Train Your Focus in 12 Minutes | Jim Kwik & Dr. Amishi Jha

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question for today is, how do you tame your wandering mind and your attention? And how do you do that in 12 minutes a day? Which is, which is a powerful promise of this conversation. I believe behind every principle there are promises, and we're gonna talk about some of the amazing principles around a neuroscientist on our show today. We have Dr. Amishi Jha. Thank you for being on our show.

Great to be here.

Now you are a professor at the University of Miami. You are author of the bestselling book, Peak Mind. which I recommend all of our Kwik readers pick up their copy. This book is all about finding your focus, owning your attention, and investing only 12 minutes a day. You and I were talking before we started to record, and that's a powerful statement to make.

Yeah. Yeah. And it comes from, gosh, almost 15 years of research that led us to wanting to find an actionable solution that would be almost a minimum effective dose with mindfulness training. Because of the kinds of groups that we were working with that were really time pressured. So it's a 12-minute-a-day invitation on how to begin. But the other piece of information that we have from all of our studies is that the more you do, the more you benefit, just like physical exercise.

Yeah, I would imagine that you see with— as a researcher, this is something that's a growing challenge for a lot of people. How do you maintain your level of focus in a world full of rings and pings and dings and app notifications, social media alerts, and we're being driven to distraction? So this is extremely important. important topic. And even now, as you and I are having this conversation, the person that might be listening might not be completely present at this moment. Now, why? We don't have to explain why. We just know it happens, right? But maybe we could comment on, you know, in this conversation about what they can do to be able to get more back on track.

Yeah. I think most of us know that feeling, right? That we get to the bottom of a page, we have no idea what we read, or we're driving somewhere and we have no idea what happened on the journey. Being in the middle of a conversation with somebody and realizing their head is down and they're looking at their phone. I mean, these kinds things happen to us all the time. It's our modern experience. And it really does feel like it's come to this crisis moment, like we just don't have ownership over our own mind. And so much has been written regarding solutions to this. So break up with your phone or, you know, take a digital detox for the weekend. Solutions that are really based on controlling the external circumstances and your interaction with social media. And people can give it a try if they choose to. My suggestion is Try something else because frankly, in some sense, our engagement with technology and media, it's like air in our modern world. We need it. You may want to have a digital breakup with your phone over the weekend, but you want to go somewhere and you've got to figure out how to get there. And you need your phone to just plug in, you know, Google Maps. And that means you can't have it on a mode that won't allow you to get notifications. And all of a sudden there you are, you're in the middle of scrolling through Instagram now or TikTok or whatever. So the notion that our external environment and circumstances should be controlled To solve this problem is problematic for many reasons. And so the solution that we are pursuing in my lab and in my work is really putting the, in some sense, the control and the agency back in the person, him or herself, themselves, which means that we've gotta do something differently. We can't just will ourselves to do this. We've gotta actually train for it and how to train for it, how long to train for it. That's the, those are the questions we pursue and I really unpack in my book. And so to cut to the chase, the answer is sort of on the front cover. It ends up that about 12 minutes a day of mindfulness meditation training was the solution that we came to after trying out a whole bunch of stuff. And it was not a solution I ever intended to find. I mean, I'm a neuroscientist. I never thought, you know, I would put— I would be studying meditation. In fact, I would say when I started this work, I was kind of a skeptic regarding what it is and why it could be beneficial. And obviously, I've changed my tune.

Now, at the time when you were exposed to meditation, was that something that You heard about family, friends?

Oh, family. I mean, I'm Indian. So having parents that meditated, like some of my earliest memories are seeing my dad meditating. And it never occurred to me that this is a thing that could be tied to something I know about or care about, you know, as an adult who studies brain science of attention. But it ended up that at a moment in my life when I was in my own crisis of attention, which is a very ironic position to be in as an attention researcher, it's like, you study this stuff, like just figure it out. And just like fix yourself. You know, you're feeling very distracted and overwhelmed. And I could not, I could not think my way out of it. I could not will my way out of it. I couldn't strategize my way out of it. And the crisis was still there. And it was, it was consequential because I had to run my life. I had to run my lab. I had to be with my family and all these other things I wanted, but somehow everything kept slipping away where I felt like I was in a distracted fog. And so mindfulness meditation training was something that was actually brought up to me by a colleague, a neuroscientist, where at least opened me up. And this was back in the, early 2000s. So the notion of meditation and mindfulness was not part of our popular culture quite as much as it is today. And it certainly was not part of the field of neuroscience.

