1
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Mindfulness meditation training.
1
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Just like you did for 30 seconds there.
1
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Very well.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well done.
1
SPEAKER_01
 For 45 minutes a day, that's the assigned homework, which is beneficial, but it's not realistic for these high-performance, high-stress groups.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what we did is we looked to see what's the sweet spot.
1
SPEAKER_01
At what time, if people do daily, do we start seeing that, yes, it's beneficial.
1
SPEAKER_01
 and continues to be maintaining the benefits if they continue doing it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the sweet spot was 12 minutes.
1
SPEAKER_01
They do 12 minutes or more, then we see beneficial effects.
1
SPEAKER_01
The more they do over 12 minutes, the better.
1
SPEAKER_01
But less than 12 was not consistently showing a benefit.
1
SPEAKER_01
It's a 12 minimum about three to five times a week.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that helped.
1
SPEAKER_01
Then people were like, in fact, that's what we did with the football team.
1
SPEAKER_01
We went in and we said, based on prior research, it's about 12 minutes a day.
1
SPEAKER_01
 You know, we just, we gave them 12 minute recordings and they did it.
1
SPEAKER_01
They did it for about five days a week.
1
SPEAKER_02
So guided meditation.
1
SPEAKER_01
Guided meditation, just like I guided you right now and you followed, same idea, but we do it for the entire 12 minutes.
1
SPEAKER_01
We're guiding them.
1
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_02
What does that look like?
1
SPEAKER_02
Is it focusing on your breath, focusing on your thoughts, focusing on?
1
SPEAKER_01
No, I mean, at this point with the practice, it was very, very fundamental.
1
SPEAKER_01
The entire 12 minutes for one of the practices is focusing on breath related sensations.
1
SPEAKER_02
And that's it?
1
SPEAKER_01
That's it.
1
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Now what people start realizing is, oh, my mind wanders.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, my mind wanders to the same stuff over and over again.
1
SPEAKER_01
So when you're not doing the formal practice, you might be able to think like, what is it that's like sticky for me that I'm just keep going back to and look at that in a different kind of a way.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it's a different progression.
1
SPEAKER_01
But remember, the point for me was, what does it do to attention?
1
SPEAKER_01
So with the football team, we compared 12 minutes of mindfulness a day for four weeks to 12 minutes of relaxation a day for 12 weeks.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And we found that both were great for improving and boosting and protecting mood.
1
SPEAKER_01
Only mindfulness helped attention.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Protecting mood is part of the equation to support you in having better attention, is that right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It didn't seem so.
1
SPEAKER_01
It seems like the mechanisms may be different.
1
SPEAKER_01
So guided relaxation and imagery was much more about feeling tension in the body, visualizing not being in so much pain, like thinking of yourself as beautiful.
1
SPEAKER_01
So guiding people to do that helped them feel a little bit more positive, but it was not helping their mood, just like we were talking about.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, sorry, not helping their, helping their attention.
1
SPEAKER_02
 But there were less, maybe less stress in those moments.
1
SPEAKER_01
In those moments, there seemed to be a little bit less stress.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes, gotcha.
1
SPEAKER_01
But mindfulness gave you both the stress reduction and mood boosting benefits and the attentional benefits.
1
SPEAKER_01
So if you were gonna do one thing, my recommendation would be do the thing that you get more benefits.
1
SPEAKER_02
Right.
1
SPEAKER_02
Is there anything else that you've studied in the last 20 years that could help you become a higher performer with more attention and more focus in your life than these types of mindfulness practices?
1
SPEAKER_02
 Or does this seem to be kind of the gold standard for the brain?
1
SPEAKER_01
It's interesting because when you start looking at the kinds of things that get people messed up in terms of performance.
1
SPEAKER_01
So we talked about where your attention is in that moment, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So eye on the ball, scan the field, that kind of stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
The other thing that seems to be very problematic is the story about what's happening.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like I'm the best thing on the planet and so I'm gonna dominate this is a problem in some sense because you have a false sense of
1
SPEAKER_01
 dominance or I just screwed up and I'm never going to recover from this.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so both of those storytelling aspects…
1
SPEAKER_01
 also seem to be a big problem for me.
1
SPEAKER_02
If you think that I'm the greatest in the world, or I suck and I'm never gonna amount to anything.
1
SPEAKER_02
Having those extremes.
1
SPEAKER_02
So is that an identity issue?
1
SPEAKER_02
It's like the way you shape your own identity about yourself?
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it may be, but what I'm talking about is how that shows up in the moment on the playing field.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because if you go in with that kind of hubris, like, oh yeah, I got this.
1
SPEAKER_01
 you are going to start limiting how much you are focusing and scanning because you've got a predisposition that there's no issue here.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you can't have that kind of already assumed success.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this is going to get complicated.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I'm not a performance psychologist.
1
SPEAKER_01
I'm a neuroscientist.
1
SPEAKER_01
But my point is really just that
1
SPEAKER_01
 The notion of storytelling in the mind and an over-reliance on the story can be very difficult.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now the story is not just about yourself, the story is about what you think the intentions of the other team are.
1
SPEAKER_01
 as well.
1
SPEAKER_01
So we think that this play means this.
1
SPEAKER_01
So anytime you start telling a story, essentially a narrative is constraining information processing in the brain because the brain is just going to default to constraining what it thinks about based on the story.
1
SPEAKER_01
So if I have the view like we were talking about earlier, we're walking down the hall and you don't look at me and my view is, oh, well, you know, he doesn't like me or whatever I end up thinking about.