Hmm.

So it was a little bit of a head-scratcher in some sense to hear it from a colleague, one I respected dearly. But then I realized, you know what, I have to at least be open to checking it out, even though I had my own kind of baggage associated with it. When I started practicing, I realized that somehow this thing of, you know, we could talk through what the practices are, but essentially paying attention to our present moment experience in sort of a nonjudgmental, nonreactive manner is entirely about attention. And it actually may address a problem we were exploring in my lab, which is how to strengthen attention in the face of extraordinary circumstances like deployment, military deployment, or being a first responder or long hours of performing surgery as a neurosurgeon. For these individuals, we don't want their attention to lapse at all because it could be consequential, life or death. for themselves or other people, frankly. But for all of us, we need to pay attention to lead fulfilling lives. So it was almost like putting two and two together, like this thing that I was experiencing, I could also offer and explore in the research we were doing in my lab.

Astonishing. So people should pay attention to their actual attention. And while the science is relatively new, there are ancient, if you will, solutions. So if somebody is— you mentioned that word foggy— if somebody has foggy attention and they want to have better attention, is this something in your research that you found is attention is trainable? The resilience is trainable.

Yeah, absolutely. That was the key thing. What I was interested in is finding something that could be resulting in neuroplastic changes. So this term neuroplasticity, engaging in repeated behavior to change the functioning and then eventually the structures of the brain. What is it that you could train people in? Should it be think on the bright side, be positive? That could be helpful. Or should you through cognitive behavioral therapy and kind of think through and, and present counterarguments to anything that you think that is problematic? Or light and sound devices, gadgets— should we use technology? Should we use brain training games where we're actually playing little computer-based attention games? All of these were part of the options that we had. But the one thing, the, the one thing that we found was that people would get better at the thing they were doing. So if they were playing brain training games, they got better at the game. But now all of a sudden you change the context and they're falling apart again. So it's just what you said, paying attention to your attention seemed to be a different approach than simply breaking up with your phone or willing yourself to be more productive or more present. Because in some sense, if you break down what occurs in our mind, kind of micro moment by micro moment, attention, and we've just been talking about it as this monolithic thing, but of course it's many things. Attention is constantly being either engaged willfully and directed as we'd like, or it's getting pulled around. And to know which of those it is, is it a lot? Is my attention aligned to the thing I want to be doing or is it somewhere else? I need to be checking in with what my attention is doing. And when I do that and train my mind to do that, if it's off track, I can actually take action to return it back to where I'd like it. If I have no idea where it is, I will spend 3 hours on, you know, some social media site without having any idea of what time has passed. And we've all been there. I mean, it's not a fun thing to wake up to that fog of like, what? But the reason that can happen is because we're not checking in with our mind in that moment. We're not actually questioning what the intention is, where it is, and whether it needs to continue being there. But if we did, we could make different choices.

So as a cognitive neuroscientist, and when you're studying the brain, what's actually going on inside? We could talk even metaphorically when people lose their attention.

Right. So there's, you know, as I was saying a moment ago, attention is not one thing. It's probably 3 things or more, but at least the 3 kind of main systems of attention that we've studied in my lab are quite different from each other, and they all have the potential to go haywire in these moments of distractibility and frankly, even psychological health challenges like depression or anxiety or attention deficit disorder. So the way that I like to think about it is, and of course these all have formal names and their neural networks are known and their neural networks are actually identifiable and independent from one another, but just for the sake of this conversation, One way in which we pay attention is really— the metaphor I like to use is like a flashlight. So we can direct it willfully wherever we want it. And just like an actual flashlight, if you're in a darkened room and you've got a flashlight, very handy tool, because wherever it is that you direct it, you're going to get information. You're going to get crisp, clear information. Everything else is a hazy, darkened nothingness in some sense. And attention does that for our conscious experience. Wherever it is that we direct that attentional flashlight, we get crisper, clearer information. And we know this at the neural level. We actually see increases in perceptual activity in the earliest stages of visual processing when people are paying attention to a particular part of space or a particular object, which tells you how powerful attention really is. But the thing about the flashlight, going back to your question of vulnerabilities, sure, we can direct it, but it can also get pulled.

Mm-hmm.

And the kinds of things that can pull our attention are really baked into our evolutionary makeup. I mean, things that have to do with salient information in the environment, right? Things that might produce fear in us or make us flee from a dangerous situation or provoke a fight or a conflict, or things that have to do with anything having, having to do with ourselves, frankly. Think about going down the street. If somebody calls out your name, chances are you're going to just look. And, you know, you've got a— Jim is a name that maybe many people might say, but I'll tell you, for maybe Kwik is not, but my name, like, I can't deny that somebody said something and I'm gonna look, even if it's Is she? And not, am I she? I'm going to think that they're saying something about me.

Mm-hmm.

Anyway, so the point is just that when it comes to that particular system of attention, it can be directed and it can be pulled. And you can see how hyper-focusing on the thing you're trying to direct toward, to disadvantage, can be problematic, or getting flitted around everywhere because there's stimuli that might grab you, just like the ding of our phone or a social media notification can be problematic. But just to quickly say something about the other 2 main systems of attention that are that are part of this broader topic. Whereas the flashlight is really about advantaging certain kinds of information and wherever we direct that attentional resource, we get more access to information available there. The second system is almost the exact opposite. It's not really about what we're attending to, it's about when.

Hmm.

And it's not about narrowing and focusing to a certain subset of things, it's about being broad and receptive. So this is something we call formally the alerting system of the brain. And it's just like that, the alert we go on. So if you're driving down the street and you see, you know, a yellow flashing light, maybe near a construction site, you're going to be alert. You're not going to be focusing on anything in particular. You're going to be broad, receptive, and ready.

More like a floodlight.

Exactly, like a floodlight. So flashlight, floodlight are sort of the ways that I like to talk about the distinct mechanisms. And what's so cool about this system is that it's ready for action. It's tied to being advantaging, again, our survival. But just like there's, you know, the Capacity to get the flashlight yanked around, the floodlight can go on overdrive. And now we're not just vigilant, we're hypervigilant. Everything is keeping us on edge and readied. And things like threatening circumstances can drive this up, which leads to disorders like anxiety and PTSD and is associated with it. And then the third system, it's not so much about what— the flashlight— when— now— the floodlight. It's really about our goals, our internally held Priorities of what's important and relevant for us to do. And the metaphor I like to use here, which, you know, frankly, I'll start with the formal name for this system, executive control. And it's like that term executive that we'd use for the executive of a company. The person's job as a leader is not to do every single thing in the organization, but to ensure that the goals of the organization and the actions are matched. So the metaphor there I like to use, and you can see in the executive context how much this is done, a juggler. You're keeping all the balls in the air, ensuring that everything's happening smoothly. And of course, in taking too many balls on or not paying attention to their coordination or oversight, the balls will be dropped, tasks will fail. There'll be a mismatch between goal and action, which often occurs in disorders like attention deficit disorder and other kinds of frontal lobe function disorders that we might say.

So there are many ways in which attention functions and also many ways in which it can become vulnerable because Now you and I, we were, you mentioned that it's trainable, which just gives people their agency back when they lose their attention and we could direct it, right? You get a, you ask somebody what time it is, their attention goes there. They ask somebody what they ate yesterday, it goes there. When we're talking about practicing and train and doing the mental work, what happens in this 12 minutes then? And I encourage everyone to get a copy of the book because obviously it'll go way deeper.