1
SPEAKER_01
 I am so biased by that that I might not notice that actually, you know, you have a bloody nose or something like that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like there could be something that I'm missing because I'm so like occupied with this thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, in the context of elite performance, you don't want that.
1
SPEAKER_01
You do not want to be disadvantaging yourself because your story is narrowing.
1
SPEAKER_01
You want the full data and you want to understand that there's a multiplicity, that the other team is not… they're no chumps.
1
SPEAKER_01
They're not going to just do whatever and they're going to fall into a particular way of doing it, especially in this team context.
1
SPEAKER_01
 It's very important in the military context with combat itself is that you don't know what the enemy is up to and if you start thinking you do, you might be very wrong, very wrong.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the drop the story aspect was also very important and it ends up that mindfulness also works on dropping the story because you are essentially aiming to orient to present moment experience without editorializing.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Let's say you have an all-star son playing college football and preparing for the season, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
He's about to go into training camp for football camp at one of the top universities, Ohio State University, and he has a goal to win the national championship and he's an all-star player.
1
SPEAKER_02
 What would you guide him on paying attention to, working on, practicing on for the month leading up to training camp and then continually throughout the entire season?
1
SPEAKER_02
What would be your prescription to your son to have the best possible chance of being the best athlete he can be and accomplishing his goals?
1
SPEAKER_01
 I mean I think that's what I laid out in my book.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean I really wanted to give the best advice I could possibly give to people in high performance contexts.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it doesn't come out of a study or two, it comes out of working with special operators.
1
SPEAKER_01
 other kind of elite people where it matters that they perform well.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the thing that's key is that you have to do it.
1
SPEAKER_01
It is like a workout and that's sort of my bigger interest.
1
SPEAKER_02
It takes time and energy.
1
SPEAKER_01
It takes time and energy and athletes actually are great for this as an
3
SPEAKER_00
 I want people to be aware of your book, Peak Mind.
3
SPEAKER_00
Find your focus, own your attention and invest 12 minutes a day.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can go to Amishi.com, Amishi Jha over on Twitter and social media.
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Amishi, what is it?
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P. Jha over on Instagram, J-H-A.
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And at Facebook as well, Amishi.jha.
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 The book is out, again, Peak Mind, if you wanna improve your focus, your attention, and improve the quality of your life, go get the book, and give it to a couple friends as well.
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I wanna hear one of your audios too, so you can get those audios on 10% Happier, mindful.org, Insight Timer as well.
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 This is a question I ask everyone at the end of our interviews called the three truths.
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So, imagine it's your last day on earth many years away from now and you get to live the life of your dreams.
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You get to see everything come true.
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You solve the question of consciousness and your brain research, you know, all these things happen.
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 I'm 500 years old.
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Yes, yes.
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You're healthy, happy, safe, all these things that you say to yourself continue to happen in your life, all that stuff.
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But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you or it goes to another place and we don't have access to your information anymore.
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Your book, this interview, all the things that you write in the future, we don't have access.
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 but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true, three lessons that you would share with the world, and this is all we would have to remember for our lives to help us improve the quality of our life.
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What would you say are those three truths?
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 that is really tied to my own life, my own work, or just my understanding of things.
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Yeah, it's not gonna be all that original because I think that these really are truths.
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Everything is impermanent and there's a preciousness to that impermanence.
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Be kind to each other.
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Be kind.
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And take care of your own mind.
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Simple is the best way, you know?
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 I think people need to go back to the basics all the time.
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It's hard to become more advanced unless you master the basics in your life.
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So that's why I think this is not basic but 12 minutes a day of training the mind is the first step that you can do to start expanding upon accomplishing greater goals or living a more fulfilling, happier life as well, being more present with the people you care about and stuff like that.
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 I want to acknowledge you Amishi for dedicating your life to this because I think so many people in the world are suffering and struggling to figure out why they have these thoughts.
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How can I improve my mind?
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How can I improve my brain?
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How can I improve my quality of my life on a daily basis?
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So the fact that you're
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 Investing so much time, your entire life, to studying this, researching this, investing in the tests for people to see what's working, what's not working as a scientist, and give us practical things we can do on a daily basis to help us improve the quality of our life is incredible.
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So I'm really grateful and appreciate and acknowledge you for your efforts and commitment to this.
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It's a complicated thing to study,
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 And you're making it so much easier for us to not beat ourselves up and have practices to improve our lives.
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So I acknowledge you for the gift you are, the gifts you are in the world, even though you went to Michigan.
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 Is there anything else that we can support you with besides getting the book, checking you out on social media, listening to one of these mindful meditations that you have?
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 Anything else, just go to amishi.com, you have a newsletter.
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Yeah, they can sign up for it at the website.
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No, I think that the best way is just keep doing what you're doing because you're providing people like me and many others that are interested in this work.
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You're giving us a platform to talk about it and you're asking really great questions and I'm not just trying to flatter you.
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I mean, I really mean it.
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It was a really fun conversation.
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I appreciate it, appreciate it.
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Final question for you, what's your definition of greatness?
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Can you tell me what yours is?
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 Mine is discovering and cultivating the unique gifts within you to pursue your dreams and in that pursuit making the maximum impact on the people around you.
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I'll go with that.
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There you go.
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I think I would add in
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 To remember your life is only lived moment by moment.
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And so it's all of the things you said, but to remember the granular.
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Remember the moment to moment.
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 Amishi, thank you so much.
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Appreciate it.
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Amazing.
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 I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most.
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And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it's time to go out there and do something great.