Right. Well, it's deeper, but it's also sort of like, just like the body, right? If I— I'm almost going to give sort of like a basic CrossFit fitness type thing, there are multiple systems are going to get engaged, and we're going to exercise those. But there are ways in which we can train all 3 of these systems I've described, and their coordination, as well as addressing something we haven't really touched on yet, internal distractibility, the mind actually getting distracted, not by anything in the external environment, but its own— propensity to pump out thoughts. And we know this too, right? The example I gave of getting to the bottom of a page and having no idea usually isn't because the phone's bugging you. It's you're just thinking. Your eyes are maybe even moving along, but you're not there. You're not taking it in. So the training itself, I'll give you one sort of example of a foundational practice, and it touches on all 3 of the systems that we talked about, as well as this internal distractibility, or what I call mind wandering, having off-task thoughts while you're trying to engage in a task. And really it starts out, and this is why mindfulness is such a cool, low-tech, low-demand, highly portable And free tool that we can all use. The key is that we got to get ourselves to do it. So what you'd ask people to do is sit in a comfortable, quiet, supportive location. Take this seriously in the same way if you did a physical workout, you know, you'd have the right gear on and you'd have your mind ready to engage in the practice. Then we're going to do next is pay attention to the fact that we're sitting here breathing, and the breath and breath-related sensations will become the anchor for our attention. Out of all the things we could pay attention to, it will be the thing we're going to focus in on. And not just the fact that we're breathing, but a specific sensory experience tied to breathing, like, you know, the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils, maybe your chest moving up and down, whatever it is for you that's vivid and able to be easily tracked. You don't want to pick something like, I can kind of feel my heart beating, or don't pick something subtle. Pick something that's very easy to pay attention to. And then in some sense, the next step is for the next period of time that we do it. And I wouldn't encourage anybody to just, if you've never done this before, to jump right in 12 minutes, start with maybe 30 seconds or a minute.

Hmm.

And then build up to that number. Think of it as now you're going to focus on those breath-related sensations for this period of time that you're going to do the practice by shining that flashlight of attention right on those sensations. Like, that's where you're going to direct your, your mental energy. Usually we have people close or lower their eyes so there's not as much happening in the environment. And then the next step is essentially you've engaged the flashlight, you know where it's supposed to be, but keep that floodlight also available to you. So you're checking out moment by moment Right now, where is my mind? Where am I? What is going on right now? And then on occasion, probably more often than you'd think, you'd notice, oh my goodness, my flashlight is nowhere on my breath. I'm thinking about lunch, or I'm thinking about this or that, or I'm having, you know, some, some other thing come up— thoughts, memories, sensations. And when you notice that your mind has wandered away, essentially then we're going to kick in this executive control to say, is my behavior aligned with my goals? No, it's not.

Mm-hmm.

Just redirect attention back. So in that short kind of practice, we're focusing, which is the flashlight, noticing, which is the floodlight, and then aligning or redirecting back to the goal, which is the juggler. And all of these things are happening in coordination and sort of repeatedly by doing something for as short as a minute and then building up to 12 minutes, which does some very interesting things. It gives us a sense of practice of how to do this. It strengthens— we know from our objective measures that it strengthens attentional Performance and real-world performance as well as mood, you know, and the goal is not to just do this because you're an Olympic-level breath follower. Who cares? Like, but you're just using it as an anchor. Now, when you're in the middle of a conversation or you're trying to write a report or anything you're doing, you're kind of keeping those 3 aspects in mind. Focusing, there is a target. Noticing where I am relative to that, and then redirecting to get back on track. It's a very handy tool.

And you find it does map into real world. So if we— people come to us for memory and reading training, so they will read a page in a book, get to the end and just forget what they just read. They'll walk into a room and forget why they're there. They'll go to the store to buy 2 things and come back with a bag full of things, except for those 2 things. They'll wanna remember someone's name and their attention will go elsewhere and it'll go in one ear, out the other. But you find that those 3 things, trainable, will actually show up in times when they want, 'cause you don't wanna be able to do do be— do meditation for the sake of becoming a better meditator. You want to do it so you can be better at life, right?

Absolutely. That's the whole point. And going back to what you were asking me earlier about, you know, my kind of history with this and why we're, why we were doing any of this with people that are going to war zones or about to do surgery or fighting fires, you know, we don't want their attention to lapse. That's the moment in which it's likely to, because of the nature of the context that we're in and the high stress that we may experience. But we want to be able to be actionable in our own lives and bring those resources, which now are not just specific to a certain instance, they're able to be used in any circumstance. We want to bring those to bear and not, you know, have to take my word for it, but all of our body of research is now showing us that in addition to seeing improvements on tasks of attention in laboratory settings, we're also seeing real-world performance improvements. So for example, one of the studies we did recently We looked at marksmanship scores in soldiers. So a shoot-no-shoot drill, you're going to shoot at a target but not shoot to the non-target. And what you do is you really advantage the chances of people shooting versus not shooting. So they make, they make mistakes where they inappropriately would shoot their weapon. Very bad idea. And now not just for military service members, any context, right? And maybe it's not shoot-no-shoot, it's treat-don't-treat or prescribe-don't-prescribe. Or you can imagine all these— shout-don't-shout. It's all these circumstances in our lives for various professions where doing the thing that is an automatic response needs to be held back for the appropriateness of the response. But anyway, what we found is that, yeah, performance is better on those types of tasks in real-world settings. And it's tied to learning about mindfulness, but not just that. And actually, that's not sufficient. Practicing, doing the exercises, this 12 minutes that I suggested, 12 to 15 minutes, about 3 to 5 days a week. is what it takes to start seeing the actionable benefits in people's lives.

Over the course of—

About 4 weeks.

Astonishing. And some of our listeners, they are very ambitious and they set good, big goals. Is there any harm in doing this training multiple times a day?

No, there's no harm. I mean, I would say the harm is always check in with yourself. You know, you want to be very careful to take care. And if you've got some kind of underlying psychological disorder or other challenge, know that what I'm talking about here— I'm a neuroscientist, I'm not a clinician. I'm not talking about specific circumstances. So if somebody is in an active trauma situation and they're dealing with active symptoms, take care and do it with the guidance of your medical professional. But yes, what we know overall in healthy individuals, even if they're extremely high stress, is that the more you practice, the more you benefit. But this threshold number of 12 minutes a day is essentially the minimum amount that we needed to see people practice in order for there to be benefits. So if they practiced less, we just were not seeing significant changes in anything about their functioning, their mood, their attention, et cetera. So it is a kind of a critical number, but going beyond that, usually just like physical exercise, the more you do, the more you benefit.

Yeah. A reminder for everyone who's listening who's concerned to seek out their health practitioner. This is not meant to diagnose or to treat anything. I want to recommend everybody to go get your copy of Peak Mind by Dr. And how can people find out more or stay in touch with you?

Yeah, I'd love for people to stay in touch. They can sign up for our newsletter. They can read about our research, learn more about the book at— if they can remember my first name, they'd be easily able to do it— amishi.com, A-M-I-S-H-I dot com.

Does it mean something in another language?

Yeah, it does. You're the first person that's asked me that in a long time. It means like the divine nectar of the gods.

I love that. Have you met a number of people who had the same name?

No.

That's very special.

It's a very rare name, actually. Yeah.

And again, that's A-M-I-S-H-I. So I recommend everybody to get Dr. Jha's copy of Peak Mind. To all our Kwik readers around the world that are listening to this, remember to subscribe on our YouTube where we put more of the extended version there as well. And I would actually Actually, I would challenge everybody to take a screenshot of where— wherever you're listening and consuming this, whether that's on Spotify, on iTunes, on YouTube, maybe on social media, and tag Dr. Jha, tag myself also as well, so we get to see it. And maybe we could ask them a question to put in the post when they, when they do post it. What do you suggest?

Yeah, let's tie it directly to the moment that they're doing the screenshot. Are you actually paying attention to that moment? Are you in the moment as you're clicking the button? And the challenge would be, be there, don't miss it.

Because that's what life is made out of. A lot of life happens when we are putting our focus into something that's not as important to us. So highly recommend the book. Everyone get your copy, tag us so we get to see it. I'll repost a few of mine just randomly, and I'll actually give 3 copies of Peak Mind to our audience at random for just as a thank you for participating. And Dr. Jha, thanks for being on our show.

Oh, thank you so much, and what a nice thing to do to give the book away. I appreciate that.

We'll talk to everybody real soon. Hi, Kwik Brain, it's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number 2, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing: if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: 310-299-9362. Did you remember that number? 310-299-9362.

362.

Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question, and I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video.